California evokes opposite worlds of both sin and sanctity, but with more emotional fervor and more luxuriant resources than other places. I spent the month of April there.

Anyone who has visited northern California must recognize the rugged western beauty of the state.  Mountains connected to interior valleys are connected to hills that touch the jagged coastline of the Pacific Ocean; these factors all contribute to the presence of excellent sites for growing grapes. 

The climate is, for the most part, warm and dry in the summer helping to minimize the problems vines have with excess humidity and rain (rot and mildew, etc.)  Cool ocean currents often modify the temperatures of warm interior valleys.  The growing season is long, giving grapes plenty of time to ripen effectively in contrast to many other growing regions of the world. 

What can you expect from California wines?  For one - wines softer in character, which results from two things:
1.) a long, warm growing season that tends to mitigate acidity and
2.) a stylistic tendency in California to prefer softer wines. 

Europeans often find higher acidity and astringency more palatable. The east coast of the U.S., a large market for fine wines, is caught between these influences.  The influence the West Coast and Europe have been having on each other is also interesting.  European wines are in some cases becoming softer, smoother and accessible earlier, whereas California wines are now moderating the clumsy use of oak and allowing for more expression of flavors from the grapes used to make the wine. 

Plenty of time to ripen effectively

The other notable characteristic is that California wines are often going to be higher in alcohol than European wines -- sometimes significantly higher.  There are generally two reasons for this. First, in an effort to develop more full flavors during ripening, grapes are often allowed to hang on the vine longer at the end of the season; the resulting grapes have higher sugar levels, which when fermented, translate to higher alcohol levels.  In some cases, however, this higher alcohol seems to be the intent rather than the by-product.  When I asked a California winemaker about the ever-increasing levels of alcohol in California wines, he said, ”Yeah, we do it because we can.”   Though he seemed to miss the point - why would you want, say, a burning 15% alcohol in a delicate wine like a Viognier?  Chardonnays routinely carry 14.5% alcohol, and some Zinfandels have alcohol percentages that are almost equivalent to some ports.

Often, winemakers concerned about rising alcohol levels apply technological solutions like actually removing some alcohol from wines.  They use processes like spinning cones or reverse osmosis.  A recent article on this subject in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that ”Clark Smith, owner of one of the two de-alcoholization companies [Vinovation, the other is ConeTech] in Wine Country, says he and his competitor are now removing alcohol from nearly half of all wine made on California's North Coast, though most clients prefer to remain anonymous.”  Other winemakers claim that consumers want more wines with big, bold flavors; along with that style comes the heat from the high octane. 

Napa Valley near Rutherford

The wine industry in California has lurched forward in the last fifty years in the same way many other things Californian have, supported by risky investments, dodging natural disasters, utilizing scientific developments, surviving political debacles (like Prohibition), and building from this what might be considered by some to be a unique lifestyle.

VinoVenue is a mechanical wine bar in San Francisco.  You buy a debit card for a dollar amount and insert it in a slot and the machine dispenses one-ounce of wine from the bottle of your choice.  Like senior citizens in the casinos of Atlantic City pumping their Social Security checks into the slot machines, here the wine buff can enjoy a corresponding experience. 

Vino Venue

Organic produce is very fashionable with consumers in California and growing more popular across the U.S.  And for those wishing to push it further, biodynamic wine production is growing in popularity.   Like homeopathic medicine and literary criticism of the 1980s, biodynamics is a profoundly French inspiration.  Although initiated in the 1920s by an Austrian, Rudolf Steiner, Nicolas Joly of the Loire Valley is its most outspoken evangelist today.  In California there is a preachy quality with those practicing biodynamics.  I get the impression that they have found the key that unlocks the mysteries of nature.  They bury a cow’s horn filled with quartz, and at a different time of the year, one filled with manure to make their soil preparations.  They use no chemicals and recycle everything. This is how a biodynamic winemaker in Sonoma County described it to me: ”You’re working with the invisible life sources that are real out there, and you’re putting the spirit in the bottle.” This was prior to showing me the new four million dollar, 28,000 square foot cave dug into the side of a mountain in Sonoma County.  ”Consumers are looking for connections,” he said.  How could one regret the minor confusions that might arise from such noble impulses?

