Our Story

  
Michael and Patricia Manz started Mountain Dome in 1984 with help from their children and Michael's brother John Mueller. For the first two years, the grapes were pressed in the kitchen of the family's geodesic dome home. In the years since, Mountain Dome has grown to be a state-of-the-art winemaking facility. Combining Old World techniques with New World refinements, we focus on crafting world class sparkling wines from Washington state grapes.

Great wines can only be made from great grapes. Washington is gifted with some of the finest terroir for grape growing in this country. By hand-selecting vineyards from all over Washington, we are able to pick fruit that works for our style. All our grapes are picked by hand and processed in a most delicate way to keep the purity of the fruit intact. We pick when the fruit's acid levels are high, allowing us to age the wine for extended periods in the bottle, creating more complex and intriguing wines.

We ferment half our base wines in French oak barrels and half in stainless tanks. The barrels we use are mostly older, neutral French oak that won't overwhelm the wine with wood flavors but balances the fruitiness with vanilla and spice. The barrels are also important from a blending perspective: Keeping small lots of wine separated in the barrels allows us to be more exact in our crafting of the wine.

To make the wine sparkle, we use the traditional champagne method of fermenting the wine in the bottle with yeast. This fermentation in the bottle is what produces the fine silky bubbles that rise to great you in the glass.

After the second fermentation, our wines are aged two to seven years in the bottle with the yeast. This further aging softens the wine and enhances the complexity and finish. Once the wines have aged to our liking, we riddle the bottles to collect the yeast at the top of the neck, then disgorge them to remove the yeast plug. All our wines are finished in the Brut style with just a little sugar added to balance the acidity.