Dr Vino's wine blog

Two buck Chuck maker Bronco Wine failed in its efforts to weaken the meaning of “Napa” when it’s on the wine label.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a challenge to a California law that requires wines carrying the name “Napa” to have at least 75% of their grapes from Napa County.

The context:

In a 2000 law, California required that at least 75% of the grapes used to make wine labeled from a particular county must come from the named region. But a 1986 federal law was more generous, allowing existing wine labels to keep their names even if they didn’t meet the grape content requirement. Bronco insisted that the federal rules allowed it to use the Napa name and that the state was prohibited from establishing stricter regulations.

Bronco even tried to use free speech as an argument for its more liberal use of the Napa name. Thankfully, this failed. But while Napa fought back and won, where will the next challenge be? Any bets on Texoma?!?

tags: wine | food and drink | wine and place names | Napa | SCOTUS

This question is for the true wine geeks out there:

Which French wine producers have “quit” the AOC system and make at least one table wine (vin de table)? I can only think of Aime Guibert at Domaine de Daumas Gassac in Languedoc but there are undoubtedly others (I think Michel Rolland has declassified some of his wines and have vague notions about Northern Rhone producers too). Are there any other appellation geeks out there who can help me come up with anything more specific?

All right, now back to our regular programming of “wine talk that goes down easy.”

The state-run Liquor Control Board of Pennsylvania acts as distributor and retailer for alcohol in the state. The monopoly claims that bulk buying keeps the final price to the consumer low. Last month our Senior Visiting Philadelphia Wine Consumer reported his disappointment with the prices in Pennsylvania despite the promotional materials.

Thanks to an article yesterday on the state’s difficult decisions in this post-5/16 era (oh yeah, that was the date of the recent Supreme Court case on direct wine shipments), we now have a better understanding of why. Consider these markups:

Currently, if a case of wine costs the LCB $100, there is the standard 30 percent markup plus a $10.80 per case “bottle handling” change, plus the 18 percent flood tax (enacted in 1936 and never repealed), plus a “rounding up” feature (to the nearest 99 cents) plus the 6 percent sales tax (or 7 percent in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties).

That brings the $100 case of wine to $166.42, which makes it hard for restaurants to add a profit margin to a glass of wine and keep it affordable to customers, he said.

Yikes. They were doing great with the 30% markup, which is low for the industry but the per case tax and the flood tax (?!) certainly are sobering. But with $200 million in revenue from the flood tax alone, any efforts at repeal are likely to meet with stiff resistance–if not a stiff drink.

The influence of the vineyard’s growing climate, a perennial issue in winemaking, has become a hot topic recently. In July, winemakers and association leaders from both sides of the Atlantic met in Napa to sign the “Napa declaration” on protecting place names. Next March, the first ever conference on terroir will occur at UC Davis.

Between now and the UC Davis conference, I will run a periodic series of contributions on the subject of terroir. First up is importer Terry Theise. Rather than simply printing a listing of his excellent wines imported from Germany and Austria and micro-champagnes from France, Theise publishes a thick catalogue including several essays. By special arrangement, I reproduce here his essay on “a sense of place” from his 2005 Austrian catalogue. His web site sums up his world view: “…[Theise] has no reservations about conveying his thoughts and feelings on wine, life, sex, philosophy and general cosmology. In Terry’s world, it’s all inter-related.”

Why does place-specificity matter?

By Terry Theise. All opinions expressed are his own.

Once upon a time I sat on a panel discussing spirit-of-place, and a Native American woman to my left said something that lodged on my heart and has not moved since.

The salmon do not only return to the stream, she said, in order to spawn; they also return in order to respond to the prayers and hopes of the people who love them.

I thought that remark was innocuous enough, so I was taken aback when someone responded it was “pretentious New Age bullshit” (or words to that effect). I recognize there are sensibilities other than mine, more linear, more prosaic. Yet with all respect, most thoughts along the “mystical” continuum are reducible to linear equations if one wishes to frame them thus.

No, the salmon aren’t actually thinking “let’s go back to the river guys, cause the Indians are waiting for us.” No one means to say that. There is, though, among certain peoples, an immersion into nature different from our I-thou relationship, an inchoate assumption of unity among living things. The idea of the salmon “responding” is poetic, but the notion of interconnectedness is entirely reasonable.

