As far as its gastronomic resources are concerned, this country is already the envy of the civilized world. I suppose it will be doubly so when we somehow arrange to produce and distribute widely and market at a really low price a few sound and pleasant table wines. Please note that I am not talking about rare vintages and old bottles, but about the lowest common denominator of wine—something that we could all afford to drink every evening or as often as we chose, as a beverage and not as a ceremony.
How many of us can recall, before the war, after wine-drinking holidays in France or Italy or Spain or the Rhineland, our return to a bleak cocktails-then-ice-water regime in this country? A good many of us were goaded into action of some sort—we tried to make our own wine, and came to the reluctant conclusion that this was a job for professionals; occasionally we found an Italian grocer or gardener who would sell us gallons, but the wine proved uneven in quality and hard to keep; finally, after repeal, we shopped around in our local liquor stores for a dependable and palatable American wine at a price we could afford, and generally, after a few disappointing months, we gave up.
Even American wine producers will now admit that most of the wines which they marketed between 1934 and about 1940 were a long way from what they should have been. And in the past five years we have hardly seen any real vin ordinaire (by which I mean a common, inexpensive table wine) sold in America. The humble gallon jug virtually disappeared in 1943 from our wine merchants' shelves; instead, the undistinguished reds and whites from the mass production areas of California appeared in fancy dress at a fancy price, and elaborate advertising campaigns were launched to convince us that bottles which we used to buy reluctantly for 60 cents were suddenly worth ＄1.50 and were being sold us as a special favor.
The real purpose of this article is to say that today, at last, a potable American vin ordinaire is not altogether a mirage; it may be less distant than a good many of us have believed. Grape prices in California are back to reason this fall, the great wine boom is over, and from here it looks as though, for wine-thirsty Americans, 1948 would be the pleasantest year since 1917.
This may be as good a time as any to attempt to draw a clean line of demarcation between common table wine, of which the United States produces annually some thirty million gallons, and fine table wine, of which we produce about one-iftieth as much. The former, in terms of food, is what we eat 360 days a year; the latter is turkey at Thanks-giving and plum pudding on Christmas Day. Fine wines, whether produced in Burgundy or on the Rhine, in California or in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, will never be plentiful and will never be cheap; if vin ordinaire is not cheap, there is no excuse for its existence. When you pay ＄1.50 or ＄2 for a white Pinot from the Livermore Valley or a Cabernet from Napa, you have a right to the equivalent of a filet steak—a vintage wine from a top district, properly aged both before and after bottling, made with great care out of the unusual, shy-bearing grape varieties which yield outstanding wine not only in this country but in France. When you buy vin ordinaire, you are altogether in a different league, and you should judge what you buy as you judge coffee or milk or beer. The vintage (or lack of vintage) is of no consequence, for you want a young wine, and it may please you to remember that 90 per cent of all French wine is drunk when it is less than two years old. As with coffee or beer, you have a right to something which is sound and palatable, with no off taste or off color; your wine will have little or no bouquet (for this comes with bottle age) but what aroma it has should be agreeable; you can serve it in tumblers or mugs or cocktail glasses, at the temperature you like and with any dish, including pickles. It is, as I have said, a beverage, not a ceremony.
The idea of converting America into a nation of wine-drinkers through the pleasant evangelism of cheap native wine is not by any means new. It has been tried every couple of decades for the past hundred and fifty years, and by persons and organizations as diverse as Nicholas Longworth and Leland Stanford, Thomas Jefferson and the Wine Advisory Board. “The introduction of a very cheap wine into my neighborhood, within two years past,” wrote Jefferson, “has quadrupled in that time the number of those who keep wines and will ere long increase them tenfold.” (I wonder where the cheap wine came from, and what it was that finally killed off that promising little nucleus round Monticello.)
If you reread today the yellowed pages of the reports and chronicles published on behalf of wine in California between 1850 and 1900, you find, over and over again, expressed with varying degrees of optimism, as the market went up or down, this same idea, as ineradicable, apparently, as the vine itself. Sooner or later the Golden West would bring the inexpensive fruit of its expanding vine-yards to “the populous cities of the East.” The case, in those days, was well argued. A quarter of a million immigrants a year were arriving in the United States from the wine-drinking countries alone; most of the restaurants in large cities were run by Frenchmen or Germans or Italians; the “upper classes, arbiters of fashion,” already drank wine, and where the upper classes led, “the rest would follow.”
