Young Bacchus Comes of Age

By Michael Demarest

In California, the rich vineyards grow and glow

In a 19th century American engraving entitled The Old Wine God and the New, a graybeard Bacchus passes a vine-wreathed staff to a wide-eyed Western stripling. The artist's message: the age-old mysteries and delectations of the grape are flourishing in California soil. It must have evoked a guffaw or two from Victorian clubmen with noses deep in the real stuff from the Medoc or the Cote d'Or.

It has taken more than a century for Bacchus Jr. to assemble his credentials: today they are a cause for hallelujahs, not harrumphs. In wine tastings from Perth to Paris, the bottles from California have been winning golds, silvers and bronzes in informal vinous Olympics against the products of some of the world's most astute and experienced winemakers. This is not to suggest, as some Californiaphiles would have it, that the Old Wine God is about to be toppled by the New. It does confirm that California's best wines are now as worthy of serious consideration and consumption as their European progenitors.

That is quite an achievement, considering the troubles that the immigrant Vitis vinifera* has had surviving in North America. The European vine did not fare well in chilly Northeastern climes. In fact, making a potable domestic wine was quite possibly the only undertaking in which Thomas Jefferson ever admitted defeat. The most grievous blow of all was the Prohibition era, in which the wine industry died on the vine. It has not been helped since by many Americans' two-fisted addiction to beer and hard liquor or aversion to alcohol in any form (dry and blue laws). Yet the past decade has seen the completion of a delicious circle: the American discovery of wine, on a large scale, as a part of the civilized life, and the maturing of an industry capable of satisfying sophisticated palates.

Wine consumption in the U.S. is still only a spit in the barrel by European standards: two gallons annually per capita (vs. 27 in Italy), ranging from less than three quarts per adult in West Virginia to five gallons in Washington, D.C. Nonetheless, the amount of wine drunk in the U.S. has doubled in ten years and is increasing at the rate of 5% yearly. That adds up to a huge present and future market for table wines--particularly for the California vintners, who supply 70% of all the wine consumed in this country.

Indeed, Americans' new love affair with the grape may be one of the few recorded instances of the consumer leading the industry. More than a million Americans are enrolled in wine appreciation courses; some 160,000 students at 620 college campuses are taking classes in oenology. The meticulous annual "barrel" tasting of new California vintages held by Manhattan's splendid Four Seasons restaurant has become a spectacular. Last winter's event drew requests from more than 2,000 would-be sippers for the 200 available tickets--at $75 each. Some 50,000 oenophiles have taken part in a procession of blind tastings of California and European wines held in 31 states by the California Wine Institute; the unmarked California bottles have won overwhelmingly. And so it goes, and flows. Says the Wine Institute's Brian St. Pierre: "I can't think of another product in America that is so exhaustively written about, talked about and analyzed."

The happy confluence of taste and technology was noted last October by France's tough and prestigious gustatory handbook, Le Nouveau Guide Gault-Millau, which saluted the "golden age" of California wine. Said the authors: "There exist today in California some estates whose wines, although expensive, can count among the best in the world." There are also some whose prices "are unbelievably low and which, on the export market, could do damage to French wines, especially in certain ranges where they show themselves to be as good or even superior." One of the great successes in the wine-for-everyman league has been Sonoma County's Sebastiani Vineyards, whose sales have increased about 1,000%, to 3 million cases, in the decade.

By contrast, the redoubtable Baron Philippe de Rothschild (Chateau Mouton-Rothschild), surveying California wine only seven years ago, pronounced: "It all comes out industrially uniform, like Coca-Cola." He would not say that today even though, ironically, the Coca-Cola Co. now owns Sterling Vineyards, one of the best of the West. The maturing of California wines has been marked not only by greatly improved winemaking techniques but, more important, by the greatly extended planting of varieties of "noble" European vines, most notably Chardonnays, from which France's white Burgundies are made; Sauvignon Blanc of Bordeaux; Cabernet Sauvignon of the Medoc; Pinot Noir of Burgundy; Riesling of Alsace, the Rhine and Mosel; Gewurztraminer, also of Alsace and Germany. And there is Zinfandel, a red grape of mysterious origin, probably Italian, that is unique to California.

TIME Los Angeles Bureau Chief William Rademaekers reports from the vineyards:

In ten years the California acreage planted in distinguished varieties has nearly trebled, to 330,000 acres, while for the first time in this century the production of table grapes and raisins (hence also cheap sweet wine) has declined. In the past decade some 150 new wineries have opened. They are mostly tiny (but big by, say, Burgundian standards), producing anywhere from 1,000 to 60,000 cases a year, and they are devoted to serious wine. The small, so-called boutique wineries are hardly household names--Cakebread Cellars, La Purisma, Milano, P&M Staiger, Gundlach-Bundschu--and their output is for the most part distributed only in California.

