Wine: it`s a local call

Wine is both the most local agricultural product in the world, and the most global. The best wines - those crazily priced bottles wine stores keep in a special locked section - are always from very specific plots of earth, often from single vineyards. As a general rule of thumb, the smaller the place name on a bottle, the bigger the price. Notice how often a wine from "Napa Valley" is more expensive than one labeled just "California." Then notice how the wines labeled with particular vineyard names (Martha`s Vineyard, Napa Valley) are more expensive still. That`s about as local as you can get. On the other hand, winemakers the world over (and down through centuries) talk the same shop talk, and send their children and employees to study abroad and apprentice at foreign wineries. And these days, top winemakers from France, Italy, America, and Australia jet all over the place to make wine for wineries in distant hemispheres and with climates and soils completely unrelated to those they`d find back home. And, of course, many wines themselves are sold the world over. That`s global. In the formerly tradition-bound Old World, the global part is new - very new - but the local part is very, very old. In European vineyards in places like Burgundy, Barolo, Alsace, and the Moselle, the plots of land that have risen to the top and command the highest prices for their wines have been determined over centuries. There is a sense that these sacred vineyards are immutable - that no matter what grapes are planted there, or by whom, or with what skill, these pieces of ground will produce aristocratic wines. A case in point is Bordeaux`s Chateau Haut-Brion, which became perhaps the first "brand" of wine since classical times when bottles labeled with its chateau name were sold in the 16th century (most wine otherwise was being sold in generic, often anonymous casks). No one today knows what grapes those famous wines were made from, or what the wine might have tasted like, but down through the centuries, the property stayed famous for producing great wine. When the Bordelais undertook to classify the region`s most noble vineyard properties centuries later, in 1855, Haut-Brion was there, listed among the "First Growths." The fact that this nearly 150-year-old classification still holds sway - almost entirely unrevised - shows the French reverence for the unchanging character of these illustrious plots of soil. The world has altered around them, but these vineyards` soils, sun exposures and micro-climates are still considered the best for growing fine wine grapes. But if centuries of trial and era (cq) had so identified those vineyards in Bordeaux that their ranking could be set in stone by 1855, what of California? Wine history there scarcely stretches back to 1855, and what knowledge existed there was almost entirely wiped out by the 14-year hiatus of Prohibition. The immigrants who had planted so many of California`s vineyards in the late 19th and early 20th centuries may have arrived from Europe with a feel for what would make a great vineyard site. But few of these plots of soil - with notable exceptions - had developed much of a track record for fine wine before the Noble Experiment shut them down or confined them to growing table grapes or wine grapes for Communion wines. Many decades passed after Prohibition ended in 1933 before Californians began to reevaluate the importance of individual vineyards to great wines. Martin Ray, the irascible iconoclast atop Mount Eden Vineyard in what is now Silicon Valley, understood the potent primacy of place back in the `40s, but he was literally a voice in the wilderness. By some accounts, even the few famous 19th-century vineyards then scattered about Napa Valley were turning out fairly bland wines for the most part during the `50s and into the `60s. The intensity and individuality of these great vineyard plots was all but obscured by winemaking that emphasized human intervention to make wines that would be squeaky clean, stable, and "balanced" in the sense that a lab analysis would show acids, sugars, etc., to be in the correct proportions according to then-prevailing theories. Then here and there, the more visionary - or, dare I say it? - European-influenced winemakers began to wise up. Among the first were the college professors/home winemakers who founded Ridge Vineyards in the late 1950s, a mountaintop or two over from old Martin Ray. These idealists did two things right: they began scouring California for great, century-old vineyards, and they hired a winemaker named Paul Draper who took the scouting mission to its present greatness over the course of the last 30-plus years. Ridge began with its own home mountaintop vineyard, called Montebello, which had been a great grape source in the 19th century before its owner`s carriage had plunged off the vertiginous Montebello road - a fate still very possible today. But they also found, in northern Sonoma County, the century-old zinfandel vineyard that makes Ridge`s Geyserville, and later the old vineyard that makes Ridge`s Lytton Springs bottling. Though the wines Ridge was making from these far-flung vineyards were nothing like French Burgundy - they were let-em-rip California zinfandel blends - the concept was pure Burgundian. Burgundy is the epitome of the wine world`s ultra-localized, tiny-plot-of-ground worship. A big Burgundy shipper like, say, Louis Jadot, might bottle 80 to 100 different wines a year, from all over the Burgundy region. But nearly all of the wines will carry specific place names or vineyard names on their labels. The idea here is that each vineyard (Le Chambertin) or village (Gevrey-Chambertin), or sub-region, has it`s own very specific meaning to a consumer. By buying grapes from another part of the state, bottling them separately, and labelling the resulting wines with the vineyards` names (Geyserville, or Lytton Springs, or several dozen others over the years), Ridge was asserting the personality of the individual vineyards over the intervention of the winemaking. Meanwhile, up in Napa Valley, other wineries were doing something similar on a Bordeaux, cabernet-based model. Here you had To-Kalon forming the core of the great Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernets, Martha`s Vineyard as Heitz` famous top-of-the-line, and Eisele as the great vineyard source first for Joseph Phelps and now for Araujo. Nowadays there are legions of estate-bottled and single vineyard wines from American vineyards, most them unfortunately meaningless to drinkers since the wines themselves offer little that is truly distinctive or "local" in character. But each year new names are being added to the roster of great vineyards and localities. It`s taking time - not centuries, but decades - for wineries in places like California, Washington and Oregon to identify these special plots and to figure out what clone of what grape planted how and produced how will bring out its character. Not surprisingly, it is these very local wines that have put the top American wineries on the connoisseur`s map of the world. It`s these local wines - the very kind that are least reproducible elsewhere - that have attracted foreign students and apprentices to American wine schools and wineries. It`s also no coincidence that one of the fathers of locality in California wine, Ridge`s Paul Draper, became this year just the third American ever honored as Man of the Year by England`s Decanter Magazine. The local communicates very well indeed all over the global world of wine.

Richard Nalley`s wine articles appear in Men`s Journal, Food & Wine and Departures. He is the winner of the 1997 James Beard Foundation Award for Magazine Wine Writing. Please send your wine questions to Wine Talk, c/o Copley News Service, P.O. Box 120190, San Diego, CA 92112-0190. Questions regarding individual bottles or collection appraisals cannot be answered. (c) Copley News Service

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Author: Richard Nalley