That assumption of a unity of living things underlies my own assumption that places have spirit, and wine is one of the ways places convey their spirits to us, and this is significant because we are in fact connected (even if we deny it or are unaware), and if we claim that wine is an important part of life then wine must be bound into and among the filaments by which we are connected to all things. Wines which simply exist as products to be sold must take their places alongside all such commodities, soda, breakfast cereal, vacuum cleaner bags. They can be enjoyable and useful, but they don’t matter.
Spirit-of-place is a concept that’s like really good soap; it’s lovely, it feels good when it touches you, and it’s slippery as hell. It isn’t announced with billboards, you know. Spirit Of Place, five miles ahead, bear right to access . Not like that. Nor is it necessarily beautiful. The northernmost section of the New Jersey Turnpike is full of spirit-of-place, however repugnant it may be. I’d say it comes at the moment of ignition between your soul and that place, and a condition of that union is that it happens aside from your awareness. It is an inference, as all soul things are.

I was driving down an especially inviting road through a tunnel of huge elms, appreciating the tranquility of the Champagne countryside. Odd, I thought, that such a vivacious wine hails from such serene land. But then I realized the vivacity of Champagne is the voice not of the landscape, but of the crisp nights of early September, and the cool days of June, and the wan northern sun that seldom seems to roast. And the still wines are not vivid in the way that young Riesling or Muscat is. They are pastel, aquarelle, restrained, gauzy. Add bubbles and they get frisky. But they aren’t born that way. Didier Gimonnet told me he’d been pestered by an English wine writer to produce a tiny amount of supercuvee from an 80-year old vineyard he owns . . . “I’ll never do it,” he insisted, “because the wine would be too powerful.” But isn’t that the point, I thought? Isn’t that what wine’s supposed to do in our skewered age? Density, concentration, power, flavor that can break bricks with its head! “I think Champagne needs to have a certain transparency in order to be elegant,” he continued. And then it came to me.

Here was the Aesthetic to correspond with the gentleness of the Champagne landscape. A pays of low hills, forested summits and plain sleepy villages isn’t destined to produce powerful wines. We have become so besotted by our demand for impact that we’ve forgotten how to discern beauty. And who among us ever tilts a listening ear to hear the hum of the land?

One reason the old world calls to us is that these lands do hum, a low subterranean vibration you feel in your bones. It has existed for centuries before you were born. It isn’t meant to be fathomed. It is mysterious, and you are temporary, but hearing it, you are connected to great currents of time. And you are tickled by a sense of significance you cannot quite touch. It cannot be the same here. Each of us Americans is the crown of creation. We invented humanity. Nothing happened before us, or in any case, nothing worth remembering. Memory is a burden in any case. We turn to the world like a playground bully looking to pick a fight. “Waddaya got TODAY to amuse me, pal? How ya
gonna IMPRESS me? How many POINTS will this day be worth?” Maybe our little slice of earth rumbles with its own hum, but if it does, not many Americans want to know how to hear it, and most are suspicious of the value of listening at all.

Does spirit-of-place reside integrally within the place, or do we read it in? The answer is: YES. We are a part of all we touch, see, taste, experience. If we glean the presence of spirit-of-place, then it’s there because we glean it, because we are not separate from the things we experience.

I want to emphasize that point. The soul records, but does not transcribe. Because we are a part of nature, what happens to us also happens in nature. This is self-evident. From this point one ventures into cosmology or does not, according to one’s preferences. I prefer to believe spirit-of-place registers in our soul because nature wants it to. Because everything that happens in nature is part of a design, which we humans discern. You may believe or disbelieve in the purposiveness of that design. Myself, I feel if one chooses to presume there is no purpose, then what is there left to think about? It’s all senseless and random, la di da, what’s on TV? Assuming it is not mere chance is at the very least an opening for more thinking.

How do we know when WINE is expressing spirit- of-place? We need some-thing tangible to grasp. Here it is: When something flourishes, it tells us it is at home. It says this is where I belong; I am happy here. I believe we taste “flourish” when a grape variety speaks with remarkable articulation, complexity and harmony in its wines. We know immediately. And the very best grapes are those persnickety about where they call home. Riesling seems content in Germany, Alsace, Austria. It can “exist” elsewhere but not flourish. It likes a long, cool growing season and poor soils dense in mineral. Then it can rear back and wail!

But the same grape will be mute on “foreign” soil. Try planting Riesling where it’s too warm or the soil’s too rich, and it becomes a blatant, fruit-salady wine, which most people correctly write off as dull and cloying. Has Chenin Blanc ever made great wine outside Anjou or Touraine? Nebbiolo doesn’t seem to flourish outside Piemonte. I’d even argue that Chardonnay is strictly at home in Chablis and Champagne, since these are the only places where its inherent flavors are complex and interesting; it does easily without the pancake-makeup of oak or other manipulations.

