Life Is Sparkling At Haliotide Wines

They are California sparkling wines made with a hyperfocus.

In a sense Haliotide Wines brings Nicole Bertotti Pope back to her wine beginnings. She began her career at Domaine Carneros in Napa making sparkling wine before establishing herself as a premier cool climate winemaker on the San Luis Obispo Coast. Husband Luke Pope has made a name for himself by developing and managing many of the best vineyards on the Central Coast over the past two decades. Haliotide Wines was launched from a shared love for making and drinking sparkling wines.

The couple use traditional methods. There are no shortcuts. Everything is done by hand, from disgorging to riddling to bottling. It’s a slow road. Bottles may spend three to six years aging en tirage. The Popes will not release a wine for sale until and if it meets their quality standards.

We have been fans of Nicole’s from her days at Stolo Family Vineyards. We did a story about that work here. We were excited to reconnect with her about her family’s love nod to single vineyard, single variety, coastal California sparkling wines. There’s something special happening at Haliotide Wines.

The Wine Write: I had forgotten that you started your wine career at Domaine Carneros. Was starting Haliotide sort of a return to your sparkling wine roots?

Nicole: It was definitely a smooth transition. I came back to the notion of making sparkling wine again. I loved making it at Domaine Carneros. I started doing that in 2007. I learned so much about the process. That was my first real wine job. I worked there for three years. I felt like I gained a knowledge base that not many winemakers have. I also thought that this region would be really great for sparkling wine. There wasn’t a lot of sparkling wine being produced on the Central Coast. There were definitely not many small producers doing it, and even fewer solely focusing on sparkling.

When I was working at Stolo, I thought that site was perfect for sparkling wine. I made cool climate Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah from there. That’s where this all started. The thought was that we would buy a ton of fruit, make it by ourselves all by hand, and see how it was. We had high hopes for it. We started doing that in 2016 and did it every year. Then we started adding in some other coastal vineyards. I made the wines in a style that makes them very age worthy. I wanted a longer tirage. I wasn’t going to do a quick release. I wanted the wines to gain character en tirage. So we started a long time ago, but it seems like a new project. And Haliotides does sort of bring me full circle!

The Wine Write: I remember seeing the shiner bottles when we visited you at Stolo in 2018 or so.

Nicole: I remember your visit, but I couldn’t recall if our sparklings were en tirage at that point. We didn’t have a name for the label or anything then. Luke and I had talked a bit about making sparkling wine. We never talked about doing any other brand for single vineyard Pinots, or any other varieties I had experience making. We love drinking sparkling. I think we wanted the challenge of bringing these wines to life. It’s just what we love. I think it also helped that there weren’t many other sparkling brands in this area doing what we are doing. This felt exploratory.

The Wine Write: It’s definitely a slow road.

Nicole: Yes! We knew doing this was going to take a lot of patience. We didn’t have some big business plan. It was more of a situation where we did what we could do in the places where I was already making wine. We kept our full-time jobs. There was no change in that setup for a long time. It wasn’t until we actually started seeing wine that I could think about leasing our own place and committing to Haliotides full-time. We’re now sourcing from different vineyards. It is a year-round project. Disgorging, bottling, and tirage is a different cycle than making still wine.

The Wine Write: What’s the significance of the name?

Nicole: The name means “abalone”. Luke used to go abalone diving up in Mendocino. I went one year. That happened to be the last year the season was open up there. The ocean there is very cold, much as it is down here. That ocean influence gives us the cool climate character of our coastal vineyards. A number of vineyards here are just a few miles from the ocean.

We wanted a name that had something to do with the ocean. We both love fishing, surfing, the beach, and beach volleyball. It’s really hard to figure out what to do for a name. You have to find something you like that’s not already taken. The scientific name of abalone is Haliotidae. The spelling we use is actually a French translation. We liked the word. We liked the fact that “tide” was on the end of it. That connection between abalone, that cold ocean water, and us just fit.

The Wine Write: Can you talk a bit about these coastal vineyards you are using?

Nicole: The first wines we made were from Stolo. That vineyard in Cambria is about three miles from the ocean. There aren’t many vineyards up in that part of the county. That area is now part of the San Luis Obispo Coast AVA. Stolo wasn’t in an AVA when we started making wine there. We were involved in the process of getting the appellation approved. Getting the SLO Coast AVA has been really good for the region. We took Chardonnay from Stolo. That fruit was very high in acid. We could let the fruit hang for a really long time. We picked it towards the end of September. We were able to get ripeness, but we retained that high acidity. We were able to keep the alcohols low, where we wanted them for making a base wine. So Stolo was where we started the project.

About two years later we started also sourcing from Topotero Vineyard. It’s a little over a mile from the ocean. It’s very coastal. It tends to be a bit warmer down there than in Cambria. We source only Pinot Noir for our extra brut Rose’ from there. It gives us bright fruit. We age that wine about two and a half years en tirage. The Blanc de Blanc gets three or four years en tirage. That Extra Brut Rose has really pretty fruit. It’s a fun wine to make. There aren’t a lot of vineyards in Avila Beach, either. This one happens to be next door to Bassi Vineyard, Mike Sinor’s old place, which is a little bigger.

The Wine Write: What wines do you have in the pipeline?

Nicole: Our next release is in the fall of 2024. We release our wines twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. We just finished releasing the 2019 Stolo Blanc de Blancs and a 2017 Late Disgorged Blanc de Blancs from Stolo Vineyard. Those wines were just recently shipped off.

