As a media platform, APPELLATION AMERICA’s avowed mission is to encourage and articulate the amazingly rich geographic diversity of the wines of North America. We believe that the “place paradigm” of wine appreciation offers the best vehicle for vitalizing and expanding the North American wine culture in the decades to come. Our motto proclaims our purpose: Building Appellation Consciousness.

Having said that, it must be recognized that another paradigm of wine appreciation (varietalism) holds the centre stage today in North America, and has in fact expanded outwards to much of the rest of the New World. Indeed, the varietal paradigm of wine appreciation has even made incursions into parts of the old wine world, where “place” (aka: appellation) has long been the anchor of consciousness about wine.

As it happens, I was a young winery apprentice (aka cellar rat) when the paradigmatic shift to varietalism began to take hold in California in the 1960s. It was out with the bogus Burgundy labels and in with the Pinot Noir imprint; sayonara plagiarized Chablis, welcome Chardonnay. The transformation around the notion of grape variety was really an epiphany, energized by a palpable sense of the moral superiority that comes with acts of purity. We were being liberated from the lie of phony European nomenclature. Know thy wine by its grape name.

And, as for all that so-called Claret we were producing in California in those days, henceforth it would be known as Cabernet Sauvignon. It was really in the purge of Claret that our Puritanism reached full fervor. This was convenient, because in fact there was no Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, or Petite Verdot planted in California to make good on the Claret blend claim in the first place. Nor should grapes be mixed, we figured, at least outside the viticultural mélange of Bordeaux, with its iffy climate and irregular vintages that made it risky to depend on a single variety.

Yes, varietal purity reached its zenith in the isolation of Cabernet Sauvignon in California, and was icon-ized in our friend Joe Heitz’s uncompromising Martha’s Vineyard Cabs of the 1970s. God help the winemaker who might have been tempted to cut the tannic purity of Cabernet with a dose of flabby Carignan, as had been common practice. In the new world of varietalism, that would have been a double sin, because Carignan belonged in its own bottle, labeled properly as Carignan! Ditto for Petite Sirah, Barbera, Zinfandel, Gamay, Colombard, Semillon, Green Hungarian, Chenin Blanc, and a host of differentiated Rieslings (Grey, Franken, Johannisberg…even Emerald). For producer and consumer, alike, those were the heady days of varietal exploration, before the arrival of the 3-tier marketing reductionism into a narrow Chard-Cab consumer pipeline.

Viva La Difference – California Wines of Yesterday

The early days of varietal elaboration and exploration made for an exciting wine culture on this continent. As consumers, it was the differences between varieties that catalyzed our interest and spawned our passions. And, for the legions of aspiring new winegrowers/producers that ballooned the ranks of the American wine industry through the 70s, 80s and 90s, the chase was on to expand the differences between wines by expanding the North American viticultural catalogue to include every grape variety under the sun. After all, America has a special place under the sun.

In the development of most things (material, intellectual, even spiritual), differentiation is typically the signal of change, transformation, expansion and - dare I say it - progress. Inversely, homogenization, the drive toward sameness, bespeaks integration, consensus and stability. If differentiation inspires human interest and passion, what then does homogeneity lead to? Comfort? Boredom?

I think the answer is both: comfort and boredom, but not necessarily for the same cultural audience. In theatre, for example, there will always be an audience for Cats, precisely because the script, music and production values remain, dependably, the same. It may be an audience that never sees other plays (except perhaps Cats II), but that’s fine; they’re comfortable with it, and, to be sure, so is the theatre “industry”.

Like most of my contemporaries in the wine culture, over the past 40+ years I have been intermittently hopeful and depressed about prospects for the expansion of a European style “wine-as-food” segment of our North American wine culture. This would be your Cats-type audience for wine, a mass of everyday wine consumers who are simply comfortable with the sameness of their daily wine fare. They are not “interested” in wine, per se, any more than they are interested in bread or cornflakes or eggs. To them, wine is just a food group, part of their diet. Let’s not confuse these people with the new foodies, who are terribly interested in what they put in their mouths and for some reason care if the egg came from a free-range chicken or whether the cornflakes have had their genes diddled. As for wine, the new foodies are driven by a thirst for knowledge and new experiences, not just something to quench the other kind of thirst. New foodies are diversity seekers, ever looking to differentiate their experiences, including their encounters with wine.

