The Booklovers' Guide to Wine

by Patrick Alexander

  U.S. STATE

  Wineries

  California

  3532

  Washington

  670

  Oregon

  544

  New York

  310

  Virginia

  222

  Texas

  204

  Pensylvania

  160

  Ohio

  142

  Michigan

  131

  North Carolina

  129

  Missouri

  125

  Illinois

  103

  Figure 7: US Wineries by State

  If only to honor the memory of Thomas Jefferson, wine is finally being grown and made in Virginia, and there are even vineyards at his Monticello estate producing Chardonnay, Viognier, Cabernet Franc, and even Nebbiolo. New York, too, over the past two decades, has seen an increase in the number of wineries and in the quality of wine produced, especially around the Finger Lakes region, which is noted for its production of Riesling, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, and Pinot Noir. Because the wineries of New York, Virginia, and most of the other states like Michigan, Texas, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, are small family-owned enterprises, they lack distribution networks and are thus little known outside their immediate neighborhood. Many of the wineries east of the Rockies also use the Native American grape, Vitis labrusca, either by itself or cloned or blended with the European Vitis vinifera. The Canadians also experiment with Vitis labrusca, which is probably the original vine that the Vikings saw growing on the shores of Newfoundland more than a thousand years ago.

  Canada produces a certain amount of wine, but more than 50 percent of the wine consumed in Canada is imported—which might reflect a local perception of the quality of the domestic product. The most notable and deservedly sought after Canadian wine is the ice wine, a sweet and powerful dessert wine made from grapes that have been allowed to freeze on the vine before fermentation. Canada also allows wineries to import grapes and juice from other countries, and to label it as “Cellared in Canada.”

  Although this book is dedicated to wine, not cider, I must make an exception by mentioning La Face Cachée de la Pomme, a small-boutique Canadian winery in Quebec which uses apples to produce a range of unctuously delicious, fruity, mouth-filling ice wines called Neige.

  The only North American wines which have achieved success on the international market are all on the West Coast, and of these, the most important is, of course, California.

  California

  California produces 90 percent of the wine in North America, and if California was a separate country, it would be the world’s fourth largest wine producer after France, Spain, and Italy. The three most important dates in the history of Californian wine are 1769, 1920, and 1976.

  1769 Missions: In 1769, Spanish Franciscan missionaries led by Father Junipero Serra started moving up the Pacific Coast from Baja California. Their plan was to found a string of missions along the coast, each located a single day’s horseback ride from the next, along a single road which they called El Camino Real. The first mission was founded at San Diego in 1769, and fifty-four years later, the twenty-first and final mission was founded at San Francisco in 1823. In order to celebrate Mass, each mission planted a vineyard to produce wine for the Eucharist. The vine that the monks planted was the same Palomino vine that Cortez had brought with him from Spain in 1524. Not having any other name, it was called Mission, and remained the dominant wine in California until the twentieth century.

  The Californian Gold Rush of 1849 brought thousands of thirsty miners from Europe, and so the demand for wine increased dramatically, especially in Northern California around the new mission of San Francisco. Many of the “49ers” came from the wine-producing parts of France, Spain, and Italy, and brought their winemaking skills with them. The first commercial winery, Buena Vista, was opened in Sonoma in 1857 by a Hungarian adventurer named Count Haraszthy, often referred to as the “Father of the Californian Wine Industry,” who certainly improved the quality of the local wine and imported many European vines, but whose biographic details remain as elusive as those of Keyser Söze, his compatriot from The Usual Suspects. In addition to their winemaking skills, immigrants like Haraszthy brought their native vines with them also, and so the ubiquitous Mission grape began to give way to other, better-quality vines.

  When the great Phylloxera blight destroyed the vineyards of Europe in the late nineteenth century, it was Californian root stock which saved the day and allowed the vineyards to be replanted. By the end of the nineteenth century, wine production was a major part of the Californian economy, and Californian wines were gaining recognition and winning prizes internationally. Napa Valley in particular was quickly recognized for producing quality wine. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, Napa Valley wines won twenty of the thirty-four medals or awards (including four gold medals) won by California entries. This was the high point that was followed by forty years of natural and human-caused disasters: severe frosts, an economic depression, the San Francisco earthquake that destroyed an estimated thirty million US gallons of wine in storage, and the disaster of national Prohibition from 1920 through 1933.

  1920 Prohibition: In January 1920, as discussed in Chapter Three, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, the Volstead Act, banned the manufacture, importation, transportation, and sale of intoxicating beverages within the United States—but not their consumption.

  Just when the Californian wine industry was achieving international recognition and respect, the government ordered all the vineyards to be torn up. Certain wineries, such as The Christian Brothers, were permitted to continue making wine for “sacramental purposes,” and Beaulieu Vineyard, for example, had the approval of the Archbishop of San Francisco to provide altar wine for the archdiocese. Vineyards were, however, permitted to grow grapes for private consumption, and so farmers ripped up all their more delicate vines and replaced them with Alicante Bouschet, a coarse varietal that produced thick-skinned grapes which were easier to transport from California to the East Coast without bruising or rotting. Other winegrowers would use the prolific Alicante Bouschet grapes to produce semi-solid grape concentrates, often called “wine bricks” or “wine blocks,” which were labeled with a very clear warning to consumers not to add yeast or sugar, and “after dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days, and do not store in temperatures above seventy degrees because then it would turn into wine.” A free packet of yeast was usually attached to the wine block.

