Founded in 1994 by
Manfred Krankl and his wife Elaine, the Krankls began making their own wines in 1994 due to personal interest and with the added benefit of being able, if the wines were good enough, to sell them to the successful Mediterranean-themed Los Angeles restaurant
Campanile, which Manfred co-founded and managed. Manfred was also a co-founder of
La Brea Bakery. Sale of a portion of his ownership position in LaBrea enabled him to focus on wine-making full-time, at which point total production, diversity of releases, and competency with the full spectrum of Rhone (and other) varieties steadily increased. Sourcing fruit from a wide variety of growers from year to year, and increasingly from their own vineyards has caused the winery to never make exactly the same wine twice, about which Krankl has said, "People buy Sine Qua Non. They don’t seem to give a toot where it’s from". However, beginning with 2020, 100% of the grapes will come from SQN-owned vineyards. A tradition at Sine Qua Non has been that each wine has a distinct name, label and bottle style. Each label is designed by Manfred, often with
linocut art work of his own creation. However, in 2021, SQN announced that due to the difficulty of registering new names, which has sometimes required renaming a wine before release, there will no longer be unique names for each bottling. In 2015, three half bottles of the 2002 Sine Qua Non E° (a rosé, which is not typically a wine type that attracts high prices at auction), sold for a total of $4,200. Sine Qua Non's first winery, located in an undistinguished warehouse at the back of an industrial facility in North Ventura, has been described by
Robert Parker as "a facility that looks like a
Mad Max movie set". Over the years, the Krankls have steadily purchased or leased their own terroir with the goal of obtaining total control over the growth and supply of their grapes. They currently manage several vineyards, including an approximately 10-planted-acre plot at their home facility in Oakview, California, just inland from Ventura, California, and another approximately 20-planted-acre plot in the
Santa Rita Hills region near
Buellton, California. In 2012, a major new winery facility was completed on the Krankl's Oak View, California, lands, and most vinification was relocated there from the initial Ventura winery location. In collaboration with Austrian winemaker
Alois Kracher, Manfred and Elaine Krankl have also produced
sweet wines under the label "Mr. K" (after the surnames of the two winemakers). Krankl announced that this program would end with the release of the 2006 vintage due to the untimely death of Kracher. The red wines have typically included the grape varieties of
Syrah,
Grenache and
Mourvedre. The white wines are typically made from
Roussanne,
Viognier and
Marsanne. or approximately
140 standard sixty-gallon barrels. It is a quantity the Krankls call the maximum possible given their non-scalable, personal, hands-on tending of the entire winemaking process. This production includes literally each vine and
cluster of grapes in all vineyards from which they derive fruit. In 2007, Manfred and Elaine Krankl started a sister winery named Next of Kyn. These wines are sourced from their Cumulus Vineyard which is planted around their estate in Oakview. Beginning with the 2014 vintage, they also started releasing wines coming from their estate vineyard called The Third Twin, located in Los Alamos. The latter includes a wine made from the Spanish grape
Graciano, which is the lowest production bottling they produce (855 bottles in 2017). Next of Kyn and The Third Twin offer wines via separate mailing lists than that of Sine Qua Non. Beginning in 2010, Manfred Krankl also started collaborating with
Clos Saint-Jean’s Maurel brothers, Vincent and Pascal, and oenologist
Philippe Cambie to produce a wine named Chimère in
France's
Chateauneuf du Pape region. The
Mourvedre that predominates in this blend comes from the famous la Crau lieu-dit. ==See also==