To be sure, the traditional wine-as-food people, God love’em, do exist here as a relatively small niche and have been served extremely well for years by that affable icon of unassuming disinterest, Carlo Rossi^™. In my more hopeful moments, I think the wine-as-food segment may be finally growing significantly …really, a matter of breaking through the latent prohibitionism embedded in our political culture. On the supply side, the emerging “wine-as-food” segment is being drawn out by grocery store merchandizing, notably for Aussie and South American producers of “sweet spot” wine, manufactured out of interchangeable red varieties. And, let’s not overlook the Two-Buck-Chuckers right here in the neighborhood. The fact that Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah are indistinguishable in these products is a virtue, not a flaw…the mass-market magic is in the sauce, not in the varietal. And that’s just fine!

However, it is important to remember that our North American wine culture has been shaped and driven by consumers (and producers) who could appropriately be characterized as “wine-as-interest” people. These are definitely not the Cats audience or producers…supply side, and consumer side, they thrive on differentiation. I suppose connoisseurship has always been about exploring differences, be it in literature, art, wine, or whatever. Indeed, isn’t that precisely the public image of a blind wine tasting…spotting differences is the mark of a connoisseur? Thankfully, we don’t talk much about connoisseurship any more; rather the term “wine enthusiast” seems to capture the essence of the meld between interest and passion, without raising the specter of snobbery.

To the wine enthusiast, difference makes the difference. And exactly what difference would that be, you may well ask? I’d say it is the difference between being (wine) culturally engaged…and simply being bored! It is the diversity of wine that keeps the wine enthusiast interested. Warning!...when the North American wine enthusiasts gets bored, it will be game over for the highly differentiated, geographically segmented wine industry as we know it on this continent.

Sadly, I think there are plenty of signs of boredom in the wine culture today, and I believe the root cause ultimately resides in the rapid diminishment of diversity in our wines. But that’s just a hypothesis. So I decided to test the notion that our wines are becoming more homogeneous by going to the core recognition values of the dominant paradigm of wine appreciation in North America. We declare the differences between our wines (and, I assume, therefore the wines’ integrity and interestingness in sustaining our wine culture) according to varietal identity. When consumers…knowledgeable, wine-enthusiast consumers…say they know-appreciate-love, say, Cabernet Sauvignon (or any other variety), we would reasonably assume that that variety expresses itself distinctively to their palates.

The APPELLATION AMERICA VD Test – That’s Varietal Distinctiveness

For my test group, I was able to assemble a rather august panel of wine professionals…wine enthusiasts who, each and all, make a living off their total engagement in wine. Collectively, we (yes, I was one of them) covered most of the professional bases in the wine world. This was a body of serious eonopiles, with an average professional tenure of 25+ years in the business. If these folks don’t know their wine (varieties), who the heck would?

For the test sample, we had the APPELLATION AMERICA staff assemble two of each of the following varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel and Syrah. All the wines were Californian from designated AVAs, and, to the best of our knowledge, 100 percent varietal. Some effort was deployed to select one relatively high, and one relatively low alcohol version of each variety. Other than that, the choice of wines was random and not programmed to garner any particular results. There was no loading the dice, so to speak. And, while the tasting was blind, the panel had the advantage of knowing that there were two each of the five specified red varieties.

The test, itself, was dead simple. A blind tasting for Varietal Distinctiveness. Know thy wine by its grape…the current first standard of differentiation in wine appreciation. Piece of cake; slam-dunk for a gaggle of veterans…right?

Oops!

First, let me say that I labored over the question of whether to make the test about “varietal recognition” or “varietal distinctiveness”. The former puts the onus of distinction on the palates of the tasters, while the latter puts the spotlight on the integrity of the wine. I didn’t even need to poll the panel to know that they preferred the latter focal point, and so it was that the meticulous scientific quantification of our results shall ever be known as the “VD-test”. (Brought to you by the same folks who burdened their wine publication with the initials “AA.com”)

Well, let me happily report that in APPELLATION AMERICA’s VD-test, Pinot Noir (that is, California Pinot Noir) passed with full marks. This was the panel’s stellar moment, 100 percent recognition of the Pinot Noirs. In an unguarded optimistic moment, I felt like proclaiming that the current popularity of Pinot had zip-all to do with that damn movie (about the glory of drinking and driving), but rather could be attributed to the sheer distinctiveness of the grape variety. However, the following day I had the pleasure of spilling a hundred or more Pinots across my spit organ at San Francisco’s Pinot Days event, and realized that a goodly number of them could well have tasted like Syrah or Merlot to our panel on the previous day. So much for our random sampling.

