Manicured Napa
OAKVILLE, CA: Rows of neatly trimmed Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines are seen just before harvest time in Napa Valley.

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Yesterday’s stunning news that more minority babies are being born in the U.S. than white babies, for the first time ever, has tremendous implications for the domestic wine industry. The problem, which in my opinion the wine industry has never wanted to admit much less deal with, is that wine is pretty much an upscale beverage for white people of European heritage. That’s worked well, in the past, but with these demographic changes (California already has more people of color than whites), a strategy that used to work seems destined to fail in the future.

I don’t see Latino or Hispanic people drinking wine, and the same goes for Asians and Blacks. African-Americans seem to prefer fortified drinks, like cognac, or beer, if they drink at all. The same goes for Latinos. Asian people don’t seem to drink very much wine either. Of course, as members of any one of these groups make money through the professions, they’re more likely to enjoy wine. But the explosion of minorities in America is mostly due to immigration and birth rates, and those two groups–immigrants and babies–tend not to be wine drinkers! Wine drinkers have always been, as the study says, the country’s “economic and political elites [who] remain essentially white and primarily male.” Of course, women buy a lot of wine, too, but they’re white women.

What should the wine industry be doing about it? To begin with, they need to stop being complacent. And let there be no doubt, there is a lot of complacency in California. Most people still get into the business for aspirational and lifestyle considerations. If they have a plan at all (which they don’t), it’s to sell their wine to people like them: white, well off, educated, living on the coasts or in the nation’s urban hubs. That is not a marketing strategy.

If you don’t believe me, then you haven’t been to Napa Valley, Santa Barbara, the Russian River Valley, the Monterey Peninsula or other regions in California’s wine country lately. They’re all beautiful places, like movie sets, with gorgeous scenery, fancy restaurants, chichi shops, trendy bars, and designer clothes. They’re also overwhelmingly white. About the only people of color you see in wine country are Mexican immigrants who work in the fields or clean white people’s houses. At fancy wine events, there’s a smattering of Asians, but I think you could count them on the fingers of two hands at an event like Premier Napa Valley. As for African-Americans, you’d never know that America even had any, if you limited your explorations to wine country.

I point out these inconvenient truths not to embarrass or confront the wine industry, but to make the point that it’s going to have to figure out how to get everyone to drink wine, if it wants to stay viable in 10, 20, 30 years. Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence that anyone’s really thinking about this. Look at the advertisements in wine magazines, and ask yourself if there’s anything there that would entice a person of color to buy wine.

According to the statistics released by several sources, including the United States Department of Agriculture as well as The Wine Institute, California (which produces 90% of American wine) indeed faces a grape shortage. These statistics arrive each year in the inboxes of wine writers and members of the trade with all the fanfare their publishers can muster, and are usually met with about as much attention and enthusiasm as an email hawking nutritional supplements.

Nonetheless, this year's statistics on the California grape crop have produced a raft of articles in the popular press, suggesting either that journalists think Americans may be more interested in the workings of the wine industry than ever before, or perhaps that writers can't resist a story that lends itself to a hyperbolic headline.... 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 web site. If you're not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It's only £6.99 a month or £69 per year ($11/mo or $109 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 the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.

• Roughly 3 1/2 cups water
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon mirin
• 1/2 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 40 grams dried oyster mushrooms
• 120 grams Chinese sausage (about 3 pieces), sliced on the diagonal
• 300 grams brown rice
• 3 cups liquid (water or the mushroom liquid)
• 5-6 stalks green onions, sliced (white and light green parts only)

There was so much hope in the air on May 16-17, 1990, exactly 22 years ago, at the International Colloquium on Rhône Varietals, which I was privileged to cover as my first major feature story when I became a professional wine writer.

Syrah and its fellow Rhône grapes and wines, Mourvedre and Grenache, weren’t widely planted in California, and certainly weren’t known by a large segment of the wine-drinking community. But experts understood the importance of those grapes in the Rhône Valley, and adherents were tinkering with them right here in California, and up into Washington State.

The three-day conference, which was held at Meadowood, in the Napa Valley, was organized by Richard Keehn, then proprietor of McDowell Valley Vineyards, which at the time was an important outpost of Rhône-style wines; Bruce Neyers, the then president of Joseph Phelps Vineyards, and, on the French side, Gerard Pierrefeu, president of the Comité Interprofessionel des Vins, and a high ranking member of the A.O.C. organization.

I was contributing short articles at that time to another wine magazine, when the phone rang one day. It was my editor. He had an emergency. The writer who had been assigned to go to the conference had fallen ill; my editor wanted to know if I could substitute in his place. When is it? I asked. Tomorrow. Well, I knew I could do a good job and that if I did, it would advance me in the esteem of my editor and publisher. So I went, and I did a good job.

The first thing a writer should do, on going to something like that conference, is sniff the air. I don’t mean literally, I mean that metaphorically. Take the pulse of the occasion; feel it out. Is there tension? Follow it. Tension means conflict, which translates to good, strong writing–if you can capture that lightning in a can.

