CALIFORNIA: Going backwards to move forwards

Many Californian producers are reverting to elegant, cool-climate, European-style wines – though there is still a place for the big, the bold and the high alcohol. By Rupert Millar.

Like all the best winemakers, Californian producers are only too keen to experiment and explore their terroirs and climate and see what varietals work where. And that pioneering spirit, so typical of the Old West, is in fact taking California to a place it has been before: a lighter style of wine, from existing sites, but this time with greater understanding of their fine wine potential.  

Or rather, as Damian Carrington, sales and marketing director at Fields, Morris & Verdin, says, “back to European styles”.

He argues that California’s long-running flirtation with cooler climate varietals and the more elegant, less alcoholic or overly oaked wines that have come to typify California’s output, is a return to how California used to be stylistically rather than a brand new endeavour.

“There has been a slight move towards more elegant styles, but our guys have always followed that route,” he says. “They always believed that California was capable of producing elegant wines.”

Another defender of California is Erik Olsen, chief winemaker at Constellation Wines US, who steps in with a reminder that the vast majority of Californian wine was and still is on or under 14%.

Joel Peterson, founder and winemaker of Ravenswood, a winery which prides itself on its “manly” wines, also states that cool climate is nothing new: “I don’t see wholesale changes,” he muses. “There is some shift away from über-ripe fruit, but that does not mean under-ripe or marginally ripe fruit is in vogue.

"I dare say there is a large proportion of the American wine-consuming public that like big flavours who would think that this obsession with ‘cool weather wine’ was a bit of balderdash.”

An ongoing trend

European regions and styles have long been popular with Californian producers, with possibly their most manifest representation in Randall Grahm and his Rhône Rangers, with their Syrahs and Viogniers.

John McLaren, UK director of the Wine Institute of California, says that the trend is now continuing steadily with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, especially in the Sonoma and Central Coasts.

Tim Marson MW, US wine buyer at Bibendum, reports that the last 12-18 months have seen strong sales for unoaked Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in the on-trade but he sounds a note of caution with regards to the fickle tastes of the US consumer: “Pinot Noir has been on a roll for several years now but it will be interesting to see what effect the significant new plantings will have on pricing and perceived value as they come on stream. California/the US is so trend conscious that Pinot could conceivably fall out of favour just as quickly as it was catapulted into the limelight.”

There is already talk of other grapes appearing on the Californian wine scene in the form of Muscat, Pinot Grigio and Albariño. However, Carrington is less sure about some of these gaining any kind of traction in export markets.

“There certainly is a move away from high extraction and towards elegance and lighter white varietals. Domestic demand for these wines may have grown,” he believes. ”Whether there’s a demand here you could question. Why do you want a Californian Albariño on your list when you could  have a perfectly good and more authentic Portuguese one?”

And this is something California is going to have to watch. Diversifying into different varietals and returning to a more classic and elegant form of Californian wine is a good thing as long as “the styles are right”, argues McLaren. To try and supplant the popular and equally valid bigger styles would be akin to “throwing the baby out with the bath water”.

Bill Legion, president of Hahn Family Wines, agrees with this sentiment, saying that it is the extremes of extraction that consumers and producers alike are beginning to turn away from, but not abandon altogether. “I don’t hear anyone beating the gong for low-alcohol Zinfandel and Cabernet, but there is a backlash against those wines which are 16% – that’s Port!” he exclaims.

There is, of course, a more stoical and less romantic answer to dropping overly alcoholic wines: taxation. The US government taxes wine by the gallon and a nine-litre case of 12x750ml bottles is equivalent to 2.4 gallons. For wine that is 14% by volume or less, the tax per gallon is $1.071 or $0.21 a bottle. For wine over 14% that tax rises to $1.571 a gallon, $0.31 a bottle.

Naturally sparkling wines are hit particularly hard with a $3.40 per gallon tax. And that only covers producers, as distributors and retailers will then use percentage mark-ups to determine pricing, so, for example, distributor A marks up all wine by 50% or retailer B only works on a 30% gross margin. Thus higher-alcohol wines are automatically more expensive to produce and market.

One cannot scoff at California for producing rich, alcoholic wines; it is a style that has done them very well and as Peterson points out, there are a great many European wines that rely on “big winemaking styles”, think riper Right Bank Bordeaux or Super Tuscans. Furthermore, whatever one’s feelings toward Bordeaux’s 2009 vintage, it was certainly ripe and there were fears over alcohol levels, yet still it is the “vintage of the century”.

Marson agrees that rising alcohol levels are not a purely Californian problem, however: “There are still plenty of wines out there that some European palates might consider too heavy/jammy/ unbalanced. The Californian winemaking mentality of ‘some is good, more is better’ is a difficult one to overcome, but as a younger generation of winemakers travels and tastes more widely than its predecessors there is still the prospect of a more widespread change in mindset.”

Alistair Viner, head of wine at Harrods, concurs and says that those seeking lower alcohol just have to manage their vineyards properly, but in the end, “alcohol is a by-product of the environment”. So even within Napa, some parts of it can manage lower alcohol styles and others can’t.

Changing wine tastes in the US will gradually begin to be felt, but that time is still a little way off. According to McLaren, the US market’s tastes are still behind the UK’s by up to 15 years, “so while we are moving to lighter, more delicate, styles they are only just moving out of the big round, oaky styles and that is starting to reflect itself in winemaking patterns”, he says.

On the other hand, he adds: “It’s mostly top end. I wouldn’t say that everyday brands can be affected by these changes.”

In addition, the domestic side of operations is so big and successful that there is very little need to export that many wines, which leaves markets such as the UK polarised. It’s £4.99 or bust, as in wallet busting.

Nielsen statistics for the off-trade to 4 September 2010 show that 44% of the UK’s rosé sales by volume came from the US. One may reasonably assume that as five of the top 10 brands on the UK market are in fact Californian, it is the White Zinfandel from the likes of Blossom Hill and Sutter Home that are behind this.

No middle ground

Carrington notes that these statistics are hardly surprising: “At the bottom end the consumer wants blush and is being well catered for by a few brands who are doing a pretty good job for themselves… whether it’s doing California any good is another question. Then at the very top end there is still demand, although we are certainly seeing less demand for the Screaming Eagle stuff.”

However, while this polarisation exists, the middle ground remains rather bare and the parlous state of the pound sterling and dollar exchange does not, in Carrington’s words, “foster any interest”, in filling it.

Viner admits that while his store is an “anomaly” in terms of its clientele and buying power, “we do reasonably well with some Pinot Noirs, from Sonoma particularly, and Chardonnay. But it’s quite top-end stuff, the category as a whole hasn’t grown that much. We’ve seen a lot of increase in demand for top wines across the entire range and we’re seeing people buy better wine rather than more wine.”

So it suits producers to stick to their ways domestically and yet, it would appear, they can or could sell their refined wines in the UK with comparative ease, but not necessarily in any kind of volume.

Big Napa Cabernet and “manly” Zinfandel will never go away and quite right too. The simple fact of the matter is that some of California’s sub-regions are capable of cooler-style wines and others aren’t.

But then that is the joy of California; it has it all. According to Olsen: “The wines produced at the nearly 3,000 wineries throughout California offer tremendous variety with regard to microclimate, terroir and wine style. Virtually any style of wine one could want has a place in California.”

This one slice of the Pacific coast alone has as much diversity as some countries, and with luck this will be further recognised and exploited. California has the drive and know-how to be, certainly not the jack-of-all-trades, but definitely all things to all men.

Rupert Millar, January 2011