Sine Qua Non (wine)

Sine Qua Non (also known as SQN) is a California cult winery known for its Rhône style blends, a tendency to avoid repetition, and a very limited production of wine that is highly difficult to obtain, with 100% of all releases allocated and directly sold to a carefully managed mailing list. The mailing list has by some measures a five- to ten-year waiting list. The winery is located in Ventura County, within the Central Coast AVA.

The wines have been titled with names such as Queen of Spades, Twisted & Bent, Imposter McCoy, The Bride, Poker Face, and Red Handed, and the bottles come uncommonly shaped with distinctive labels featuring Manfred Krankl's own artwork.

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. Beginning with several self described "project wines" made in partnership with John Alban and other vintners, initial production was approximately 100 cases. After several experiments with white varietals, Rhone red varietals and even Pinot noir, the Krankls found their sweet spot in 1994 with a predominantly Syrah-based blend they named Queen of Spades that earned a 95 point rating from Robert Parker. Today, this wine retails at an average price of $5,861 per bottle.

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) varietals 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".

A tradition at Sine Qua Non is that each wine has a distinct name, label and often bottle style. Each label is hand made by Manfred with linocut art work of his own creation. This process requires each year's wine's names and labels to be individually approved by the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an unpredictable process subject to the whims and vagaries of regulators. Despite numerous and seemingly random rejections, Krankl has persisted with this expensive and time consuming process, creating a colorful, diverse and oftentimes humorous body of label art.

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