At the back of a warehouse stacked with 300,000 bottles of sparkling wine, vintner Laurent Gruet selects a near finished bottle of brut and prepares to disgorge it.

Dégorgement, as the French have it, is the relatively simple process of uncapping a bottle and removing the dead yeast and sediment before a cork is inserted. Today disgorging is almost always done by a machine that can handle up to 8,000 bottles a day. But winemakers like Gruet, the head vintner at Albuquerque’s Vara Winery and Distillery, still do this by hand occasionally. It’s a delicate skill that can take years to master. The trick is to let the pressure inside the bottle force out the sediment without losing a glassful—or more—of the good stuff.

Gruet has had more practice than most. In late 1999, as sparkling-wine sales soared ahead of the New Year’s Eve parties that would ring in the new millennium, Gruet’s machine failed. He was forced to disgorge 30,000 bottles by hand. 

So, at the warehouse, when he holds the bottle of brut in his hands, it’s clear that these movements are second nature to him. With the bottle inverted, Gruet uses a disgorging key to swiftly flick off the cap, then he swings the bottle upward. A short burst of yeast flies out, which Gruet catches in a plastic cup. A few drops speckle the warehouse floor, but the bottle remains remarkably full and sediment-free.

As Gruet pours from the freshly opened bottle into two glasses, he remarks on the threads of tiny bubbles streaming through the amber-colored brut. The expelled yeast makes the room smell as if a fresh brioche had been pulled from the oven. Gruet swirls the effervescent liquid in the glass and then tastes it.

“That’s what I do,” he says with a smile, as if that sip summed up his entire life. “That’s my wine.” 

Laurent Gruet, 59, is still mostly associated with the winery that bears his name, which his family started in 1984. Gruet Winery proved almost single-handedly that New Mexico’s climate could produce quality wines. Over three decades, the Gruet family grew and harvested the grapes, did the pressing and fermenting, and aged and bottled each vintage.

In 2014, however, Gruet’s three sisters decided it was time to sell, and ownership shifted to Precept Wine, one of the country’s largest alcoholic-​beverage producers. Gruet stayed with the company for a few years, but found himself laboring under a different philosophy and new priorities. He started talking to a distributor he’d worked with for two decades, Doug Diefanthaler, who’d sold his company, too, and then invested in a startup winery in Albuquerque in 2013: Vara. Both Gruet and Diefanthaler had always preferred to devote their time to producing quality wines, even if it meant the yield was smaller. Gruet knew it was time for a change, so he left for Vara in 2020. 

Gruet was born in the Champagne region of France to a winemaking family. Even as a child, he felt his happiness swell with every harvest. He thought nothing of rising at 3 a.m. to do the hard work necessary to produce great wines. While traveling through the American Southwest on a family vacation, his father visited vineyards in New Mexico and saw possibilities in the dry climate with warm days and cool nights. He began buying land. Gruet was 18 and only spoke French when he moved to New Mexico with his sister Nathalie to oversee their parents’ first plantings of chardonnay and pinot noir grapes. The first year of production they released just 2,000 cases, but that soon grew to 5,000. Then 10,000. 

“It was exciting, and it came with a lot of work and passion,” he says. 

Viticulture in New Mexico goes back 400 years, when Spanish missionaries smuggled grapevines into the region to make sacramental wine. Production peaked in the mid-1800s, then waned during Prohibition. It didn’t regain much ground until an influx of European expertise arrived in the 1980s and 1990s to reignite the winemaking scene. The Gruet family settled in the state amid a wave of other Europeans—Paolo D’Andrea from Italy, who started Luna Rossa Winery; Germany’s Bernd Maier, who founded Amaro Winery; and Hervé Lescombes, of France’s Burgundy region, who established the Lescombes Family Vineyards, among others. Even with experienced hands, though, it was mostly a trial and error process.

“In France, I’d have the old guys. I could say, ‘What about that plan? What about that land?’” Gruet says. “Here there was no asking the old guys.” 

Some vineyards failed. Mistakes were made and learned from, but that often took years. Gruet persisted, believing that if you made good wine—and priced it reasonably—people would drink it. Now events like the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Fiesta are a testament to the foresight the Gruet family and other winemakers had about the state. Today the New Mexico Wine and Grape Growers Association tallies 56 wineries in the state, including six new ones in the past three years. Vineyard acreage has increased in recent years. Chris Goblet, executive director of the association, says those European families helped create a tradition-infused winemaking industry. 

“I think the Gruets are the ones who really showed that it could be done, that New Mexico had the climate and the business environment to succeed,” Goblet says. “They wanted to prove themselves, and I think that’s evident when you talk to Laurent—how passionate he is for proving himself to anybody who doesn’t think that he or New Mexico can make quality products.” 

Gruet Winery became known for méthode champenoise wines, a traditional French approach. Méthode champenoise distinguishes itself by requiring a second fermentation in the bottle, during which yeast and sugar interact to create carbon dioxide—naturally fizzy bubbles, unlike the artificial ones pumped into some other sparkling wines.

“Champagne you can have only once in a while,” Gruet says. “Méthode champenoise you can have every day.”

