The Right Place at the Right Time

I am no wine snob.

I’m not an industry insider, I’m not an aficionado, I’m not on any wine label’s payroll. But what I am is curious, and in the right place at the right time. I live at the southern tip of California’s Central Coast, one of the most exciting places in the world for local food, artisanal cheese, and small vineyards making exceptional wines. There is a lot of energy here, with new ideas and communities around every corner. You can hardly walk outside without running into a small farm or a beautiful new wine tasting room. There are places to taste local olive oil and honey, and all year round there are festivals celebrating avocadoes, lemons, lavender, and of course wine.

I’m out to learn all I can, to taste and listen and read, and share it all with you here.

We have a banquet of good stuff before us, so let’s dig in –

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In a couple of weeks I’ll be exploring a nearby wine region at the Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Association 2011 Festival Weekend. There are more than 110 members of the Association, showing you just how wine-rich this area is! It’s got me thinking about what sets each wine region apart, so it’s a good time to tackle one of the big words in wine culture, appellation.

You can’t get too far in a conversation about wine before you encounter that ominous word. It’s clearly a word that wine people care about – they argue about whether it is the essence of fine wine, or if it is un-American; they form committees and lobby government officials about it; they throw it into conversation and expect that you should know what it means; and, handy for us, they write books about it. Here, in a nutshell, is a layman’s guide to help you join the conversation.

“Appellation,” like most wine jargon, is a French term. The word means “name” or “designation,” and refers to where a wine comes from. Champagne comes from the Champagne area, burgundy wines come from Burgundy, Rhône wines come from the Rhône Valley region – you get the idea. Incidentally, that’s why champagne-style wines grown in California or anywhere else are called “sparkling wine;” it’s not champagne unless it was grown in Champagne.

The thing is, people have been growing and making wine in France for so long, they’ve worked out exactly what grapes work best in each area, and they’ve refined their winemaking techniques over many generations. That means that for French wine, the appellation doesn’t just tell you where it’s from, but give you a lot of information about both the variety of grape, and the distinctive flavor characteristics of the wine. It tells you about the “terroir” – but I’ll save that bucket of worms for another day.

In the United States, we have a bit of a different system. You’ll hear about wine coming from a certain “AVA,” which stands for American Viticultural Area and is simply an area recognized as a wine-growing region by the federal government. Within any given AVA, there may be a spectrum of wine varieties grown, with no one style being typical of the region.

Some winemakers see this as a great thing, an example of the American spirit of adventure and experimentation – “If we can grown Spanish whites and Rhône reds and sparkling Pinot all within a few miles of each other, why shouldn’t we? Variety is the spice of life!”

Other wine aficionados see it as a mark of the immaturity of winemaking in the Unites States. After all, we’ve only be making “fine wine” (as opposed to bootleg hooch) on a broad scale since the mid-20^th century, with our first wines being internationally recognized in the late 1970s. Such critics would like to see wine makers pay more attention to the unique characteristics of each region (that’s the “terroir” again), and carefully develop flavors in the wine that are distinct to a specific area.

In his book New California Wine (Running Press, 2004), Matt Kramer argues that for a long time Americans were more intrigued by the chemistry and technology of the wine making – everything that happens after the grapes are harvested – than in the slow, artful process of developing distinctive vineyards. After half a century of fine winemaking, however, he’s starting to see more attention to an “appellation” way of thinking, working with the land to make recognizable, region-specific wines.

So, appellation: outdated French word, or the heart of good wine? What do you think?