A glass too far
Sir: Late as it may be, I cannot let Mr Hop- per's letter (23 August) be the last word on Californian wine.
Without a doubt, this wine is the most overpriced, overrated drink in the world. I first moved to California in 1967, when the market was flooded with Gallo boxed wines. We had to drink it then as Californi- ans had no idea what French or Spanish wines were all about, and it was that or their ghastly Coca-Cola. In 30 years they haven't changed much — the Gallo boxes have now been turned into fancy-looking bottles with fancy-sounding labels but with the same crap inside. They got the mar- keters in and, as we all know so well, hype equals dollars. Give the suckers rubbish and charge them the earth, an unbeatable combination here in the west.
I regularly buy wine from the Spectator Wine Club and have it delivered to my address in Surrey, so that when I return to civilisation I have some decent plonk wait- ing for me and my friends to dispose of over a happily inebriated ten-day period. I then have the inner strength to return to the wilds of California and visit well-mean- ing friends who proudly produce a bottle of horse piss, call it chardonnay and force me to drink it!
After all the hype they should have called it The Importance of Being Stephen!' As for sending Mr Waugh to Napa to visit someone of Mr Hopper's taste, let alone his friends, God forbid.
Patrick T. Corden
0-5/919 Bayside Drive, Newport Beach, California
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