Alas for the upper classes and alas for Bacchus! The best California wine, as late as 1910, sold for ＄6 a case, but in those easy and pleasant days you could buy a case of bonded whisky for the same ＄6. Now it is a disillusioning and unpleasant truth that the popularity of various alcoholic beverages, the world over and throughout history, has always been in direct ratio to their alcoholic content and their price. The fiction that deep-seated racial preferences exist, that Frenchmen like wine, Germans like beer, Cubans like rum, and Americans like whisky, is nothing but fiction and has been disproved a hundred times over. Move a family from Munich to Rüdesheim or from London to Bordeaux or from Chicago to Paris, and you will have a family of wine-drinkers within twenty years. Ninety per cent of your rum-drinking Cubans come of wine-drinking Spanish stock. The Normans are French, but they drink cider like their neighbors in Devonshire across the Channel, and like the Spaniards in Asturias, for the excellent and sufficient reason that cider is cheap and wine comparatively expensive in the districts where they live.
To bring the comparison a little closer home, how can we explain, except on the basis of availability and price, the fact that the average citizen of California drinks four times as much wine as the average citizen of West Virginia or Michigan or Vermont or Texas? There is no longer, either in California or elsewhere in America, any large body of foreign-born who still cling stubbornly to the eating and drinking habits which they formed before they came to this country. The overwhelming bulk of the wine which the American public will buy and drink during the next ten years will be bought, not on account of old taste habits, but because it seems, to the present generation, to go well with American food, and because it is fairly cheap. A gallon of wine for ＄2.50, or a bottle for 60 or 70 cents, is a better buy than ＄3 gin or ＄4 whisky by any criterion, even by the tough, unpleasant, but final criterion of alcoholic content.
The important part which price plays in this matter was long ago recognized in California. Competing with spirits at 50 cents a bottle, the table wines of preprohibition days had to be cheap as well as good if they were to be sold at all, and a possible saving of three or four cents a gallon in transportation costs was a matter of major interest to the entire industry. As recently as 1910, most of the wine shipped east from California came by steamer or sailing vessel around the Horn, at some three cents a gallon plus the cost of the oak or redwood barrels in which it was customarily shipped and sold. Rail rates were considered almost prohibitive, and it was not until the first refrigerated tank car appeared in 1910 (a tank car designed for milk being used as a model) that the railroads began to play a really major role as carriers of cheap wine. At seven cents a gallon, coast to coast, these tank cars were rated at first as something pretty luxurious and expensive, and a good many of the old-school vintners continued to claim as well that a wine which had twice “crossed the line” in wood had received a sort of “aging” which time itself could not duplicate. It was more or less in support of this theory that a lady journalist, Mrs. Frona Eunice Wait, once wrote that even the Spaniards, in order to age their sherries, shipped them to “the Equator, in the Mediterranean Sea.”
The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 made wholly academic any further discussions of this sort; it also brought to light a good many novel possibilities in the field of shipping wine. By the end of 1915 plans had been completed for a double-hulled tanker which would carry wine from dockside San Francisco to dockside Brooklyn for one cent a gallon, and which would carry steel rails to California on its return voyage. Before the keel could be laid, there came the steel shortage and the war and prohibition and, so far as the California wine industry was concerned, the deluge. It is interesting, however, to note that some twenty years later the French constructed a very similar steamer, which they quite properly named the “Bacchus,” and which carried on every trip across the Mediterranean, in its capacious belly, enough Algerian wine for an army on the march.
The unhappy story of the prohibition years has no rightful place in an article such as this. Briefly, those who were unwilling to do without their claret or their vino rosso began to buy what were euphemistically called “juice grapes” in the large Eastern cities, in order to make wine at home. Now the finer wine grapes are thin-skinned and fragile—they will not stand transcontinental shipment. The demand, therefore, was for the tough, thick-skinned, and common varieties which would travel; fine vine-yard after fine vineyard was grafted over to such vines or replanted, and the superior varieties, little by little, tended to disappear. Today, fifteen years after repeal, most of this debris is still there, and even today there are fewer acres planted to superior vines in the better California districts than there were when the Eighteenth Amendment became the law of the land.
