California’s High-Country Wines

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The phrase ‘alpine wine’ is on the lips of many a sommelier these days. Thanks to the exigencies of climate change, not to mention the surge of interest in lower-alcohol, higher-acidity wines, mountain-grown wines everywhere are having a moment.

Despite the lack of the word ‘mountain’ in its name, the Sierra Foothills American Viticultural Area (AVA) hosts most of California’s highest-elevation vineyard sites. And within the Sierra Foothills, a good many of those sites can be found within the El Dorado AVA, whose vineyards begin at 1,200 feet (366 m) and go up to 3,300 feet (1,006 m) of elevation.

El Dorado County was quite literally put on the map in 1848 when James Marshall discovered gold there at Sutter’s Mill, launching California’s Gold Rush and forever changing the fate of the entire state. Within 20 years, El Dorado County hosted nearly 2,000 acres (809 ha) of grapevines, planted with the hopes of slaking the thirst of a ballooning population.

But El Dorado’s prominence as a vine-growing region faded quickly. By the turn of the 20th century, most vineyard projects were abandoned, like so many failed mining claims. The onset of Prohibition in 1920 represented the final nail in the coffin for El Dorado’s (and most of California’s) wine industry.

Barring a few experimental plantings, El Dorado’s wine industry wouldn’t really get started again until Boeger Winery opened in 1973. Plantings grew slowly after that, but began to pick up steam in the 1990s. In 1993 the county crushed 3,334 tons of grapes from roughly 780 acres (316 ha) of vines. In 2022, 6,235 tons of grapes were harvested from a total of 2,941 acres (1,190 ha). Needless to say, yields have come down considerably since the early 1990s as growers have become more sophisticated and quality-minded.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

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Tasting California’s Geekiest Vineyard

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Psychologists analysing paratroopers divide them into three different categories: ‘courageous’, ‘fearless’ and ‘over-confident’. It’s not clear which of these would have applied to ex-paratrooper Bob Koth, but almost certainly one of those qualities was required to plant what is the most eclectic collection of wine grapes in a single vineyard anywhere in the state of California.

Bob Koth grew up in Lodi, and joined the army right after high school. Later he would attend the College of the Pacific, where he met his wife Mary Lou, a half-Norwegian pianist and long-distance skier. Their son Brett, whom I met recently, claims to have inherited ‘a bit of Viking’ from her.

Bob and Mary Lou moved back to Lodi in 1962 and bought a parcel of land on the east side of town that slopes down to a bend in the Mokelumne River and was planted with a small pear orchard and a few acres of Flame Tokay and Zinfandel grapes. While teaching middle school, Koth built a house and the two settled down to have a family.

Bob Koth was already a wine lover by the time his kids came along. ‘My dad was drinking all the normal stuff that people would drink in the eighties’, says Brett Koth, ticking off the usual suspects: Thunderbird, Mateus and especially Blue Nun.

But then in 1990 everything changed. ‘My sister went over to Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, and my dad used that as an excuse to take some time off’, says Brett. ‘He went over there and they went out to dinner and he ordered a Riesling, thinking it would be a little sweet. But instead he ended up with something dry and it was a lightbulb moment.’

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Photo of Mokelumne Glen Vineyard by Randy Caparoso.

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Ingredient Labeling In Prospect in the US

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On the heels of new EU requirements to make ingredient and allergen information available to consumers on wine labels (enforceable from 8 December 2023), the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) announced on 17 November 2022 that it will issue new regulations for ingredient labeling of American wine within a year. 

Many of us in the American wine industry have long supported the idea of ingredient labeling. Since the end of Prohibition in 1933, however, alcohol has been regulated by agencies in the US Department of Treasury (rather than the Food and Drug Administration) and those bodies have not seen fit to require beer, spirits, and wine to carry the same ingredient and nutritional labels as all other food and drink in the US. That is, unless they are under 7% alcohol by volume, in which case they must adhere to FDA labeling guidelines. 

No one knows precisely the cause of the glaring exception that allows wine over 7% to escape the government’s otherwise comprehensive consumer labeling requirements, though a combination of tradition, bureaucratic inertia, and heavy lobbying by the alcohol industry have presumably played a significant role.

In 2003, the National Consumers League (NCL) and the (decidedly anti-alcohol) Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) submitted a petition to the TTB requesting that it require wine, beer, and spirits labels to include similar facts to all other food and beverage packaging, including calorie count, allergens and all ingredients and additives.

Three years later the TTB responded to this petition with the introduction of an interim set of guidelines for the voluntary use of statements about allergens and indicated that further, permanent rule-making might be forthcoming regarding other elements of the petition.

