The Case for American Wines

Once upon a time, American vinophiles looked upon the U.S. as a great place in which to live, but you wouldn't want to drink its wines. Wines for winos? Of course. And wines for cooking? OK. But wines to talk about in the same breath with the prestige products of France and Germany? You're kidding. But that was once upon a time. Wine drinking is the most steadfast of pleasures, but wine making is the most fluid of arts (no pun intended), as we shall see.

Looking for equals in European and U.S. wines is like trying to find identical rivers. Each breathes its own prevailing atmosphere, is hugged by its own soil and flows along its own course. The quality of a wine is a marriage of the human palate and a subtle combination of alcohol, pigments, aroma, bouquet, acids, tannins, sugars and countless other components Bacchus himself couldn't name. Juice crushed from the grapes on one hill is quite different from the very same variety grown on another hill. When a specific grape, such as the Pinot Chardonnay, is transplanted from the Côte d'Or in Burgundy to the Sonoma valley in California, it's destined to yield a different cup of cheer—not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different. Long before President Johnson ordered our embassies abroad to eschew the foreign grape in favor of American wines, the vintages of the two continents were being judged side by side. Thomas Jefferson, after serving two bottles of U.S. wine sent to him as a gift, wrote to the donor saying that his company could not tell the difference between them and "the far-famed burgundy named chambertin." In a series of wine-tasting sessions a while ago at Harvard, Columbia and Williams, the oenological undergrads preferred American wines over their Continental counterparts two to one. During a six-year California comparative wine-tasting program in which 2500 fanciers offered their sober and civilized opinions, U.S. wines took 214 first places; foreign wines, 198 first places. As you might expect, some French wine exporters sneered that the barbaric Americans couldn't be depended upon to tell good from bad. Not all Frenchmen are so condescending. Pierre Lamalle, one of the top inspectors of the prestigious Guide Michelin, took a gastronomic tour of this country a few years ago, and tasted an American wine from a rare bottling that he said could honorably compete with any of the top wines of France of the same variety. Many U.S. wine makers now turn out a small amount of such opulent growths, usually babied in small casks until they reach their moment of perfection—a critical point of time when a great wine must be bottled or else it begins to go downhill. In the U.S. wine bowl, these great wines are still a small, if steadily rising, pool. But for that matter, while there are more great European wines than American, the really noble bottlings in Europe such as the Romanée-Conti or the Bernkasteler Doktor amount to only a small stream themselves; rarely more than ten percent of the total output.

American wines have so overhauled their Continental counterparts, particularly in the medium grades, that the dedicated vinophile no longer need store only a few naïve, domestic vintages for his kitchen. Indeed, a really proper cellar, once the exclusive province of French and German wines and an occasional cask of amontillado, may now start with its foundation deep in native American soil.

If a foreign versus U.S. tasting is challenging, an all-American play-off can be even more diverting; it can also give you, as if you needed one, the perfect excuse to toss a different kind of party. Actually, the occasion can serve two purposes—a wine-tasting party for your friends plus a chance to test candidates for your own cellar. Begin by inviting those friends who might enjoy forsaking their martinis for the subtler pleasures of the fermented grape (stronger spirits will tend to anesthetize the palate and make for indifferent wine tasting). Eight to twelve guests is a good number for a wine party. More than a dozen tends to cloud the issue and befuddle the tasting. Before the guests arrive, set up a long table covered with a snow-white tablecloth, which will accent the rich hues of the wines. Put out a cheese buffet with wedges of mild brie, French port salut, crème danica, stilton and gourmandise, accompanied by unsalted water crackers, dry toast, small skewers of beef and portions of steak tartare. The food will clean the taste between sips of different wines and tempt the palate to sip and sample more.

Some purists decree that each taster should be presented with but a single tulip-shaped glass, to be rinsed after a new wine is sampled. However, we like to have plenty of clear crystal glasses handy to give each wine a fresh start in a fresh glass.

Before we actually get to the serving and sampling of the wine, a heretical word or two about stemware is in order. There are seven basic shapes of wine glasses, ranging from the commodious champagne to the tiny liqueur. From these seven basics, manufacturers have produced a bewildering array of variations, many of them interesting and beautiful in themselves. If you're crazy about the aesthetics of crystal, then by all means stock up on as many varieties as catch your (continued on page 191)American Wines (continued from page 106) fancy. But if your tastes run more moderately, you'll want a dozen each of champagne glasses, preferably in a tulip shape; large steamware for reds; slightly smaller for whites. These should get you through everything but a royal reception very nicely. If you're ever in doubt which size to choose, always opt for the larger glass. There's nothing quite so luxurious as swirling a bit of red wine in an oversized 14-ounce Baccarat. The proper wine glass has a slight incurving to the lip, which allows the taster to savor the aroma (the fruity odor of the grape) and the bouquet (the heady fragrance of the mature wine). Of course, you'll never use a standard cocktail or highball glass whose flared lip encourages these volatile delights to escape.