When a vine is at home it settles in and starts to transmit. We “hear” these transmissions as flavors. A naturally articulate grape like Riesling sends a clear message of the soil. And so we see the lovely phenomenon of detailed and distinct flavors coming from contiguous plots of land. Vineyard flavors are consistent, specific, and repeated year after year, varied only by the weather in which that year’s grapes ripened.

If you’re a vintner with parcels in these sites, you know them as if they were your children. You don’t have to wait for the wine to see their distinctions; you can taste them in the must. You can taste them in the grapes.

You wouldn’t have to sermonize to these people about spirit-of-place. They are steeped within that spirit as a condition of life. Their inchoate assumption that Place contains Spirit is part of that spirit.

Let’s step back at little. The Mosel , that limpid little river, flows through a gorge it has created, amidst impossibly steep mountainsides. Its people are conservative and they approach the sweaty work on the steep slopes with humility and good cheer. They are people of the North, accustomed to a bracing and taut way of life. Is it an accident that their wines, too, are bracing and taut? Show me someone who is determined to prove otherwise, and I’ll show you someone who has never been there.

I’ll go further. I believe the Catholic culture of the Mosel produces wines themselves catholically mystic. You see it in the wines when they are mature; sublime, uncanny flavors which seem to arise from a source not-of-this-earth. I need wines which tell me in no uncertain terms: “I hail from THIS place and this place alone, not from any other place, only here, where I am at home.” Because such wines take us to those places. If we are already there, they cement the reality of our being there. We need to know where we are. If we do not, we are: lost.

I don’t have time to waste on processed wines that taste like they could have come from anywhere, because in fact they come from nowhere and have no place to take me. We crave spirit of place because we need to be reassured we belong in the universe. And we want our bearings. We want to know where home is. We can deny or ignore this longing, but we will grow old wondering at the ceaseless scraping nail of anxiety that never lets us feel whole. Or we can claim this world of places.

And when we do, we claim the love that lives in hills and vines, in trees and birds and smells, in buildings and ovens and human eyes, of everything in our world that makes itself at home and calls on us to do the same. The value of wine, beyond the sensual joy it gives us, lies in the things it tells us, not only its own hills and rivers, but the road home.

The Supreme Court cracked open a cellar door for wine to flow directly to consumers with its ruling on May 16. Although the media attention has been great, the effects of the ruling have been limited because the high price of shipping makes it only cost-effective for consumers to purchase expensive wines. Further, with reforms only on the books now in Connecticut and New York, the actual change thus far has been a trickle. But the change could turn into a flood with another case before the courts.

The July issue of Wine Business Monthly reports that the case of Costco Wholesale Corp. vs. Hoen, pending before the federal district court in Seattle, could “put US retailers within self-distribution reach of all wineries.”

The May 16 Supreme Court decision on the consumer cases (known as Granholm vs. Heald and Swedenburg vs Kelly) will impact the Costco case. The Court supported the interstate commerce clause and ruled that states could not states discriminate between in-state and out-of-state wineries, as was the case in both Michigan and New York. Similarly, states maintain different standards for in-state and out-of-state distribution, which the Costco case may erode.

It’s technical and doesn’t have the sex appeal of allowing consumers to deal with the wineries directly, but Costco could have an impact that affects wines at all price points, not just the high-end collectible bottles.

Consider my favorite example of the celebrated “Two Buck Chuck,” aka Charles Shaw. The producer, Bronco Wine Co. arranged an exclusive retail agreement with Trader Joe’s grocery stores with a retail price of $2 within California where no distributor is needed. But every other state requires distributor intervention even though this arrangement is between a large producer and a large retailer. The result for consumers is often Three Buck Chuck. Or three-and-a-half buck chuck. A distributor gets a near 50% mark-up (allowing something for transport) for simply having a license. That is a disservice to the consumer.

R. Corbin Houchins writes in WBM that the second of four counts in the Costco case relies on interstate commerce (the other three counts pertain to Sherman anti-trust provisions and thus are not directly affected by the May 16 Supreme Court decision). Washington state wineries and breweries are allowed to self-distribute to retailers while out-of-state wineries and breweries are not: they must pass through mandatory distributor intervention.

If the Supreme Court’s recent decision acts as a precedent for the Costco case, the change for wine could be wholesale (excuse the pun). The only rub is the 21st Amendment, which devolved the power to regulate the production, distribution and sale of alcohol to the states. But how long can alcohol beg different status from other goods in interstate commerce when it is so clearly anti-competitive?

The changes would be manifold. Effectively, it would be the end of the three-tier system, at least in states that decided to permit self-distribution. A big winery could self-distribute and Two Buck Chuck would cost $2 for consumers outside of California as well as inside California. From the business side, more consolidation of retailers with each other would probably occur and they might even acquire distribution for more vertical integration.

