Sine Qua Non

Sine Qua Non’s story is a bit of a fairy tale with an “only in California” backdrop. It goes like this. Manfred Krankl (Austrian-born, like the state’s Governor), was a managing partner at one of Los Angeles’ most fashionable restaurants, La Campanile. The restaurant became famed for its wonderful bread to the extent that people would go there just to buy some bread to take home. So, to the restaurant they appended a little bakery, which they called La Brea, to keep their customers happy. One day, Manfred came to work and found a queue of people snaking round the block, all waiting for the bakery to open. At this point Manfred realized that, unwittingly he had, as he put it “spawned a monster”. The bakery became several, then a factory, and then Manfred sold off his mutant, money-spinning bakery child to get back to running his restaurant. Then people started asking where the house wine came from. The answer was: he made it himself. It was in fact in partnership with the Coppo brothers in Piedmont, a blend of Barbera, Cabernet Sauvignon and Freisa. Everyone wanted some. It became clear to Manfred and his wife Elaine, whom he had met at La Campanile, that in winemaking they had found something they loved more than restaurant management. They retired from the restaurant and the weekend hobby became the day job, at which Manfred and Elaine directed all their obsessive perfectionism and turned it into the phenomenon it now is. The winery, which Manfred, with a touch of tongue in cheek likes to call “the Garage D’Or” is in a ramshackle post-industrial dump in Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. Here he makes all the wines, designs the labels and comes up with the nuttily entertaining names for his wines which change every year. Up until very recently they owned no vineyards of their own, concentrating on sourcing top quality fruit from top producers such as John Alban and Bien Nacido in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, the area they consider most perfectly suited to Rhône varietals. They also sourced fruit from the famous Shea vineyard in Oregon, which they trucked all the way down to southern California in refrigerated lorries. About seven years ago Manfred and Elaine bought some vineyard in Santa Barbara of their own and this fruit now contributes significantly to the wines. Sine Qua Non have made a big name for themselves in an astonishingly short space of time (their first proper vintage was in 1992). A definition of their house style would have to include words like lush, intense, decadent, rich, and pure. Available in minuscule quantities, the wines are in many ways rather like Manfred himself, flamboyant, intense, and mad bordering on genius.