Spend some time selecting the tastingparty wine card. Discuss it with your wine merchant and ask for his suggestions. Choose those American brands you are curious about as well as some you are already familiar with. Purchase three different bottlings of each U. S. variety to be tasted. You might have to visit the shelves of several wine merchants to get three different Cabernets or three Pinot Chardonnays, but it's well worth the seeking. If you're looking for burgundies, you might try a Louis Martini, a Charles Krug and a Buena Vista. For your whites, you might take a look at Almaden, Paul Masson and Wente Brothers.

Good red wines should be served at 70 degrees, the temperature of a comfortable room. Cheaper reds (anything under $3) may be improved by an hour or two in the fridge before serving. Open reds about 15 minutes before your guests arrive to give the wine a chance to "breathe."

With your guests assembled around that snowy-white tablecloth, glasses at the ready, wine bottles prepared for uncorking, and all your gleaming wine equipage on display for immediate use, you might remind your assembled guests that there are three tests for judging a wine—appearance, aroma and bouquet, and taste. To judge the color and clarity of the wine, swirl it around in the glass. Color is the first indication of the drink to come. The deeper the shade, the more robust the body. Then sniff the aroma and bouquet. By judging the scent alone, you have gone more than halfway in determining the taste sensations to come. Last, taste the wine. The word for the moment is taste—not drink. Let the wine linger on the taste buds as it's held in the mouth and swirled around. Note the body and deepness of flavor. Then comes the aftertaste, a vital lingering sensation experienced after the wine has been swallowed.

Apart from these simple rules, your wine-tasting party should be informal and fun. If social ice-breaking seems in order, you may introduce a game element by forming teams to blindfold-test their abilities to distinguish among, say, several whites, or to determine which is the heartiest of the reds. But as your tasting party progresses, you and your guests will find such games unnecessary: The gentle glow that suffuses the participants leads to a spontaneous Gemiitlichkeit and camaraderie that is a welcome change from the quick belt of cocktails and the frenetic yakking that characterize too many cocktail parties. A proper wine-tasting fete finds all hands happily high, not crocked and groggy, and ready for whatever further fun beckons.

Begin the testing with a dry sherry. We favor one that's produced in a California winery, such as Almaden, made from authentic Palomino grape and following the Spanish Solera system in which the wines are stored in small oaken tiers. In this way, the younger and older wines are transferred and blended to produce the same high quality year after year. Test for its full amber color and dry tartness.

Your second offering should be a choice between two white wines. Perhaps a Johannisberg Riesling, a Rhennish wine from California and a Pinot Chardonnay, a white burgundy. Both should be served well chilled in your best wine buckets. Excellent producers of these varieties are Buena Vista and Paul Masson for the Riesling, and Wente Brothers, Inglenook or Krug for the Pinot Chardonnay, While sipping, savor the Riesling's dry, delicate flavor and fresh fragrance that makes it a perfect wine to serve with filet of sole. The Chardonna should be of light gold color and full body, which makes it an ideal companion for chicken or shellfish.

Carry on with two deep California reds, such as a zinfandel and a Cabernet Sauvignon. A recommended vineyard to buy here is Louis Martini. While sipping, notice its hearty bouquet and the unusual fruity flavor that makes it uniquely appropriate with beef. The Cabernet Sauvignon from Beaulieu vineyards can, we think, be compared with the best of the Bordeaux wines. We favour it with veal.

King champagne is next on the agenda. Your first choice might be a Korbel Natural from Korbel vineyards. If such isn't available, choose one of New York State's fine varieties, including Widmer, Taylor, Gold Seal or Great Western. When serving bubbly, watch for its effervescence. A good champagne should send up a stream of tiny bubbles for at least two hours. It should have a strong, clean smell, and unless it's one of the blanc de blanc dessert varieties, it should be very dry.

To top off your wine sipping, serve complementing ports, say by Buena Vista or Fincklin, along with a platter of stilton cheese.

During the tasting session, you may wish to keep a personal wine diary on hand. In it you can record the pertinent information about each wine tested, including the comments of your guests on the quality of the offering. This recorded information can be especially valuable to the thoughtful host when planning future dinner parties to rediscover his guests' personal preferences before selecting the wines for the evening.