But even with the Pinot included in the stats, the overall VD score from our very expert panel was an unimpressive 43 percent. Take the Pinot out of the calculus and the varietal distinctiveness factor of the four remaining varietals slipped to 29 percent. Imagine watching a baseball game, with less than 1/3 recognition of who was playing. Booooring!

The next highest VD-score (57%) went to the high alcohol (15.7%) Cabernet Sauvignon; while the low alcohol (13.4%) version garnered a measly 14 percent VD-score. To be sure, our expert panel has been on the job over the last decade, and now knows California Cabernet for its boozy sweetness. Without those characteristics, it doesn’t register as Cabernet Sauvignon at all. In fact 71 percent figured the low alcohol Cab to be Merlot. Now that’s an interesting profile identity for Merlot…sort of Cabernet for wimps. To be sure, there are some antecedents for this confusion, but they are embedded in the blend-based Bordeaux appellation identities, not in the varietal distinctiveness paradigm of the New World.

So, what about the “real” Merlot? : The somewhat lower alcohol (13.7%) version had the second highest VD-score at 43 percent (after the high alcohol Cab); though an equal number of tasters figured the wine to be Cabernet. Again, the results were very “Bordelaise”, the sort of mental meritage of expectations one might bring to a table of mixed-varietal Medoc wines. Here’s a thought…Merlot and Cabernet belong together! But is driving them individually to the same taste point the way to achieve the meritage objective? It seems that the traditional approaches to homogenization…that is, varietal blending and hybridization…have been replaced by extended ripening, intense oxygenation, and de-alcoholization. Voila, one variety where formerly there were two (three, four, etc)!

But what of high alcohol Merlot? : Well, the high alcohol (15.9%) version had the lowest overall VD-score (0%) of all the wines tasted. 86 percent of the panelists thought it was Zinfandel, again showing how alcohol-style, rather than varietal flavor (if any was left) has come to be the signature of varietalism.

Will the “real Zin” please stand up? : Curiously, the lower alcohol (13.5%) version did a little better than the high alcohol (15.9%) Zinfandel with a VD score of 29 percent , though an equal number of tasters figured it was Syrah, and the same again had the wine as Merlot. Sadly, we don’t seem to know what to make of Zinfandel distinctiveness these days. Parenthetically, I might add that this portends well for wrapping our minds around the rich potential for identifying regional distinctiveness in this chameleon varietal.

Finally a word about the VD-score of Syrah: A while back I ranted (Click here to see Roger’s rant) that all varietals were being “Syrah-ized”, and, at the same time, Syrah itself didn’t taste like what we formerly knew to be Syrah. The point being that Syrah was the first-in varietal in the fruit bomb era and therefore got to be the poster-cum-reference grape in the rush to the soft, oxygenated, sweet and alcoholic style red wine. In our VD test, 36 percent of the tasters pegged Syrah as Syrah, though an equal number of palates identified the high alcohol (17.6%) version of Syrah as Cabernet, and ditto for thinking it was Zinfandel. Obviously style (manipulated from the vineyard to the bottle) has trumped the varietal distinctiveness of Syrah.

So, what to make of all this?

I doubt that my “VD Test” will make it to the Harvard Medical Journal, noted for weighing in scientifically on wine issues. I’m the first to admit that my “science” lacks a certain elegance, not to mention rigor, and one could certainly quibble over the choice of this or that particular wine sample, as, indeed, the panel did quibble. For sure the statistics rest on a wholly inadequate sampling, and my methodology has gotten a little rusty in the decades since grad school.

I suspect that common intuition and the taste experience of wine enthusiasts everywhere are way ahead of the science in confirming the hypothesis that recipe viticulture and recipe winemaking, targeting a pre-determined (pretty much one dimensional) consumer taste profile, is (quite purposefully) erasing the differences between the varietals.

It is not coincidental that one of the most common descriptors winemakers use for their red wines these days is “cola”. We used to talk about a consumer progression moving from soda pop to simple sweet wine, and ultimately to complex wine. After this tasting, I have to ask, did someone accidentally hit the gearshift and put us in reverse?