Allan Pangborn, 60, of Kennewick, crafts sparkling wine in his workshop. He’s been making his Café Metropole wine for nearly a decade.
Posted: Wednesday, December 30, 2009
KENNEWICK, WA - Christmas is over. But a portly guy with a white beard is still hard at work in his workshop. He’s not making toys in the North Pole, but rather bottles of sparkling wine in southeast Washington. Correspondent Anna King has this profile of one of the Northwest’s few producers of sparkling wine.
Making bubbly is part chemistry, and part art. Allan Pangborn works every day for a year to ready 12-thousand bottles for life’s high spots. He has a few friends and family members help him bottle the wine, then the real work begins.
Allan Pangborn: “It’s very specialized as opposed to making regular wine. Making regular wine the equipment is pretty much the same: Crushers, presses and bottling equipment. With sparkling wine you start with a regular wine you add yeast…”
It typically takes about a year for sparkling wine to mature. After that Pangborn puts the bottles, neck down in special racks to let the yeast settle out slowly. Each day he has to give the bottle a quarter turn to help the yeast filter out.
Sound: [Riddling rack]
There are many more steps after that –and he does the work to 12-thousand bottles all by himself.
Allan Pangborn: “There’s a good 10 times that you have to handle the bottle.”
Reporter: “That sounds like a lot of work to me Allan!”
Many larger producers have tried to automate at least some parts of the process.
Because it’s so complex, Pangborn says there simply aren’t that many small producers of sparkling wine in the United States. And only a handful in the Northwest.
He used to work for big companies, but for about the last decade he’s been crafting his own called Café Metropole.
Allan Pangborn: “It’s not like having to deal with a larger corporate structure. I can buy the bottles I want, the corks I want, the wire hoods I want. I don’t have to work with budgets, or purchase orders. I can just do what I think is best.”
This New Years Pangborn plans to open one of his bottles, but he probably won’t be staying up ‘til midnight. For him, the most satisfying time is to watch his wine cracked open and enjoyed along with other bottles, and seeing his disappear first.
Sound: [Pop!]
Copyright 2009 Northwest News Network
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