And I felt plenty of tension. This was 1990, mind you. If I can characterize the psychology on both sides–the Californians and the French–it was this: the Californians wanted to learn (steal) as much as they could from the French, about everything from rootstocks and weed control to pruning and maceration times. The French? They felt they had nothing whatsoever to learn from the upstart Californians–rien! But they had been hearing things across the pond, rumors that these Californians were rich, ambitious, and coming on strong–and that they had great weather all the time. That was scary. After all, it hadn’t been that long since the Paris Tasting had scandalized tout France. So the French came over to see what the heck was going on.

They were a haughty, supercilious lot, those Frenchmen. I think they came prepared to do war. Pierrefeu later wrote that he had expected “hostile behavior” to ensue; that’s how heated was the potential for explosion.

Mercifully, no explosions occurred. People in general behaved themselves quite well. The point of all this is, however, a sad one. Expectations among the Californians (Randall Grahm, Bob Lindquist, Craig Williams, Kevin Hamel, John Buechsenstein, Fred and Matt Cline, John MacReady and Lou Preston) were enormous. These were men who had staked their claims, not on Cabernet Sauvignon, but on Syrah as the red wine of the future. (Well, Craig was also making top Cabernets at Phelps, so I should exclude him from that generalization.) They were as sure as sure can be that Syrah (and maybe even Chateauneuf-style blends) was the Next Big Thing. It was their excitement I sniffed in the air alongside the hauteur of the French. I tried to capture that sensation in my article.

We all know what happened. Syrah was not the Next Big Thing. In fact, some of the wineries represented at Meadowood began a decline when Syrah tanked, or failed to take off. They simply put their money on the wrong horse.

Still, I look at the International Colloquium on Rhône Varietals as a milestone in the history of California wine. It wasn’t as dramatic as The French Paradox episode on Sixty Minutes, or as impactful as the phylloxera epidemic (both of those events also occurred in the 1990s). But symbolically, it placed California on an equal footing with some of the greatest names in French wine, and it did so on a California stage. The French, despite themselves, by their very presence acknowledged that they had to treat the Californians as equals.

Our selection criteria include:

• A very good Quality rating of >=3.5 stars (out of 5)
• A price tag of <=$20
• Must be widely available

Chateau Ste. Michelle is Washington State’s founding winery with its roots dating back to the repeal of Prohibition. In 1976, Ste. Michelle built a French-style chateau in Woodinville, just northeast of Seattle. While all of their white wines are made in Woodinville, all of their red wines are made at Canoe Ridge Estate in eastern Washington. The fruit for this Cabernet Sauvignon was sourced from vineyards in the Columbia Valley including Cold Creek, Canoe Ridge Estate, and Indian Wells.

“Our goal with the Columbia Valley Cabernet is to highlight concentrated Washington red fruit in an accessible style. This is our inviting Cab with plenty of complexity and structure with silky tannins. It’s also very versatile with food—try it with beef, pork or pasta.” –Bob Bertheau, Head Winemaker

2009 Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon (Columbia Valley, Washington): 83% Cabernet Sauvignon, 9% Merlot, 3% Syrah, 2% Malbec, 2% Cabernet Franc, and 1% Petit Verdot. Dark red in color. Aromatic with red fruit, earth, and smoked meat on both the nose and palate. Medium to full-bodied with lively acidity, smooth tannins, and a medium to long finish.
Quality: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
QPR: 5 bangs for your buck (out of 5)
Where to buy: Received as sample, suggested retail $16; Available elsewhere, $10 to $18

A Wine for Tonight: 2009 Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon was originally posted on Wine Peeps. Wine Peeps - Your link to great QPR wines from Washington State and beyond.

Its flavors hold memories of long days, green grass, laughter, and innocence. Of all summer fruits, none holds more spirit of childish delight than watermelon. The crisp red, or more exotic yellow, tantalize with promises of thirst-quenching, lip-smacking sweetness beneath the green rind. In the world of wine, the flavors of watermelon are most often found in the luscious brightness of rosés. In the brief flirtation of skin and juice that produces these delightful wines, we receive aromas most magical, where a sip can echo the gratification of sinking your teeth into a half-moon of colorful, chin-dripping goodness.

Stag's Leap Wine Cellars "Amparo" Rosé, Napa Valley, California, USA
Chateau de Campuget "Tradition" Rosé, Costieres de Nimes, Rhone Valley, France
Lorenza Rosé, California, USA
La Scolca "RosaChiara" Gavi, Piedmont, Italy
Van Duzer Rosé of Pinot Noir, Willamette Valley, Oregon
Pullus Pinot Grigio, Ptujska Klet, Slovenia
Schloss Gobelsburg "Gobelsburger - Cistercien" Rosé, Neiderosterreich, Austria

This is part of an ongoing series of original images and prose called The Essence of Wine