  Farmers made so much money selling unfermented grape juice and grape blocks during Prohibition that land devoted to vineyards in California increased by 700 percent. By 1928, approximately 27,900 railroad carloads of grapes left California bound for New York alone. The volume was so great that the Pennsylvania Railroad expanded its Jersey City freight terminal solely to accommodate the thousands of grape-laden boxcars. Prices increased as well as volume. During the first four years of Prohibition, a ton of grapes went from a pre-Prohibition price of less than $30 to a staggering $375, and land prices for vineyards during Prohibition increased seven-fold.

  The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 left California with an excess of vineyards producing a surplus of bad juice. The Californian wine industry was dead. Americans in general had once again developed a taste for spirits and cocktails rather than wine. Consumers
now demanded cheap “jug wine” (so-called dago red) and sweet, fortified (high alcohol) wine. Before Prohibition, dry table wines outsold sweet wines by three to one, but after Prohibition the ratio had more than reversed. In 1935, 81 percent of California’s production was sweet wines. The reputation of the state’s wines suffered accordingly.

  For the next thirty years, the Californian wine industry was in complete disarray, producing such American classics as E&J Gallo’s Thunderbird and other wines normally served in a brown paper bag. But during the 1960s, a new wave of winemakers began to emerge and help sponsor a renaissance in California wine with a focus on new winemaking technologies and an emphasis on quality. Several well-known wineries were founded in this decade, including Robert Mondavi, Heitz Wine Cellars (both in Napa Valley), and David Bruce Winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains. As the quality of Californian wine improved, the region started to receive more international attention.

  1976 Judgment of Paris: A watershed moment for the industry occurred in 1976 (discussed in more detail in Chapter Three), when British wine merchant Steven Spurrier invited several Californian wineries to participate in a blind tasting event in Paris to compare the best of California with the best of Bordeaux and Burgundy. In an event known as The Judgment of Paris, Californian wines shocked the world by sweeping the wine competition in both the red and white wine categories. Throughout the wine world, perspectives about the potential of California wines dramatically changed.

  Once he had recovered from the shock of seeing his Premier Cru, Mouton Rothschild, voted second place to the unknown Californian wine from Stag’s Leap, Baron Phillippe de Rothschild flew to California and signed a fifty-fifty partnership deal with Robert Mondavi. The result was the wine Opus One.

  As George M. Taber explains so well in his book The Judgment of Paris, California wine has never been the same; the French are still struggling to recover, and the ripple effect of that blind tasting in Paris is still being felt around the world. The wine critic Robert Parker had started writing his wine guide one year earlier in 1975, and started publishing his newsletter, The Wine Advocate, in 1979. Parker is an unabashed advocate of the big-bodied, fruit-forward, alcoholic wines that first emerged in California and are now defined as New World wines. It was Parker who criticized winemakers for imitating French wines and “going against what Mother Nature has given California.” If you want to make French wines, he said, do it in France. It was Parker who enthused that the strength of Californian wines “lies in power, exuberance, and gloriously ripe fruit;” and of course by “gloriously ripe” he meant high in alcohol.

  Parker’s rise to being the world’s undisputed and most-influential wine critic parallels the incredible rise of the Californian wine industry. Although wine is grown in some fifty states, California is responsible for nearly all of it.

  Californian Varietals: For much of its history, California was dominated by the Mission grape until the late nineteenth century when European immigrants started to introduce French and Italian vines. As described previously, most of these quality varietals were replaced during Prohibition by Alicante Bouschet grapes, but by the middle of the twentieth century a new wave of immigrants started replanting other vines, such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.

  Initially the winemakers tried to imitate European wines, and even labeled their own wine with recognizable European names such as Burgundy, Chablis, or Chianti. But under pressure from innovators like Frank Schoonmaker and Robert Mondavi, Californian wines began to be labeled with the name of their varietal—in the same way that the wines of Alsace are labeled.

  Today, there is probably not a wine varietal in existence which somebody is not trying to grow in California. Every type of varietal can be found in California, including many different hybrid grapes and new Vitis vinifera varieties developed at the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology. The only varietal which was perceived as being unique to California was Zinfandel, which recent DNA analysis shows to be descended from the Croatian grape Crljenak Kaštelanski and the Primitivo grape from Puglia in Italy. The Zinfandel was declining in popularity in the mid-twentieth century and might as well have vanished if it was not for the sudden and surprising success of White Zinfandel in 1975, when Sutter Home accidentally created a pink, sweet, soft jug wine with low alcohol. It became an overnight success and remains the third most popular wine, accounting for 10 percent of all the wine consumed in America. White Zinfandel outsells red Zinfandel by six to one.

  Ironically, after promoting “varietal” over “terroir” for so many years, different regions of California are increasingly starting to focus on specific varietals, and thus California is now developing its own terroirs.