Our fall release will include the 2021 Topotero Extra Brut Rose’. We usually do one wine, sometimes two, per release. This 2021 Topotero is the first wine we’ve released that was made in our new facility. Until now we have been pulling wines that were made while I was still working at Stolo. We’re small. We still do everything ourselves. There aren’t a lot of different wines.

We are experimenting with a few fun wines. We have some from different vineyards up in San Simeon. We’re also playing with some Champagne clones in some vineyards. We’re working with some Roederer clones for a Blanc de Noir. We just made some Pinot Meunier in a base wine this past vintage. All these wines will be out in a few years. That seems like a long time, but it keeps coming fast. It’s fun. We’ll have some different vineyards and different wines going forward.

At this point we are sticking with the single vineyard, single vintage, and single variety for each bottling.

The Wine Write: It would be hard for me to keep all that straight in my mind.

Nicole: It is hard. Sometimes you look back, and think about a wine you made three years ago. We try to check in on the wines as they are aging. We gauge when they would be in the best place to be released. That’s one of the differences in being a small producer. When you get bigger and bigger, you need a set plan for each wine. One wine may get eighteen months en tirage. Another may get two years. We want to make the best decision for each wine. We release when it’s time. We want all our wines to show the best.

The Wine Write: Tell me about your winemaking facility.

Nicole: It’s a small winery that is on private property in Templeton. It’s a barn-like building. It was built as a winery in the Nineties and bonded. It had been sitting unused for about ten years when we got to it. It was in great condition. It has full air conditioning, drains, and several different rooms. It’s nice for aging wines en tirage. We do hand riddling, so we have riddling racks set up in one of the rooms. Most of our base wines age in neutral oak or stainless steel barrels. We have a barrel room. We use a front room for cellar work and moving things around. It works well for us.

Finding it was funny. I happened to run into a friend during Covid at the farmer’s market. I hadn’t seen her for awhile. Our kids had gone to preschool together. We were catching up on what was going on, and I mentioned that I was still working out in Cambria for Stolo, but I also had my own wine brand. My friend then mentioned that she had a bonded winery on her property. Ooooh, okay! I told her I was interested.

I did not want to go to a custom crush facility. Sharing space with other winemakers can be great, but you need to find the right partner. We hadn’t gone very far in that discussion with anyone. My friend told me they were just using the building for storage. They didn’t want a tasting room on site. Their house is very close to the winery. I didn’t want a tasting room. We just wanted a place to make the wines that was closer to our home in Templeton. This was perfect. It’s a beautiful place, up in the hills on the west side of Templeton. The views are gorgeous when we are outside. It’s nice and quiet. We love it.

The Wine Write: Talk about serendipity. And something good came out of Covid.

Nicole: It was. The timing was perfect. Something good did come out of Covid. I know a lot of people made changes during the pandemic. I stuck through it, too. The kids were home from school in 2020. I had a newborn. And I was still working in Cambria for Stolo. I got through that crazy time, made all the Stolo wines and ours as well. When we had that conversation at the farmer’s market, I started to think about stopping going in the direction I was in. We needed to focus on what we wanted.

The Wine Write: How can readers best source Haliotide Wines?

Nicole: We have a mailing list. People can sign up via the website. We send out an email before the spring and fall releases that announces the opportunity to buy. We’re thankful that we sell out pretty quickly. Right now we are putting new people on a waiting list. I don’t have a set time for how long people stay on a waiting list. I usually put the wines out to our mailing list. If there is any wine left over after a week or two, I can add people from the waiting list to get offers to buy. We are slowly growing.

The Wine Write: That leads me to my next question, which is where you would like to take Haliotide?

Nicole: Our plan now is to stay under one thousand cases. We want to keep exploring different single vineyard sources. We might not necessarily bottle everything that we make. We only want to bottle and release wines that are going to be top quality sparklings. Sometimes you have to make those wines first. Sparkling wines have not been made from most of the vineyards from which we are buying fruit.

We want to keep all this in-house. I want to keep it manageable. We change the label for every new release from every vineyard. There’s new art work on every label. This is all very hand made. We hand disgorge every bottle. We use equipment to help us with some of those tasks, but it’s all done manually. We riddle the bottles by hand.

We don’t have some big plan to expand. That would require a big jump. We’d have to invest heavily in some really expensive equipment. Then we’d likely have to do custom crush for other people to cover those costs. For now we try to do everything we can ourselves. Friends help us out when needed.

The Wine Write: It sounds like you are in a happy spot.

Nicole: We are. We’re not too big. It’s still really fun each time we release a new wine. It’s exciting when we disgorge a new wine. We are also proud to taste some back vintages, now that we have a few years behind us. It’s fun to taste those library wines. We have a small library! We have fun observing how the wines are aging. You always hope that you are making something that will age nicely, but you’re never sure what’s going to happen. So far we are really happy with all that.

Folks on the mailing list are giddy, too. Haliotide Wines wasn’t conceived with an eye toward a quick turnaround. We recall seeing the shiner bottles so long ago at Stolo and marveling at the patience of the Popes. Those bottles have now matured, and are pleasing discerning lovers of sparkling wines.

The entire project reads like a love story. The vineyards that are used are boutique, ocean kissed sites. The harvested fruit is cool climate and complex. Most of these sites have not previously been used for growing sparkling wines. We suppose part of the Haliotide story could be deemed a science experiment, too.

However you characterize it, Haliotide Wines is a must follow for those of us who love sparkling wines and/or want to learn more about them. You will not find a family wine project that is more hands-on and quality driven than this one. You owe it to yourself to get on that mailing list. Your bubbles await.

Haliotide Wines / The Wine Write