For 16 years no further regulations affecting this issue emerged from the TTB.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

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Pix—The Inside Story

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American wine isn’t keeping up with the digital technology revolution, and it hasn’t been for a long while. I’m not talking about the surprising resistance of some wineries to invest the time and energy required to engage customers on social media. I’m talking about a lack of the deep-seated digital transformations that have occupied most other industries for the last decade.

The wine industry has a long history of eschewing what it calls ‘ecosphere’ investments (investments that contribute to the overall industry ecosystem) in favour of either proprietary systems or products. Put simply, the largest wine companies are more than happy to spend a bunch of money on software to help themselves operate more efficiently, or to spend a couple of million acquiring a new brand for their portfolio, but seem quite reluctant to invest in companies that benefit the broader industry.

Roughly two years ago, wine-technology evangelist and thought leader Paul Mabray launched a start-up named Pix, aimed at providing consumers easier ways of buying wine while giving the wine industry better tools for selling it. On 16 August, Pix laid off most of its staff and began searching for buyers, after some of the largest players in the wine industry opted not to participate in the company’s latest round of fundraising. Even though many of these companies were already enthusiastically paying for the services that Pix offered.

Explaining Pix

For the last 18 months or so, I served on Pix’s Board of Advisors. As some readers know, in addition to writing about wine, I have also had a long career as a consultant in technology marketing, design and digital strategy. As an advisor, I was given stock options in exchange for providing advice and perspective to Mabray and the rest of the executive leadership team. 

My involvement since the early days of the company gave me an intimate understanding of what Pix was getting right, and what challenges it faced. For all of those challenges, the business Pix was building proved not only financially sound, but also potentially game-changing for the wine industry.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image of a wine city of the future created by MidJourney.

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How Flashy is American Wine?

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A slowly growing number of American winemakers are relying on the winemaking equivalent of a secret weapon. It doesn’t feature prominently in most winery tours as it doesn’t exactly fit in with the romance of oak barrels and sweeping vineyard vistas. In fact, it usually requires its own building with a natural gas line, plumbing and, occasionally, a separate insurance policy. But from dealing with smoke taint, to handling some adverse effects of climate volatility, to shaping the flavours and textures of high-scoring wines, a once-esoteric European winemaking technology called flash détente (as it was named by the French) increasingly has a role as an indispensable tool for some winemakers.

A combination of thermovinification and flash evaporation, flash détente involves the rapid heating of grape must or juice to between 175 and 190 °F (79–88 °C) and then moving it into a vacuum chamber. When the hot must enters a vacuum, the cellular structures of the grape skins and pulp burst open, in the same way they might if they were brought to the boil. But because this happens in a vacuum, the instantaneous evaporation of water cools everything down, allowing the extraction of colour and flavour compounds that you could ordinarily get only by cooking the fruit, which would result in much less desirable flavours.

The evaporation and capture of water from this process produces three critical outcomes that matter to winemakers: a concentration of the processed must or juice (usually the equivalent of around 2 Brix in sugar accumulation), the removal of a wide array of unwanted volatile compounds (including pyrazines, various aerosols and some elements of smoke taint, all of which have conveniently low boiling points and end up in the captured steam), and the effective pasteurisation or denaturing of moulds, enzymes or other sources of grape spoilage.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is usually available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image courtesy of Barry Gnekow.

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Napa – Small Scale, Big Change

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For more than 80 years, the journey up Highway 29 into Napa Valley has begun with the same view. To this day, as motorists make the turn off of Highway 12 from Sonoma or sweep across the Napa River and head north into the valley, the first sights they encounter are a set of green fields dotted with cows grazing placidly in front of an old white barn.

This pastoral scene, in the Carneros section of Napa Valley, provides an exceedingly rare glimpse into an agrarian past that few in modern-day Napa remember. Multi-generational family farms, especially those that grow anything but grapes, are all but extinct in Napa. But thanks to a measure passed by the Napa Board of Supervisors on 22 March, the few remaining such farms may have a new lease on life.

Those picturesque pastures at the entrance to Napa Valley (pictured above) have been in Ailene Tarap’s family for four generations, ever since her great-grandparents bought the property in 1903. The Stewart Ranch, as it is called, was one of Napa’s original local dairies, but now Ailene and her husband Paul raise a small herd of Belted Galloway cattle for meat, even as they struggle to keep the property afloat so they may pass it along to their children.

‘Over the years we’ve been working to figure out how to avoid having the next generation forced to sell the ranch and develop it, but ultimately the cows are not going to make it’, says Tarap.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is usually available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image of the Stewart Ranch courtesy of Paul and Aileen Tarap.