Don't worry about the unfinished bottles as a result of your tasting party. That's what brand-new, sparkling decanters are for. There is a great deal of hand wringing by self-styled traditionalists over decanting wines. Much of it is nonsense. Some of the most elegant sommeliers in Paris decant their finest vintages as a matter of course before bringing them to the table in simple carafes. Since American wines are almost always sedimentfree, the decanting process is a simple transfer from one vessel to another and involves none of the delicate touch required in pouring hoary European vintages. We recommend you keep your decanted whites and reds in the fridge, and drink them up within a few days.

When recording domestic wines for your own cellar, there are a few basic rules to follow. An American wine is known either by a generic name, such as rosé, or by the name of the grape, such as Grenache. Our advice is to use generic names only for champagne, rosé, sherry and port. In all other cases, you are better off going by the name of the grape.

Names on American wines such as bordeaux and burgundy should best be forgotten, if only it were possible. There once was an abortive attempt by American wine makers to follow the French system of labeling wines by their native province and name California wines after the county in which they were grown. American consumers refused to go along with Western names, and the attempt ended in a resounding flop that could be heard all over Napa valley; French names became annexed by the American industry. No matter how fine the wine, you're not likely to see a bottle of "Sonoma" or a split of "Sacramento" for sale. The resulting confusion can be unriddled by the following list of generic wine names, coupled with the grapes whose flavors produce them:

Bordeaux—Cabernet Sauvignon

Sauterne—Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon

Red burgundy—Pinot Noir and Gamay Chablis or white burgundy—Pinot Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc and Chenin Blanc

Rhine and Alsatian wines—Johannisberg Riesling, Emerald Riesling, Grey Riesling, Sylvaner, Traminer and Gewurztraminer.

These grapes are the first families of California wines. They belong to the vitis vinifera, the "wine-bearing" species whose ancestral domain was in Europe but now finds a home in the counties around San Francisco. So cordial are the California sun and soil to these grapes that one giant vineyard is planted with 1,300,000 vines of 19 varieties of grapes. It's a versatility unknown in Europe, where most vineyards grow one or two varieties of grapes.

In spite of their size, the best California wineries still baby their wines in small oak casks. Since California never has to put up with the grim cold and heat that often bedevil European vineyards, vintages don't count for too much. No year can be a disaster. There are some annual differences in the grapes, but the quality of a wine is liable to vary more from one vineyard to the next than from one year to the next. When you do see a year printed on a U. S. wine label, it usually means it was a bottling of which the cellarmaster was particularly proud. It also serves as a reminder to drink the white wines such as Sylvaner and Traminer in their youth, within two to three years of their vintage date; the red wines retain their excellence somewhat longer, but usually no more than four to five years.

One of the happiest American contributions to civilized drinking is a new hybrid grape developed by oenologists at the University of California. The grape and the wine are known as the Emerald Riesling. Under the Paul Masson label, it's a lively, straw-colored wine with a delightfully fruit-haunted aftertaste.

Eastern grapes, mainly from the Finger Lakes region of New York State and northern Ohio, are among the few things in this world that can be called really native to America. Leif Ericson marveled at them during his explorations and called the new land Wineland the Good. The grapes used today are hybrids of those original wild vines. The best of the current Eastern wines sold by their grape names, such as the Diamond, the Delaware and the Elvira, are smooth, clean-tasting, altogether superb wines. Their fruitiness recommends them to dinners of ham, wild fowl, chicken and all dessert and cheese courses.

The biggest news in the East is the successful planting of new French-American hybrid grapes. The amount of wine gushing from these new vineyards isn't large. But for the first time dry, European-style wines are being bottled east of the Mississippi.

There are several ways to store your wine collection. A good cellar these days doesn't have to be in a vaulted room in a subbasement, but a place where bottles of wine can be properly stored on their sides so the cork stays wet and keeps air out of the bottles. We've seen good working cellars housed in wooden chests, closets and old converted armoires. The variety of good wine racks available, either wooden or metal, provides a wide choice to suit your space and decor. Whatever you choose, store your wine in a cool, dark spot. Stack more delicate white wines closest to the floor, where it is usually coolest; stack the reds above them.

The following basic cellar of American wines can be stored in the space of two liquor cases and costs about $65. (Costs are approximate single-bottle prices.)

For a more munificent U. S. wine cellar, costing about $550, we recommend:

The beginnings of a good domestic wine cellar should be planned, as above The balance of your cellar can be acquired impulsively, as your taste buds lead. If there's one particular wine that really makes you flip, buy it by the case You'll find that our vines do, indeed, have tender grapes.