  Californian Terroirs: Over the past hundred years, as experience has shown which varietals thrive under what specific local conditions, a series of Californian terroirs has started to emerge. At the same time, the US government introduced the American Viticultural Area (AVA), which is a designated wine-growing area defined by its geographic boundaries. As of March 2015, there were 230 AVAs in the United States. However, AVAs are much more like the German Grosslage than the French AOC definition of terroir.

  Ignoring the vast wine-producing region of the Central Valley where most of California’s grapes are grown, the other two major regions are the North Coast and the Central Coast. California’s most notable terroirs include the following very abbreviated list, from north to south down the coast, where the very cold waters of the Pacific Ocean temper the warm, sunny climate and bring on the cooling evening fog:

  • North Coast (North of San Francisco Bay)

  Mendocino: The summer fogs coming in from the coast create German-like conditions, and so favor white wines like Riesling and Gewürztraminer, while above the fog line of the Anderson Valley the area has long been noted for its great old-vine Zinfandels, which were long thought to be native to California. Not famous just for its cannabis, Mendocino wines are increasingly competing in reputation with its southern neighbors in Napa and Sonoma, and producing some of the nation’s very best Zinfandels and Petit Syrahs.

  Sonoma: The Alexander Valley in the north of Sonoma is most famous for its red wines, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, but, receiving less sun, they are often not as powerful as the reds from the adjoining Napa Valley. Some vineyards, such as Silver Oak, cross the border, and are able to blend grapes from both Sonoma’s Alexander Valley with grapes from Napa Valley. The Russian River, subject to cooling fog rolling in from the ocean, is noted for its Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. Further south, Dry Creek Valley, again above the fog line, is noted, not just for its powerful Zinfandels, but also Sauvignon Blanc and, increasingly, Barbera and Syrah.

  The southern part of Sonoma, Los Carneros, where it borders Napa Valley, was always famous for its Californian Champagne. The cool fog and consistent breezes from the bay create the perfect climate for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes to thrive, as they do on the limestone plains of northern France. What is interesting is that after the European Union prevented use of the word Champagne outside of its historic geographic region, many of the big French Champagne and Spanish Cava makers, such as Taitinger, Freixante, Cordonieu, Moet Chandon, and Mum’s, have all purchased vineyards in Los Carneros to make sparkling wine. After you beat ’em, join, ’em!

  Napa Valley: Despite its large international fame, Napa Valley is relatively small, being only one-eighth the size of Bordeaux. Much hotter in the north of the valley, the southern half is cooled by the fog coming through the Golden Gate Bridge and up from San Francisco Bay. Widely recognized, except by the French, as producing the best Cabernet Sauvignons in the world, the names of the following Napa Valley AVAs (from north to south) are almost as well-known as many of France’s AOCs: Spring Mountain, St. Helena, Rutherford, Oakville, Yountville, and, of course, Stags Leap.

  Oakville is the home of the famed Ulysses Vineyard and its acclaimed Cabernet Sauvignon wines. The literary refere
nce is neither to Homer nor James Joyce, but to Alfred Lord Tennyson and his poem “Ulysses,” with its praise of the hero’s determination “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

  Stag’s Leap was named after a rocky peak in the southern part of Napa Valley associated with various legends involving stags escaping capture or alternatively being slaughtered by leaping off the cliff. In any event, it was the Cabernet Sauvignon from the Stag’s Leap winery owned by Warren Winiarski that won the 1976 Judgment of Paris, putting Californian wines on the map and making Stag’s Leap the most famous wine in California. The neighboring vineyard of Stags’ Leap (note the apostrophe), owned by Carl Doumani, obviously benefitted from the confusion over the name, and this resulted in decades of bitter and expensive lawsuits between the two wine owners. Eventually, when the lawsuits ended, Doumani and Winiarski became friends and joined forces to produce a wine with grapes made from both estates, called Accord. When the US government created the American Viticultural Area in 1989, it wisely decided to ignore the apostrophe, which is why the AVA is Stags Leap. Stag’s Leap is now owned by Foster’s (the Australian beer giant), and Stags’ Leap is now owned by Château St. Michelle.

  Interestingly, after selling the Stags’ Leap winery, Carl Doumani opened a smaller winery inspired by Miguel de Cervantes. His wines include an organic Petit Syrah called Sancho Panza, as well as a robust Cabernet Sauvignon called Quixote, like the name of his winery.

  • Central Coast (From Santa Cruz to Los Angeles)

  Santa Cruz Mountains: South of San Francisco, close to Monterey Bay, the vineyards are surrounded by protective forests, and benefit from the higher-elevation Californian sun during the growing season and from the cooling fog off the bay during the evenings. David Bruce Winery is noted for his full-bodied and powerful Cabernet Sauvignons (despite getting the lowest score for his Chardonnay in the 1976 Paris tasting). Nearby Bonny Doon Winery is noted for its uniquely quirky labels by Ralph Steadman, its focus on terroir, its successful blends of Rhône style wines, biodynamic practices, and its pioneering use of the screw-top seal for its bottles.