California Dreamin'
by George Rose
 

QUICK HITS OF WINE
By George Rose

A Medal For Every Wine

Despite this millennial depression we’ve fallen into, there seems to be a silver lining for consumers. More and more individuals are drawn to making commercial wine, and when you combine that with a lack of consumer spending, prices on even the most expensive wines appear to be dropping like a rock. There is now an abundance of quality wines at attractive prices—wines that were once over-priced and hard to find. Is this payback for those high-minded marketers and owners who believed exclusivity was the key to high prices?

Anyone needing validation of this glut of quality wine need look only at the number of entries in the recent San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Judges for the 2010 edition of the competition sampled nearly 5,000 bottles of wine, up from 3,800 bottles in 2007, handing out over four hundred medals.
Owners and winemakers trying to separate themselves from the wine pack are now paying attention to wine competitions around the globe. Entering wines in a competition is one of the easiest things a winery can do to gain some level of attention. But like the Olympics, only gold medals count. No one remembers the silvers or the bronzes.

Take Snows Lake Winery in Lake County, for example. The previously unknown boutique producer recently won a few gold medals in the 2008 Concours Mondial de Bruxelles International wine competition, a reputable awards program that is overwhelmingly geared to French, Spanish and Italian wines. Hoping to one-up the famous 1976 Paris tasting, Snows Lake Winery relayed the good news to a Lake County online news outlet.

The website took the breathless news at face value, announcing to the world that Snows Lake Winery had finally arrived! Call me old fashioned, but winning a gold medal in a European Concours whatever is completely meaningless to consumers in the United States.

In commenting on the competition news, I suggested to the Lake County online editor that the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles is an “obscure” wine competition. Weeks later, I was corrected by a concerned Napa Valley PR person, who also just happened to be on the Concours payroll. He explained politely that this was the “most important and highly respected” wine competition in the world.

I suggested to the flak that, perhaps, the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles might not be “obscure,” but that it just may be the most irrelevant wine competition in the United States.

Wine In The White House

California winery public relations departments were working overtime, hoping and praying their wines would ride Barack Obama’s coattails into the White House after the 2008 election.

The wine media became wrapped up in a guessing game of which wines would now be favored by White House chefs, poured at state dinners, or tucked neatly into the “official” First Family wine cellar. One winery sent two cases of its popular wine to the White House on the basis of a People Magazine article that mentioned their brand in passing while describing Michelle Obama’s kitchen.

After the new President had recited (and muffed) the oath of office, Democrats and Republicans sat down to an inaugural luncheon that included bottles of Korbel and Duckhorn. Oh, and lost in all this hyperbolic speculation, was the fact that Barack Obama, in keeping with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, does not drink alcohol, this according to the New York Times.

Jesus Was A Teetotaler

For those who think this issue has been settled, the anti-alcohol, neo-prohibition movement is alive and flourishing in this country. These forces continue to press their case that life on this planet would greatly improve if only wine, beer and spirits were removed from store shelves or, at the very least, taxed into submission.

An Associated Press article by religion writer Richard Ostling caught my eye recently. The article detailed a process in which Thomas Bramwell Welch, an abstemious Methodist, had come up with a way to cook grape juice to make it permanently nonalcoholic, a process similar to pasteurization.

Welch's son, Charles, promoted the product at the 1893 Chicago World Fair, proclaiming the juice "born out of a passion to serve God by helping give communion through the 'fruit of the vine' instead of the 'cup of devil'."

We know this product today as Welch's Grape Juice and at the turn of the 19th century, its popularity was sealed just as American Protestants were waging a flat-out war on alcohol. That neo-prohibitionist and anti-alcohol war is still being waged today.

The article goes on to shed light that Roman Catholics are equally strict about their communion wine, in the opposite direction. According to the report, section 924 of the church's law code requires that in Mass, "the wine must be natural," meaning it must be alcoholic, not grape juice. I am not a Catholic, but I’m told that parishioners receive a bread wafer and “watered-down” wine at the altar during communion.

To this day, some "dry" Protestants believe that Jesus himself was a teetotaler. Despite the fact that wine is mentioned 185 times in the Old Testament and 26 times in the New Testament, abstinent Christians would just as soon beverages containing alcohol disappear. For their part, Muslims, according to this article, find it "inconceivable" that Jesus would have produced a beverage they blame for the "social and moral bankruptcy" of the Western world.

Which brings us to this place in history: How do you abolish a beverage that is central to the history of our civilization?

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