Food & Drink: A Watch on the Wine

FOOD & DRINK

Not long ago, the average American thought that people who drank wine with their meals were either oddballs or foreigners—or both. The wine drinker, in short, was assumed to be either a recent immigrant who had not yet adjusted to the American way of life or a rich sybarite with exotic tastes. Exotic, because wine naturally meant French wine.

But in the last decade, more and more ordinary Americans have been discovering that a taste for wine is both respectable and rewarding. Where once a bottle of wine was reserved for special occasions, it is now often no more unusual on the table than a pitcher of milk. What’s more, 95% of the wine that Americans drink is made in the U.S.

With the notable exception of champagne (largely produced in upper New York State), nearly all U.S. wines come from the 22,000 vineyards of California. Americans have discovered that many California wines are often better than European vins ordinaires, and that a few of them rank with the good (if not the best) French wines.

The Count. The founding father of the California wine industry was a wandering Hungarian named Agostin Haraszthy, who appeared in San Diego one day in 1849. California wine was then largely made from the sweet, heavy purple grape brought from Spain by the Franciscan monks. “The Count,” as Haraszthy was called, did not like it. He persuaded the legislature that the state’s wine needed improvement, and in 1861, he took off for Europe, returned with 200,000 cuttings of Europe’s finest vines—a favor that California later returned.*

In the next decades, winemaking became a tidy local industry. But when Prohibition came, the vintners either ground out tons of grape juice or sadly closed down their presses and let their plump grapes wrinkle up into raisins. After repeal, the vineyards recovered only slowly, did not begin to produce wine they could be proud of till the late 1930s.

The man who has since done most to popularize wine in the U.S. is Ernest Gallo, 52, president of the E. & J. Gallo Winery Corp. in Modesto. Until recently, United Vintners, run by Gallo’s rival Louis Petri, was the biggest producer of cheap wines in the nation, but Gallo has been coming up fast and this year he hopes to peddle 40 million gallons to make himself undisputed top bottle in the business. His methods shock the traditional winemakers. His stainless-steel vats and presses are by far the most technologically advanced in the world (“You won’t find a stick of wood in our winery”); he pumps his wine by the millions of gallons through canvas hoses from tank to tank. He has taken to radio and television to advertise his wares with singing commercials (“Ripple—the wine with that ring-a-ding flavor . . . Oh-oh, that ring-a-ding taste!”; “Everybody gooes, for Gypsy Ro-ose!”).

Sneaky Pete. Gallo has no use for his premium-wine competitors, who are chiefly concentrated in the Napa Valley. “The reason people think Napa Valley wine is better,” snorts he, “is simply because it costs more. The wine snobs like it because it costs more. The so-called fine wineries’ audience is composed of wine snobs. Well, let ’em have each other.”

Gallo argues that the best way to boost wine consumption in the U.S. is to start the beginner off on the pints of 49¢ and 69¢ sweet wines for which he is famous. “Then,” he explains, “after a couple of years, they’ll be drinking a drier wine.” Meanwhile, Gallo’s judgment of the public taste results in the sale of millions of gallons of his artificially flavored Ripple, and Thunderbird—both spiked with CO².

The embattled traditional vintners, who have been doggedly trying to build the reputation of U.S. wines among the connoisseurs, react to such mass marketing tactics with apoplectic distaste. Says Wine Expert Brother Timothy of Christian Brothers, one of several winemaking religious orders: “Nothing is sacred in the wine industry. There was a time when tradition counted, but the revolution is here, and it would only be fair to say that Mr. Gallo started it.” Grumbles Winemaker Louis Martini: “There should be federal laws to prevent Gallo from calling those flavored drinks ‘wine.’ It’s a disgrace to the whole history of wine.” Another Napa Valley man adds bitterly: “Caesar fell. Mussolini fell. Gallo will fall!” Retorts Gallo, his frozen stare framed by rimless glasses: “It’s all sour grapes. When all the sour grapes are swept away, there isn’t an honest man in the industry who would tell unfriendly stories about me.”

Screw Caps. The vineyards of the premium producers—Almaden, Beaulieu, Beringer, Cresta Blanca. Inglenook, Korbel, Krug, Louis Martini, Masson, Wente, et al.—are concentrated chiefly in the Napa Valley and coastal areas near San Francisco. Most own their own vineyards, bottle their table wine in the old traditional style of the good French winemakers, studiously disdaining such modern advances as concrete fermentation vats and screw-cap bottle tops. Their wine is labeled with the name of the grape from which it is made, so that buyers can approximate the European equivalent in a California product. In white wines, Pinot Chardonnay, for example, is related to a Pouilly-Fuissé or a Chablis, white Riesling to a dry Rhine, Sauvignon Blanc to a superior dry Graves; in the reds. Cabernet Sauvignon is like red Bordeaux, Pinot Noir like lesser Burgundy, Camay Beaujolais similar to the French Beaujolais.

Though it might shock some purists, who believe that opposite sides of the same French hill produce distinctively different wine, most California makers blend their wines, arguing that this assures consistent quality and taste from year to year. Sometimes wine from the year before is added; often the vintner, if his own crop happens to be small one year, will buy the crop of nearby growers. In fact, only the label “Estate Bottled” indicates that the wine is wholly grown and produced on the grower’s own property.

The bulk of California production still goes into the sweet dessert wines such as port, sherry and muscatel, especially the cheap versions known as “Sneaky Pete” consumed by impoverished alcoholics (“Let’s not call them winos,” says Gallo, who sells a lot of such stuff). But the premium vintners are heartened by the fact that table wine is getting an increasing share of the total market. In 1957, for example, all U.S. vintners shipped 143.3 million gallons, of which 93.6 million were dessert wines and 40.8 million table wines. Last year, as total domestic shipments climbed to 152.5 million gallons, table wines had climbed to 47.4 million while dessert wines dropped to 86.3 million.

Even the fine-wine producers will admit that some of the cheap table wines are sound value for their price. Gallo’s Paisano, for example, is a passable vin ordinaire, even by French standards, and so is Petri’s Viva Vino. For quality wines, the experts stick to the Napa Valley for reds, Livermore for whites and Sonoma for Rhines. Among the leaders: Louis Martini’s Zinfandel and Folle Blanche, Inglenook’s Cabernet Sauvignon, Wente Brothers’ Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Chardonnay, Charles Krug’s Camay and Camay Beaujolais. California’s sparkling wines, on the other hand, are rarely worth the nose tickling; U.S. champagne is almost exclusively the province of New York State.

With their growing reputation among connoisseurs, U.S. vintners no longer have to advertise their wares as “Burgundy-type domestic” or a “California Chablis.” The day has not yet come when Pinot Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon are as well known as Medoc or Bordeaux. But the best measure of U.S. vintners’ growing reputation is that their best wines can now hold their own on any wine list, and under their own names.

* In the late 19th century, California paid its oenological debt to Europe by shipping thousands of cuttings to France after an epidemic of phylloxera devastated every French vineyard. But the simple transplanting of vines from one country to another does not result in identical wine unless climate and soil are also identical. Thus, despite all this cross-breeding in their ancestry, the wines of the U.S. and France remain notably dissimilar.