Sphaerics

Laura grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, studied biology at Pepperdine and worked in healthcare research in Los Angeles before moving north in 2011 to make wine. At UC Davis she won a scholarship from the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin and worked at Domaine Armand Rousseau in Gevrey-Chambertin. She spent two and a half years as enologist at Cliff Lede; then Brad Grimes, winemaker at Abreu, stopped her on the way to her car one afternoon and told her she was ready for the next step. He recommended her to Mark and Teresa Aubert, and in spring 2017 she joined them.

Brian grew up in Virginia, took a degree in mathematics at William & Mary and became an operations analyst at J.P. Morgan in New York. In 2009 a mentor on the trading desk told him to go and do what he really wanted to do. He went to work for a winery services company in Santa Rosa in 2010, ran the wine list at Ma(i)sonry in Yountville while studying at Davis, and later became general manager of Skipstone in Alexander Valley. The two met in 2012, volunteering at a winemaking symposium in Davis a month before their studies began.

Upper Barn sits inside the Jackson family’s Alexander Mountain Estate, 5,100 acres in the Mayacamas above Alexander Valley that Jess Jackson bought in 1995. The rancher Ed Gauer planted its Chardonnay in 1982, Old Wente selection on AXR1 rootstock, ten feet by twelve. From 1987, when Helen Turley was winemaker at Peter Michael, its fruit went into Peter Michael’s Mon Plaisir, until 2008; it was designated for Marcassin from 1991 to 2001, and from 2010 it was bottled under the Jacksons’ Stonestreet label.

Jess Jackson took pride in selling fruit from his best vineyards to young winemakers, Turley among them; the family had largely stopped. Brian got to know Chris Jackson while he was at Skipstone, and in 2022 Chris told him the family would sell Upper Barn fruit and would be honoured if he and Laura made a Chardonnay from it. The vineyard is above the fog line, on thin topsoil over broken-down volcanic rock, and the vines struggle. The stems and seeds start to brown at around 20 Brix, so the picking date is the whole game. The wine is called If and Only If.

The Chardonnays are made the way Laura learned in Burgundy and at Aubert. The juice ferments in barrel on its own yeasts, cold and slow; malolactic follows in its own time, and the whole fermentation can take nine months. The lees are never stirred: the wines have all the texture they need without it. The barrels come from three coopers, Damy, Ramon and François Frères; after eleven months in wood the wines rest five or six months in steel and are bottled without fining or filtration. Each wine runs to a few hundred cases.

Overline comes from a 120-acre Carneros vineyard owned by Cliff Lede, just over the Sonoma County line and across from Hudson; it is planted to Old Wente, Hyde and Mount Eden selections, it is the coolest of their sites, and it sees 45 per cent new oak. On Days and Nights is from the Russian River Valley, a steep, rocky site planted to Old Wente in 2004 and the warmest they work with. Superset, the Pinot Noir, began with the 2024 vintage: Frei Road and Bondi Home Ranch, farmed by the Martinellis on Goldridge sandy loam, aged fifteen months in 40 per cent new oak.

More than two thousand years ago Theodosius of Bithynia wrote Sphaerics, a treatise on the geometry of the sphere that mathematicians and astronomers used for centuries. The name is also a play on Brian’s surname. Every wine follows the theme. Ancient Greek had no separate numerals, and a letter became a number when it had a line drawn over it: hence Overline, from a vineyard just over the county line. On Days and Nights is the title of another Theodosius treatise, on the sun’s path through the year. If and Only If is the logician’s phrase for a condition that is both necessary and sufficient.

In May 2025 Laura and Brian bought their own vineyard, thirteen acres of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay near Occidental on the Goldridge soils of the Sonoma Coast, the ground many of the Aubert Chardonnays come from. The San Francisco Chronicle’s headline said this new winery would change your mind about Chardonnay. On the evidence of the 2024s, it should.

When a winemaker gets it right, there’s nothing like it.

Esther Mobley, San Francisco Chronicle