The Bluffer's Guide to Wine by Jonathan Goodall

Author:Jonathan Goodall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bluffer's Guides
Published: 2012-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

NEW WORLD

THE AMERICAS

USA

Should any discussion of American wines veer beyond your bluffing comfort zone, simply invoke the Judgment of Paris. The most seismic date in modern wine history is 24 May 1976: the day the nobility of French viticulture met its Agincourt. You can replace the plucky English archers with two unflinching rows of California Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, but the results were horribly similar.

Tell the amusing tale of how British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organised a blind tasting in the French capital, pitching California Chardonnay against the aristocracy of Burgundy, and California Cabernet against the might of Bordeaux. You can see what’s coming, can’t you? Stag’s Leap Cabernet Sauvignon and Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, both 1973 and as Californian as Baywatch, came top in their respective tastings, beating the likes of Château Haut-Brion 1970 and Roulot Meursault-Charmes 1973. Quelle horreur! And to really rub salt into the wounds, the tasters were grands fromages of the French wine establishment.

The same results today wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, but in 1976, just a year before Star Wars, French viticulture regarded itself as the Death Star, unassailable and impregnable. In France, the results were dismissed as laughable, although they were seized upon as a great source of encouragement for winemakers, not just in the USA, but throughout the New World – and the French have been paying the price ever since. Of course, they demanded a rematch of the very same wines, on the grounds that the French wines would age better. This took place in San Francisco in 1978, and the winners, again, were Californian – just as they were yet again in 2006 in the Judgment’s 30th-anniversary tasting, held simultaneously in London and Napa, California. Sometimes it’s just best to stop digging.

Seeking to console his French chums, Steven Spurrier commented, ‘The results of a blind tasting cannot be predicted and will not even be reproduced the next day by the same panel tasting the same wines.’ Which rather raises the question: what’s the point? But, of course, this is music to the bluffer’s ears.

From Texas to Hawaii, from sea to shining sea, wine is made in all 50 of these United States of America – that’s if you include some nutters up in Alaska making it from salmonberries. But 95% comes from California, making it the fourth-largest wine producer in the world, after France, Italy and Spain.

The bulk of California wine comes from the 483km-long Central Valley, where irrigated vines churn out nothing special. But in Lodi, to the north of the valley, they’re making seriously good, great-value wines from Zinfandel, which was proclaimed ‘America’s Heritage Grape’ by the ZAP group (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers). As a bluffer, it’s your duty to point out that DNA testing in 1994 revealed this ‘all-American grape’ to be none other than southern Italy’s Primitivo, an association the Italians have dined out on.

As you are well aware, Zinfandel makes a wide range of wine styles from sweet, pale-pink wines at around 11% abv (referred to either

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