Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

Author:Bianca Bosker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-24T11:55:56+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Quality Control

Lei Mikawa runs one of the only wine operations in Napa that doesn’t want you to come visit. Honestly, you can’t even really find it. Or at least I was hopelessly turned around.

I’d come to California wine country and wound up lost on Route 218 because I’d gotten lost in a figurative sense. Since my pillage of Yquem and other once-in-a-lifetime bottles, I’d struggled to answer what had initially appeared like a relatively simple question: What is “good” wine? In my blind tasting groups, I was learning to distinguish classic Chenin Blancs from classic Pinot Gris. These were differences in type, not in quality, and I wasn’t sure what ruler to use in measuring whether they were any good. Given all the bickering that somms did over bottles, I’d also gleaned that identifying a wine is much less contentious than determining how good it is.

For the better part of half an hour, I’d been making U-turns on gravel roads in a hapless search for Lei’s research lab. That’s where Lei, a sensory scientist, analyzes what regular humans—not critics or sommeliers—enjoy about wine. She works as the sensory insights manager for Treasury Wine Estates, one of the world’s largest wine companies, which produces more than seventy labels that pump out more than 30 million cases of wine each year, ranging from the swanky Syrah your uncle might serve at Thanksgiving dinner to the plastic mini-bottles of Pinot Grigio you knock back on airplanes. I was more interested in the latter. And I was a long way from the treasures of La Paulée.

“Bad” is how most oenophiles would refer to Treasury’s budget wines. Treasury calls them “commercial”—bottles sold for $10 or less—or “masstige”—a portmanteau of “mass” and “prestige,” referring to wines under $20 each. This is the grape juice that ends up in most Americans’ stomachs. In 2015, the world’s wine auctions sold a combined $346 million worth of fine wine, like Château d’Yquem, to PXs like Pierre. That same year, Americans spent almost $2 billion on five “bad” wines alone: Barefoot, Sutter Home, Woodbridge, Franzia, and Yellow Tail—smash hits from Treasury’s biggest competitors. The average price Americans paid for a bottle hit a record high in 2015, when it reached a grand total of $9.73.

The labels “commercial” and “masstige” refer broadly to price categories. A $15.99 bottle of Verdelho from the Barberani family’s biodynamic, no-machines-ever vineyard in Umbria could technically be “masstige.” But the term is more often used by conglomerates who produce a very particular type of commercial and masstige wine: not only cheap but engineered to taste the same year after year, developed to have mass appeal, and churned out in Walmart volumes. These mass-market wines are what you see over and over again in every liquor store you visit, or on the laminated menus in chain restaurants. They usually have critters on the label, or puns that get chuckles around the office water cooler (“Marilyn Merlot,” “Seven Deadly Zins”). And they drive oenophiles crazy. Wines

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