SOUR GRAPES ABOUT CALIFORNIA
William Cash says Britons and continental
Europeans can no longer be superior about American wine, but they still try
Los Angeles IN DIPLOMATIC circles, Californian chardonnay is known as the 'correct' wine of choice when world leaders chink glasses with President Clinton. When Mr Clinton was host to a dinner in May for the well- fed members of the European Union at the Hague, he served 1994 Crichton Hall Californian chardonnay. The day before Mr Clinton was host to the 'Summit of Eight' talks in Denver in June, urgent `requests' were made by the prime minis- ters of both Japan and Canada to the dis- tributor of Peter Michael Wines in Napa Valley, for a six-pack of their Point Rouge and L'Apres Midi Californian chardonnay to be Fedexed overnight for their respec- tive group dinners. Yet the June issue of Britain's Decanter — 'the world's best wine magazine', circu- lation approximately 32,000 — published a deeply unflattering report on a sampling of Californian chardonnay which the editor, Jonathan Goodall, described as 'a surpris- ingly disappointing tasting of what many might expect to be some of the most pres- tigious wines emerging from the United States.' One wine was dismissed as 'simply awful'.
The scathing report received the unusual honour of being turned into a cover story in the 'Food' section of the Los Angeles Times, headlined: 'Brits bash Cal chards. They don't know what they are talking about, the poor things.' The piece was written by Matt Kramer — a columnist for America's Wine Spectator — accompanied by a cartoon of a ruddy-faced Yank wear- ing a reversed baseball cap, grinning out cockily across the Atlantic, while a miser- able-looking Brit in a pin-striped suit looks down into his glass.
This media squabble holds up a mirror to the wider subject of the cultural aggres- sion that has always existed between Europe and America. Gone are the days when the Brits could snigger at the Ernest and Julio Gallo wine-boxes in Tesco. The unpleasant truth is that a small number of California 'super-premium' wines are now arguably better than many of the most famous in Europe, and the United States wine press is more influential (even in France, where vineyards like Chateau Latour are sick of buyers looking up from their Robert Parker notes and saying, 'I don't want your 1995'). Robert Parker is American. His The Wine Advocate (started in 1978) now has such an effect on the wine trade that British merchants scurry over to France to buy from the top Bor- deaux wineries before his notes on the previous year's vintage are published in May, in order to pre-empt orders from American importers.
It is one thing for Europe to have resigned itself to the American juggernaut of 'Batman' movies and McDonald's restaurants flattening its identity, but another to suffer the ignominy — as the French, of all people, are being reduced to — of imitating the Yank vintners at their own game (i.e. adopting 'varietal' labelling, such as pinot noir, and copying the Californian cabernet style of wine- making) to save their own crucified wine industry. And unlike France, whose morose winemakers were complaining at Win Expo' in Bordeaux of another dismal vintage because of the rain, California has stable weather and can therefore operate its vineyards like businesses by forecasting costs and investnient.
Piquantly, two of California's leading chardonnay-makers are British. Peter Michael is Sir Peter Michael CBE, the shrewd businessman who rescued and re- structured Classic FM. He bought a plot in the Napa Valley in 1980, and his wines are today worshipped by grand American restaurant sommeliers (if they can get their hands on any) with near religious fervour. He says there has been a dramatic volte- face over wine by American snobs in the 1990s: 'In the 1980s in New York, if you wanted to entertain properly, it was neces- sary to indulge in what were very, very expensive French wines to put over the right image as a person of culture and aste, but all that has been very much turned around.' Again this was chiefly thanks to Robert Parker taking a 'very strong' view of a few inclusive California wines, saying that 'the Burgundians should be really worrying'.
Crichton Hall vineyard is owned by the former merchant banker Richard Crich- ton — expelled from King's School, Can- terbury for placing an 'object' on the spire of Canterbury Cathedral — who educated himself in wine through extensive study of restaurant wine-lists in New York and Europe on his banker's expense account: `I don't think British wine writers, enough of them, have been to California and seen what we do here. If the wine journalists want to beat up an industry, write up the outrageous prices Bordeaux and Bur- gundy are charging. We make consistent, excellent wine. I think there is jealousy in England over the success of American wine that most people can't even afford.'
The envy is increased by the Americans having far more money than your average Brit to enjoy their 'fine wine ambition'. As Decanter's editor admits, 'Californian wine has always had a little problem with the UK wine trade — basically it's bloody expensive.' Whereas the British are a nation of serious cheap wine drinkers the average is around £2.99 a bottle Americans are increasingly a nation of ultra-serious wine connoisseurs and collec- tors (many of whom don't even drink wine). A recent Wine Spectator cover story on the American wine boom reported New York's Park Avenue Liquor Shop owner, Mike Goldstein, as saying, 'For many people price is no object.' Twenty- eight dollars a bottle is typical for a decent Californian wine you might bring to a Los Angeles dinner party.
What is certainly difficult for stingy, wine-sloshing Britons to grasp from afar is that, until fairly recently, it never occurred to middle-class Americans to drink wine with meals. They drank hard liquor, beer or water. When France was liberated by the Allied forces, Eisenhower bluntly asked for a Coke inside the caves of Moet et Chan- don. Before the late 1970s, wine — invari- ably white, with possibly an ice-cube floating about in it — was regarded by Americans as a kind of refreshing fruit cocktail.
What really makes wine snobs in Europe spit into their glasses is the galling sense that after just 20 years of really being in business Americans are now strutting around with an almost smug superiority about wine. It is the condescending, we- are-the-best pose that, not surprisingly, has the French in particular seeing rouge. Thus Matt Kramer, whom the New York Times declares 'says profound things about wine and civilisation', has the blurb of his book modestly explain 'how and why California has become the most influential wine region in the world: California delivers the most advanced research in wine-making and the most sophisticated wine-marketing techniques'.
Up to a point. 'We have no marketing,' Sir Peter Michael told me down the phone from his English farmhouse. 'We take it round by hand to restaurants. You'll never find an ad by us, ever.'
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