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Direct to America

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Wine producers the world over have long coveted America’s growing consumer base of wine drinkers. But wanting access to the American market and successfully selling into it are two entirely different things. The United States has historically not made it easy (or cheap) for international producers to sell their wares to its citizens. Nonetheless, international producers have continued to explore many different ways to bring their products to American wine drinkers. And just like domestic producers, both the pandemic and recent trends in distributor consolidation have them taking a close look at the idea of selling directly to US consumers. 

Of course, literally shipping wine to an American consumer from a winery in Europe or South America is against the law. There are customs duties to be paid, licences to possess, and different laws in every state about how wine can be sold, transported, and delivered into the hands of the waiting customer.

That hasn’t stopped some producers, however. I remember visiting a winery on my very first trip to Tuscany long ago and being told with a wink that I could have bottles of that estate’s wines whenever I wanted, as long as I didn’t mind receiving a shipment of ‘olive oil’ now and again. Plenty of small and medium-size wineries around the world skirt the law and import duties when they can establish direct relationships with consumers in America.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is usually available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

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America’s Wine Decline

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Numbers, they say, do not lie. But the numbers to which you pay attention matter greatly. Much ado has been made in recent years about America’s ascendancy to become the world’s largest consumer of wine by volume, a title it achieved in 2014 and has kept since (as-yet-unreported numbers from the last two years notwithstanding). America seems to be drinking more wine than ever, but that seemingly good news belies a much more disturbing trend that suggests America’s wine industry is in some fairly serious trouble.

Rob McMillan has been watching the American wine industry for three decades, having founded the Wine Division of Silicon Valley Bank in 1992. SVB, as it is more commonly known, finances a significant portion of the country’s wineries and wine businesses, and has unmatched visibility into the financials of thousands of wineries. Each year, based on information gleaned from those financials, as well as an industry-wide survey, McMillan assembles his State of the Wine Industry Report and attempts to provide a snapshot of where the industry is headed.

‘Let’s talk about the elephant in the room’, said McMillan in his live-streamed presentation of the report. The elephant, hiding under big flashy numbers like rising wine consumption and many high-end wineries saying that 2021 was the best year in the history of their business, was this: McMillan’s analysis shows steadily shrinking growth rates for the industry as a whole for the last 20 years.

You don’t have to have an MBA or a degree in statistics to know that when it comes to business, you want your graphs to go up and to the right. The American wine industry’s graph goes down and to the right.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is usually available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

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An American in London

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Every time I find myself strolling the streets of London, as I did for a few days in early December while in town to attend the annual JancisRobinson.com Christmas dinner, I inevitably end up whistling Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York’. Odd as it may be, I revel in my (admittedly very geeky) inversion of the song’s conceit. 

I’m an American in London. I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien. You can hear it in my accent when I talk. I like my toast done on both sides.

I arrived in London just as the world was beginning to hear about the Omicron variant, slightly nervous because of that, but determined to make the most of my time in a city I hadn’t visited since 2015.

As on that previous trip, my first impression of the city consisted of a skyline continuing to evolve, with myriad buildings in various states of construction and completion. Given the infrequency of my visits, I suppose I should resign myself to a perpetual sense of architectural change in central London.

Once released from my post-flight, pre-COVID-test-result isolation, a stroll across Hyde Park (under darkening, but mostly blue skies) brought me into familiar streets and the recollection of just how much more festive London is during the holidays than my home in California. The holiday lights suspended above the streets, the artfully decorated windows of Harrods, and the hordes of stylishly dressed shoppers (a surprising number speaking Arabic or Farsi) put me in a Christmassy mood for the first time in 2021.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is usually available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

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Three Small Steps Forward

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Understanding the byzantine nature of wine laws in the United States involves thinking not in terms of 50 separate states, but in terms of 50 separate countries. The regulations enacted by each state in the wake of the 21st Amendment’s repeal of Prohibition are so complex, they have given rise to several companies whose revenues run into the tens of millions of dollars, all from helping wine producers stay on the right side of the law.

Decades before they enacted the protectionist and convoluted shipping laws that are the bane of America’s modern existence (except for the wholesalers who profit handsomely from them), most states established a set of laws governing the consumption and sale of alcohol. Some of these so-called ‘blue laws’ forbade the sale of alcohol on Sundays or during certain hours of the day that were objectionable to primarily religious interests.

Other laws, known as ‘tied-house’ laws, were enacted to prevent the competitive price wars among liquor sellers that the temperance movement blamed for overconsumption before Prohibition. 

While these laws have sometimes been adjusted and changed with the times, in many states, California included, laws still exist that seem quite preposterous. But on 9 October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed three bills into law that inject just a bit more rationality into state-wide winery regulations.

Continue reading this article on JancisRobinson.Com

This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is usually available only to subscribers of her website. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and maps from the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

Image of a growler from Kivelstadt Cellars by Grace Remeta.

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