There are coffee shops on neighboring corners on Fourth Street in downtown Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County.  I asked the attractive young woman at the counter at Peet’s Coffee and Tea what made the coffee she served better than the coffee at Wolf’s Coffee on the next corner.  She said with a smile that Wolf’s used Styrofoam cups, and Styrofoam cups weren’t ”earth friendly,” and that was enough for her.

Almost as common as coffee shops in California are microbreweries.  It seems to me that there is a microbrewery in every town in California.  Industrial beer manufacturers in the U.S. have consolidated production of beer over the last few decades, and in doing so have diluted their products to the point where people have finally noticed that their beer is often a meekly beer-flavored, carbonated solution.  This has opened a niche in the beer business and allowed for the return of small, local breweries.

Across from Peet’s, on Fourth Street in Santa Rosa, at the Russian River Brewery, you can sample all12 of the various beers produced there in 2 oz. tasting glasses for $7.50.  On a chalkboard they list the name, the style, the specific gravity, the alcoholic content, and even a bitterness index for each of their beers.  The brewery crowd is local and this microbrewery seems to be where many in Santa Rosa go at the end of the day.

Within the boundaries of the American Viticultural Area (AVA) called Napa Valley, about 35 miles long and 4 miles wide, there are several variations in climate.  It is, for example, warmer in the northern part of the valley and cooler in the southern part.  This is due to the cooling effects of the San Pablo Bay, an extension of the San Francisco Bay, which eases the way for the cool air from the Pacific Ocean to move inland.  The Napa Valley has varied geography: many different soil types, mountains on either side of a flat valley, and an arrangement of interior hills and valleys that move to the east on the valley floor.  This is one of the reasons why there are 13 distinct AVAs within the Napa Valley AVA itself.  It is a paradise for growing grapes, and living in rural beauty and comfort in close proximity to San Francisco. Agricultural land and wineries meet luxury homes, and often there is tension. This real estate is some of the most expensive agricultural land in the world.

Vineyards at Quintessa

Entering Napa Valley, a large sign on a new development of cookie-cutter bungalows to the east of Highway 29 announces ” Homes beginning in the low $500,000s.”

The City of Napa is rather charming with its Victorian architecture.  People on their way to the famous wine-producing valley directly to its north often overlook it.  The Napa River, normally little more than a creek, runs past the city on its eastern edge.  The city has some nice restaurants and a wine bar, Bounty Hunter, on First Street that is worth a visit.

I tasted many extraordinary wines on this trip, but to ask for a decent wine that is priced below twenty dollars, is akin to panhandling.  The trend in Napa is a kind of eco-capitalism where each wine producer tries to outdo the other on how much more they love the earth than the next guy, and how much over a hundred dollars a bottle they can get for their wine.   This is probably necessary to pay the mortgage and architect’s fees for the new public displays of architectural affluence complete with beautiful gardens and landscaping.  Everyone claims that they can sell all the wine they produce.  However, a chance conversation with an accountant who works for a firm representing many Northern California wineries suggested to me that it is a tough business.

A hospitality employee at an upscale winery on the Silverado Trail in Napa put it to me this way, ”Image is everything in this valley.” I have no reason to doubt her. Some wineries in the Napa Valley can have the look of Saddam’s pre-war palaces complete with lines of limos outside, even on an overcast and rainy April Saturday. 

Darioush

Of course in California the touchy issue of terroir arises.  It seems everyone wants a piece of it.  However, no one could seem to agree on a definition for the French concept at the conference, Terroir 2006: A Dialogue Between Earth Scientists and Winemakers held in March in California. We see the word used often as in this example from an essay on the Napa Valley by wine writer Gerald Boyd.  ”Understanding what makes certain grapes grow better in one terroir and not another is as essential to understanding a wine as knowing an author’s background is to understanding the central core of a novel.”  When I asked a plant pathologist at the University of California at Davis if a grapevine could indeed pick up flavor components from geologically diverse soils (i.e. limestone, clay, slate etc.) as many wine writers assume and proponents of variations of the French idea proclaim, she said in a matter of fact way, ”No, it’s all bullshit.” 