Gruet’s wine would go on to earn accolades at the International Wine and Spirits Competition and a spot on one of Wine Spectator’s lists of the top 100 wines. But the recognition that meant the most to Gruet, he says, was submitting his sparkling wine to a blind taste test among his French peers—and coming in third out of 12. 

“To me that’s better than a gold medal,” he says. 

France’s Champagne region has an amazing terroir, the combination of environmental and climatic factors that imparts distinctive flavors to the wine. (Only sparkling wine from the Champagne region of France can be called Champagne, otherwise it’s all referred to as sparkling.) But he contends that New Mexico’s can compete. He still loves watching new drinkers express pleasant surprise. 

“That’s what feeds you,” he says. “Then you go, ‘I want to make more wine.’ ”

After 33 harvests at his family winery and an estimated three million bottles of wine produced, Gruet could have easily drifted into retirement. But he still felt the passion bubbling inside him. Vara offered Gruet the chance to return to producing sparkling wine, and to make it how he wanted to: by finding the perfect balance between old ways and new.

“It’s exciting,” he says. “It’s not easy, but I’ve been there before. I started from zero with Gruet.”

The sticking point he wouldn’t compromise on, the one that compelled him to jump ship for Vara, happens at harvest. Machines can pick grapes, and many vineyards have automated that labor-intensive process. But a machine can’t sense whether a grape is tender or needs another day or two on the vine. A machine won’t set aside what’s just a little overripe. A food chemist can solve problems that arise from mechanized plucking, but that often involves using chemicals to reset the balance. Gruet argues instead for handpicking. The choice affects how the yeast and sugar mingle, how much acid arises, whether it reaches the right percentage of alcohol, and even the bubble size. 

“To make good wine, you have to have good grapes,” he says. “Especially in a climate like New Mexico, where it’s a little warmer than Champagne, you have to pick at the right time.” 

Precision is critical during all phases of winemaking. Too much yeast and the bottles explode. Too little and it won’t ferment. Too cold and the yeast dies. 

While giving me a tour of the Vara warehouse, he pulled out a bottle from a stack of wire racks that nearly reached the ceiling. As he held it to the light, clouds of sediment darkened the sides of the bottle—the yeast removed with disgorging. The machine-powered version of dégorgement involves submerging the bottle’s neck upside down in minus-23-degree-Celsius glycol, so the sediment freezes against the cap, which another machine then extracts. Gruet isn’t against mechanization, especially where disgorgement is concerned. A machine handling glass is preferable to one handling fruit.

Lately, Gruet has a new source for blending old and new. Toward the end of 2023, his nephew Sofian Himeur returned from Iron Horse Vineyards, a California vintner known for sparkling wines, to join Vara’s staff. 

“It’s very good with both of us here at Vara, because we exchange ideas, the old and the young,” Gruet says. “The goal is to make the best wine, whatever it takes.” 

Vara sources grapes from California, Spain, New Mexico, and Washington, but Gruet spearheaded efforts to release the winery’s first vintages made entirely from grapes harvested in New Mexico, including some from vines tracing their roots to the early Spanish missionaries. Last summer the winery released a rosé from grapes grown in the Mission Hills Vineyard in Mesilla. In October, it debuted a méthode champenoise brut made with 100 percent New Mexican grapes harvested in Anthony and Vado, in southern New Mexico, and from Los Ranchos de Albuquerque Vineyards. 

“I wanted to show what the terroir is,” Gruet says. “There’s a reason why I started here and it was successful. So let’s do it again. Let’s do the same process, but with a bit more experience.” 

The result could be good for the state. “This is positioning the New Mexico wine industry for another renaissance,” says Goblet, “and I think it’s not just Laurent 2.0 for Laurent’s sake. I think it’s for everyone’s benefit.” 

Gruet hopes to see New Mexico wine continue to improve with an infusion of young people like his nephew. This fall he dropped in on a two-week red wine course at CNM Ingenuity, a nonprofit partnership with Central New Mexico Community College dedicated to fostering economic development. For students it was a first foray into winemaking as a potential career path. Timothy Donahue, owner of Horse Thief Wine Consulting, taught the course. It yielded 300 gallons of rosé that Gruet will help finish, and​Donahue continues to talk with Goblet about ways to develop New Mexico’s leadership in sparkling wine. 

“Laurent is certainly bullish on that, because it’s him,” Donahue says. “None of that would have happened without his unbelievable, radiant energy. He’s just a force.”

Gruet still drives out to see the grapes at one of the first vineyards in the state he worked with. He likes to look out over the rows of vines, contemplating past seasons. But it also offers him the chance to assess the seasons ahead—a blend of where he’s always been and where he hopes to go next.  

Sip for Yourself

Sample Vara’s latest wines at its tasting rooms in Albuquerque (315 Alameda Blvd. NE and 201 Hermosa Dr. NE) and Santa Fe (329 W. San Francisco St.). Vara wines are also available online at varawines.com.

Second Acts

If you’re thinking about your own second career, whether it’s starting a passion project or getting back in the workforce to earn some extra income, Central New Mexico Community College has a job portal through its Engagement Connection Center to help adults aged 50 and up find job opportunities that leverage their unique skills and experiences. You can sign up at ingenuity-cnm-csm.symplicity.com.