Exploring Life & Business with Kaibab Sauvage of Sauvage Spectrum

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kaibab Sauvage.

Hi Kaibab, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
After working together on numerous wine projects, winemaker Patric Matysiewski and wine grower Kaibab Sauvage formed a partnership in 2019 to create a new breed of estate winery, Sauvage Spectrum. We have complete control of the process from grape to glass, allowing us to deliver a very high-quality product. Sustainability is a major driving factor in all of our farming and wine-making practices. Handcrafted, artisanal blends are grown with the intention of producing a modern sparkling wine. Nominal interference in the cellar highlights our premium high-desert fruit. Unusual and rare blends allow us to exercise creativity, showcasing the versatility of Colorado wines without being tied to tradition. Sauvage Spectrum is 100% Colorado estate grown and bottled. We are hands-on and visible in producing our grapes and wine daily in the vineyard and winery.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There have definitely been challenges along the way. When we opened our tasting room doors in December 2019, we were greeted with a global pandemic that had all sorts of repercussions, from lockdown to supply chain disruption. The team dug our heels in, adapted, and figured it out. In the long run, it ended up helping us out as people had to cancel their international travel plans and were looking for close places to visit. Mesa County had a very effective 5-Star Variance program that enabled us to stay open, and we had lots of outdoor space so everyone could spread out. We are still seeing the results of Denver and Salt Lake City discovering Colorado’s wine country. We got hit again with a devastating freeze event in the fall of 2020; we lost all of our grape vines to the ground; not only did we get a minimal crop in 2021, but we also had to tie up over 40,000 grape vines in order to get them back into production for 2022. Most recently, inflation has drastically affected our bottom line, there is no one item that went up in price it has been a death by a thousand cuts, every single item that we use in winemaking has gone up in price, and it is very difficult to pass these price increases along as the wine market is so competitive even a dollar price increase can put you into a different price category and consumers view that category as too expensive for their daily purchases. All that being said we have an amazing, resilient team. We took all of this in stride and are still making world-class wine, stronger and more resilient for the struggles we have been through.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
From the outside, our winery looks like any other: tanks, barrels, press, pumps, and hoses. Everyone knows that it’s what’s on the inside that counts: innovation!

When we launched Sauvage Spectrum Winery four years ago, we saw an opportunity: sparkling wines; they were just starting to trend nationally and were underrepresented in Colorado and happened to be what we love making and drinking. We jumped at this opportunity with our first release, Sparklet, a fun, fruit-forward, affordable sparkling wine with its own tagline, “Celebrate Everyday”. For us to keep this affordable, we are utilizing lower-priced grape varieties (that just happen to be perfect for sparkling) and a proprietary tank method. The bottle is sealed with a non-traditional crown cap like you would find on a beer bottle (much easier to open than a traditional cork and cage). The packaging is finished off with a screen-printed bottle, which allows us tons of space on the bottle to cover it with stars like the night sky reminiscent of the bubble inside with a classy foil finish over the neck. We offer this in a white, a beautiful highlighter pink rosé, and a Lambrusco-inspired sparkling red wine that recently received a Double Gold, the highest honor in Colorado’s premier wine competition, the Governor’s Cup. In addition, our Malbec and Teroldego earned the same distinction in 2023.

Additionally, we have been restoring ancient winemaking techniques with our bottle-fermented Pet-Nat’s. Utilizing a technique that predates champagne, the Ancestral Method, these wines undergo spontaneous fermentation in the tank; utilizing nominal interference and no sulfites added, they ferment down until just the right moment. After careful monitoring, we bottle and allow the wines to finish fermentation completely in the bottle. This step is crucial because if we bottle too soon, they can explode, be too late and the wine will be flat. Properly executed, the wines are yeasty, hazy, fun, sometimes just a little bit funky, almost like a cross between a cider and a sour beer and the perfect gateway beverage for beer drinkers getting into wine or those seeking new adventurous flavors. We offer our Pet-Nat in white, Magenta (our take on a rosé named after its electric pink color), recently launching a dry hopped version, using Citra hops reminiscent of a triple IPA, along with a skin contact orange wine, a white wine left on the skins for a week lends it’s orange color. All of these fall into the natural wine category.

Another project utilizing ancient wine-making techniques is our low ABV canned wine called Piquette; this is a sustainable, upcycled product, targeting the burgeoning healthier for-you wine-drinking demographic. It is made by collecting the skins after pressing the juice from them and doing a wash over them with filtered water; this wash pulls residual sugars, color, and flavors from the skins, this is then fermented and result in an easy drinking low ABV (6%) wine that offers a craft option for the sparkling seltzer drinkers. Typically, these skins are composted and applied as mulch in our vineyard, but we wanted to take it one step further and upcycle a product from our waste.

We also make a small lot of wine club-only still wines, “Crush Club”; these are typically very special or obscure unique varietals. These wines are only available to our wine club members, which requires a one-year commitment to purchase 3, 6 or 12 bottles quarterly. The most popular of these is our “American Heavy Toast Malbec,” aged over 18 months in a fresh unused bourbon barrel, complementing the muscular black and blue fruits of the Malbec with sweet, enticing oak lactones (think vanilla); this wine is truly a blockbuster! Other adventurous wines offered to our members are Gruner Veltliner, a crisp, refreshing Austrian grape variety that fits our cold winters and high elevation growing conditions splendidly. Another stand out is Teroldego, a northern Italian red wine grown at the base of the Dolomites in the Alto Adagio region, also known for its high-elevation vineyards and cold winters. We also offer a single varietal, Roussanne, a Rhone variety; this masculine white wine offers lingering butterscotch flavors perfect for the cooler seasons.

We offer our “Domaine” (house), both red, white, and rosé, in kegs, which we use on the premises at the winery for our growler club, “The Imbibe Tribe.” We offer guests special pricing on growler fills and entice them to come in once a month for a fill-up. We also offer these kegged wines for distribution to accounts serving wine on tap, partnering with several eateries and wine bars.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
As entrepreneurs, we have to embrace and understand risk. So much innovation comes from taking a risk; in the vineyard, we have countless numbers of risks every day, from the weather to disease pressure, labor shortages, and trying new obscure, unproven varieties of grapes. You just have to be mindful of what is happening and make the best decisions you can to keep moving forward. As a winery, I believe we take some of the boldest risks around. We have proven that these New World Cultivars thriving in Colorado can make exceptional wines. We highlight obscure varieties from all over the world, and our winemaker has to figure out how to make these wines from grapes most people have never even heard of. The risks we have taken to get to where we are define our brand and are what make our brand stand out in the Colorado Wine scene.

Pricing:

• Our wines range in price from $22-$45 a bottle.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sauvagespectrum.com/
• Instagram: @sauvagespectrumwines
• Facebook: @sauvagespectrum
• Yelp: Sauvage Spectrum Estate Winery

Image Credits
Sauvage Spectrum