Winemaker and CEO of Ridge Vineyards, Paul Draper told me that he hates the word ”terroir” because ”it’s become such a marketing term.”  He does, however, believe firmly that ”great wines should express a sense of place.”  His beautiful ”place” is high up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco.  From the Ridge winery you can see the San Francisco Bay in one direction and, overlooking the San Andreas Fault, the Pacific Ocean in the other.  Mr. Draper is able, he says, to recognize the individual characteristics of his wine from specific vineyard parcels from year to year.  He and his winemaking team use the wines from these parcels to assemble the blend of Bordeaux varietals, Ridge Monte Bello.  This wine outperformed the French wines in the much-publicized ”Judgment of Paris” tasting in 1976 and was the favorite of both the English and American versions of the 30th anniversary rematch of that tasting held recently. I tasted the 2005 Ridge Monte Bello from the barrel, and it was outstanding.

Paul Draper of Ridge

Driving south on Highway 101 through the Salinas Valley you’ll pass the town of Soledad, known for the production of romaine lettuce and broccoli, and for its ”Correctional Facility.” To the right are bench lands at the foot of the Santa Lucia Mountain Range.  These bench lands, fan shaped piles of sediment at the base of the mountains, make up part of the AVA known as the Santa Lucia Highlands.  I couldn’t take my eyes off of the panorama while driving south.  This section of the Santa Lucia Highlands is a textbook alluvial fan with an eastern exposure, perfect for growing grapes. Here some grape growers are becoming recognized for their Pinot Noir.  The southern section of this bench, the Arroyo Seco AVA, loses some of this geological precision.

Santa Lucia Highlands

On the opposite side, the Gabilan mountain range rises to define eastern edge of the Salinas Valley.  Well off the heavily traveled wine trails of California, about 10 miles into the Gabilan Mountains east of Hollister, Cienega Road ascends into the Diablo Range where the Calera Wine Company is located.  The vista to the east of the offices of Calera Wine Company includes a part of the Diablo Range, which separates the Central Coast of California from the Central Valley.  The Central Valley produces the majority of the jug wine consumed in the U.S., as well as a lot of raisins and table grapes. 

Josh Jensen is from California, and the owner of the Calera Wine Company.  After graduating from Yale and getting a master’s degree in anthropology at Oxford, where he was a member of the crew team that beat Cambridge in the 1967 Boat Race, he went to Burgundy where he worked first at Domaine de la Romanee-Conti and then at Domaine Dujac. 

Josh Jensen of Calera

In France he learned that the best Pinot Noir was grown on limestone soils.  After consulting California Bureau of Mines geologic maps he found Mt. Harlan, a rare limestone site in California.   Mt. Harlan is 1,000 feet higher in altitude than the winery and is located about a half a mile away.

In the early 1970s, Jensen told me, the large wine production companies of Louis Martini, Almaden, and Christian Brothers all made Pinot Noir.  But they made it in the same way they made their other wines, with a standard red wine recipe, the way they made Cabernet Sauvignon.  The thinner-skinned Pinot Noir came out looking like a rosé, he said.  They then added Petite Syrah or Alicante Bouschet to darken it.  Jensen contrasted this with the Pinot Noir made not far away at Chalone by Dick Graf, which he thought was pretty good at the time. In 1979, in what he calls, ”the bad old days of California wine,” he began to produce a lighter and more elegant, French style Pinot Noir at Calera (which means limekiln in Spanish).

Today Pinot Noir is growing in popularity with consumers, and following the trends, more and more is being made in California.  Much of this new Pinot Noir often has little to do with the light and elegant, cool climate, European Pinot Noir, but is closer in style to the powerful, full-bodied, Cabernet Sauvignon of California today.  When I asked Josh Jensen what he thought about this, he said that he was ”considering writing a diatribe against muscle-bound Pinot Noir.”

I’m sure that California isn’t the only place where wine could be described as ”muscle-bound.” But California, often known for its cultural extremes, is one of the few places where muscle-bound on one hand garners respect and reverence, and on the other, disdain.