Does that scenario sound like a doomsday, Mondovino-style horror film? Well, it could be. But it could also result in greater efficiencies, which could mean lower prices to the consumer. The United States is the only advanced industrial democracy to mandate distributor intervention in alcohol (even in Sweden, where the retailer is state owned, a thriving private market of distributors exists). Who knows, per capita wine consumption in America might even go vertical. Wine and Nascar anyone?

June 29, 2005

New York, NY – What does it take to be a wine producer? Or an importer? Or a retailer? Discover the inside scoop through a “year in the life of” three accomplished wine industry professionals. The new initiative, The Real Wine World, launches today on DrVino.com.

Taking a page from the reality TV playbook, the project will track three industry participants for a year. Susana Balbo makes wines in Mendoza, Argentina. Gregory Smolik of Chicago imports artisan Italian wines. And Patricia Savoie, owner of Big Nose, Full Body, who sells wines from all over the world at its neighborhood location in Brooklyn, NY.

Over the course of the year, the project will track the participants as they make or sell wine. They will offer insight into the industry, whether on technical winemaking questions or what works for selling wine. Further, the two non-producers will serve as an example of how to start-up professionally in the wine industry without owning or working at a winery.

The project is conceived and written by Tyler Colman (Ph.D., Northwestern). Colman is working on a book about the politics of wine in France and America. As a freelance wine writer with articles in consumer and trade publications, he writes about the business and politics of wine. He currently teaches classes on wine and politics at both University of Chicago and New York University.

Here at Dr. Vino world headquarters last night, we pulled a cork in celebration of the new wine law in New York. For the first time since Prohibition was imposed in 1919, wine consumers will be able to buy wines directly from out of state wineries. The Supreme Court ruled last month the New York system discriminated against out of state wineries in May. Yesterday, a mere 38 days after the Court’s ruling, the NY legislature passed the bill removing the barriers to interstate commerce. (story)

Legislators took on the state’s distributors and shops who stand to lose fractionally as some, mostly expensive, wines bypass these traditional channels. But the legislators had the support of the state’s 200+ wineries, third most in the country behind California and Washington. The wineries appear sold on the idea that people outside of New York will actually order their wines in sufficient quantity to make up for the loss of in-state sales as NY consumers shift their boutique wine budgets to the small wineries of Washington, Oregon and California. That may just be putting a brave face on the situation since the only other option for the legislature would have been to shut down all sales, which would severely impact the state’s wineries for the worse.

The new law, currently headed for Governor Pataki’s desk for an assured signature, will place a high limit of 36 cases per winery per year for consumers. (That’s right, 3 cases a month per winery.)

So which wine did we choose to celebrate here in New York? Why a Dehlinger Estate Pinot Noir 1999 from the Russian River Valley, a winery that we could “import” from in the future.

Wine consumers across America can rejoice with the Supreme Court ruling handed down this morning that allows direct wine shipments from wineries to consumers. Twenty six states including New York, Florida and Michigan had prevented direct shipments based on a legal framework dating from the patchwork repeal of Prohibition. (story SF Chronicle)

It was bound to be a close decision for the Court, pitting the free traders against the social conservatives, but in the end the free interstate commerce carried the day with the 5-4 decision.

“States have broad power to regulate liquor,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “This power, however, does not allow states to ban, or severely limit, the direct shipment of out-of-state wine while simultaneously authorizing direct shipment by in-state producers.”

“If a state chooses to allow direct shipments of wine, it must do so on evenhanded terms,” he wrote.

Kennedy was joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, Souter, and Breyer. Showing how difficult an issue this represents for the Court and in particular this conservative Court, Justices Thomas and Scalia parted ways. Justices Thomas, Rhenquist, O’Connor were joined by Stevens in the dissent. This is a cleavage of the Court that rarely appears.

The 24 states that maintain some sort of limits on shipments will have to level the playing field between in-state and out-of-state wineries. Currently in New York, for example, wines from Long Island and the Finger Lakes can be shipped to residents in Manhattan. This ruling means that Governor Pataki and the legislature must decide whether to eliminate direct sales altogether or to allow California, Oregon and Washington state wineries the same privilege.

Given that Governor Pataki and the other 23 governors of states with limits on shipping are always looking for ways to boost revenue and they could do worse than follow last week’s example by Governor Rick Perry of Texas. Texas will collect sales tax revenue on shipments now as well as a shipper’s permit fee from wineries. Wine consumers will be waiting with eager anticipation that they decide to allow all shipments.

Our man in Washington