Since posting my column on “The Achilles Heel of American Wine” last week, I’ve received several emails from readers 
suggesting that the sweet, short, simple profile of many American wines is the result of deliberate stylistic decisions by winemakers, especially in California. The most interesting of these came from WRO’s own Mary Ewing-Mulligan.
If you missed the column, here’s a link to take you there:
http://www.winereviewonline.com/Michael_Franz_on_Americas_Weakness.cfm
Here are sections from two emails, with a quick comment from me at the bottom:
Michael,
How correct you are. I have tasted thousands of under-$15 wines for the past several years, because that has been the price limit for my New York Daily News reviews. The California wines in that price category are terribly sweet and one-dimensional in both flavor and structure. They are also extremely short on the palate–which actually comes in handy when explaining ‘length’ to students in wine classes. This situation has not improved at all over the past five years, and in fact I think it has worsened.
My theory on the category is that they make the wines that way to suit a certain demographic of wine drinker, which their market research has identified. I am actually doing a seminar at the Santé Symposium on this topic–whether inexpensive wines should be judged by a different quality standard than fine wines. Anyway, I hope that your column raises a flurry of responses. I will probably quote parts of it in Vermont.
* * *
Another thought came to me–something that I am quite convinced about. When we professionals taste these wines (any wines), we do the whole slurp and whistle thing and hold the wines in our mouths for a certain amount of time. But this is not how the end user experiences the wines. Our ‘delivery system’ is completely different from theirs. Occasionally I have ‘tasted’ some inexpensive wines the way that the people who buy them do: quick in, and swallow. When you do it like that, you have no time to notice whether the wine is short. You have no time for anything but to grasp the 1) upfront impression and 2) flavor intensity. These inexpensive wines are all intense in flavor (if simple flavor) and the flavor is very upfront on the palate. In a way, perhaps, this theory supports the idea that the wines are made in a certain way specifically for a certain user.
Perhaps such wines should be critiqued by non-professionals instead of by us. But the producers market them as if they are fine wines. I believe that they belong in another category, namely, ‘beverage wines.’ But read the back labels or the advertising, and you see that the wineries are playing the fine wine card, so that entitles us to judge them as if they were. In reality, however, most of them would taste better (and even acceptable) if quaffed from a tumbler, maybe with an ice cube to dilute their searing alcohol on the rear palate (which you notice only when you hold the wine in your mouth long enough).
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Mary’s comments raise a very interesting question for me, namely, whether professional tasters tend to prefer $12 wines from Chile and Italy (for example) because they more closely simulate the world’s truly fine wines than do many California wines, which are deliberately styled to appeal to a demographic that doesn’t include broadly experienced tasters–or those who taste as professionals taste.
Does that seem correct to you? Write to me at [email protected]
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