However, when one of their number beats French wines in major competitions, the effect is like that of an obscure novelist winning a Nobel or a Prix Goncourt: the bottles become causes celebres. For example, Trefethen, a Napa Valley winery that pressed its first grapes only six years ago, leaped to fame in 1979 when its crisp, polished '76 Chardonnay won first prize against a host of respected Europeans at a Gault-Millau tasting in Paris. Since the family-owned winery, founded by Eugene Trefethen, distributes only 15,000 to 20,000 cases a year of all its wines, the laureate Chardonnay is as scarce as truffles in a parking lot.

There has been a dramatic improvement in table wines throughout the price spectrum. It is a truism that today's "jug" wines --bottles containing 1.75 liters at prices ranging from $3.50 to $5--are superior to the more expensive premium wines of a decade ago and right-years better than the vin ordinaire that gurgles by the gallon down French gullets. A major step in the de-Colanization process has been marked by vintage labeling, meaning that at least 95% of the wine in the bottle was grown in the stated year rather than blended with other vintages. (While Golden State boosters have often maintained that every year is a vintage year in California, this is a little like the line in Camelot decreeing that "July and August cannot be too hot.") The most important --and voluntary--move has been made by the giant winemakers who produce generic "Burgundy" and "Chablis" that have no claim at all to nobility. These companies are now supplementing their lines of jug wines with varietals of surprising merit.

The elevation of taste and quality has been quietly but steadfastly led by E. & J. Gallo, the world's biggest winemaker (it accounts for more than one-third of all wine consumed in the U.S.). The busy brothers Ernest and Julio have been growing varietal grapes, and paying their outside suppliers to plant them, since the early '60s, and have built an underground cellar the size of two football fields to age their wines in casks of French and Yugoslav oak. While they are the General Motors of American wine, in the tastings they enter the Gallos consistently win the kind of awards that go to Ferraris. Indeed, few California vintners of any size work so hard on the all-important process of vinification, the actual making of the wine.

Next to its equable climate and wine-welcoming soil, the greatest boost for Vitis Californiensis has come from another five-letter name: Davis, short for the University of California's department of oenology in the Yolo County city of that name. Davis is widely regarded as the world's most advanced wine research establishment; it has trained many of the state's vintners, revolutionized winemaking techniques, developed many hybrid vines suitable to American growing conditions and helped open up microclimates in areas traditionally considered inimical to serious viticulture.

Indeed, it is the ever expanding California vineyard, now spread far beyond the traditional and best-known growing areas in Napa, Sonoma and Santa Clara counties, that has lured serious winemakers to the Pacific slopes from all over the world. They range from young couples like Robert and Zelma Long, who are starting out with 14 acres in the Napa Valley, to conglomerates like Heublein and France's eminent Moet-Hennessy; from old estates like Beaulieu to newcomers like Thomas Nicholas Jordan Jr., a Denver oilman who has spent close to $15 million to build a Bordeaux-style chateau in Sonoma County--and has yet to sell a bottle of wine.

Among the most respected leaders of the industry is Robert Mondavi, whose family-owned Napa Valley winery employs advanced technology, equipment and skills to produce consistently elegant varietals. Next to quality, he says, the most important goal for California winemakers is to produce bottles at prices that will enable American families to regard wine as the everyday complement to food rather than as an infrequent celebration.

California is by no means the vinous El Dorado pictured by its publicists or by many writers who would not know a Chardonnay grape from a supermarket Thompson Seedless. Americans using the Pinot Noir grape of Burgundy have yet to make a red wine that is remotely equal to its ancestor in body and authority. Many California wines, particularly the often overpraised Zinfandels, lack finesse and balance. Some, like Heitz Martha's

Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon '69, which sells for up to $40 a bottle, have become ridiculously expensive; and, because they are scarce, the reds in particular are snapped up and drunk down years before they have fully matured. Peter Morrell, a Manhattan wine merchant who boasts one of the country's biggest assemblages of California bottles, insists on locking the better ones away until they are mature enough to drink.

It may be that California wines, so young in the millenniums-old history of the art, are still in search of a true identity. This argument is made by Alexis Lichine, who makes fine wine in the Medoc, imports good bottles, writes definitively on the subject (New Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits), and, with the late Frank Schoonmaker, did more than any one to evangelize California wines, starting 40 years ago, when there was not too much to evangelize. Says he:"California wines should be proud of their origins. California has unique climates, unique soil and the talented people to turn good grapes into good wine. In time, California will stop trying to compete with France and will pro duce wines that are uniquely and quintessentially Californian. They should be great." And Young Bacchus will have come of age.

--Michael Demarest

*The leading species, origanally cultivated in the Mediterranean basin, that is responsible for all the world's great wines. Even in Europe, however, vinifera vines are grafted on the hardy rootstock of native American Vitis labrusca and Vitis rotundifolia.

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