Nearly a decade and a half after its great and apparently final defeat, the California wine industry was rather abruptly called on to reform its ranks and begin where it left off. Obviously, this was altogether impossible. Most of its conscientious and honorable leaders had retired or died, many of the producers were bankrupt, the majority of its wineries were in ruins, the beautiful oak cooperage in most cellars had dried out or gone moldy through sheer neglect, the better vineyards had been regrafted or abandoned—there was less left than most Californians care, even today, to admit.
The inevitable result was a five-or six-year period of poor wine, wine so bad that much of it could not be sold at any price, even in a country where wine was a new and glamorous toy; wine made from raisin grapes or table grapes or culls, hastily and carelessly fermented; wines labeled “Sauterne” and “Moselle” and “Chablis” and “Rhine Wine,” although all four were drawn from the same tank; wines that would make a beer-drinker out of anyone who tried them, and a good many people did.
Most California producers were just a step ahead of the sheriff in those days. In 1939 grapes sold for ＄20 or ＄25 a ton, well below the cost of growing and picking them, and bankers estimated that California's wine inventory of 115, 000,000 gallons was worth an average of 24 cents a gallon, which was perhaps an exaggeration.
If the war years did nothing else, they at least put the California producers on somewhat firmer financial ground, and now that grape prices are down again we have a right to expect from our friends on the West Coast something a good deal better and a good deal cheaper than anything they have sent us since prohibition. Congress has seen fit to tax spirits at a rate which makes them no longer competitive with wine, and if California misses this chance, she may never get another so good. I do not think, however, that she will miss this chance.
Having by now (I hope) awakened a moderate thirst and a certain spirit of anticipation in my readers, I am compelled in all honesty to admit that it will probably be more difficult than it sounds to find really satisfactory American ordinaires, a least for the next few months. Such wines will certainly be produced and will certainly be for sale; the problem will be to find them, to put one's finger unerringly on precisely the right jug or precisely the right bottle in the carnival of fancy names and gay labels. To do so, we shall probably have to abandon some of our carefully nurtured prejudices.
I, for example, very much dislike buying a wine called “Chablis” unless it tastes like Chablis, or a “Claret” which resembles nothing so much as a lesser wine of the Rhone Valley. When I buy a superior American wine I insist on knowing not only where it came from, but also out of what grape it was made. When we are dealing with vin ordinaire, this is altogether out of the question. If we buy a jug labeled “Moselle” and the wine tastes likes Graves, we have no complaint so long as it tastes like good Graves. Actually, it is impossible to distinguish, either by chemical analysis or by tasting, between California Burgundy and California Claret, and the one axiomatic statement that we can make about both of them is that neither is ever made from the same grape as its prototype in France. Apart from a few regional and varietal names (Sonoma and Santa Clara; Zinfandel, Cabernet, and Riesling, for example, the former referring to districts and the latter to grape varieties) California table wine names are utterly without meaning. A producer is at liberty to call his white wine Chablis or Rhine Wine or Hock or Dry Sauterne as he sees fit, and legally he can draw all four out of the same barrel. This, of course, has nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of the wine, which may be excellent, but it does render a good deal more difficult the selection of a bottle on a wine merchant's shelves.
Before prohibition, California clarets were generally (but by no means always) lighter in color and body than Burgundies and contained a high proportion of wine made from Zinfandel grapes, whereas Burgundies were made from the Petit Syrah, the Carignane, and the Refosco. But the most celebrated “Chablis” of the 1890's was a Gray Riesling, “Moselles” were made largely from Folle Blanche (which is the cognac grape), and a half dozen more odd fish of the sort could be pulled up at will out of this wide ocean of confusion without limit or bottom.
Such nonsense need not concern us greatly when it comes to selecting a cheap wine for our daily dinner table—the producer can label it “Château Fujiyama” or “Napa Red,” providing the wine is good.
Another widespread and legitimate prejudice is one against tank-car wine. Since a certain amount of bottle age is absolutely necessary to a fine wine, and since practically everything shipped out of California in bulk and bottled in the East goes to market as soon as it is bottled, and finally since the raison d'être of tank cars is cheap transportation, we are justified in complaining if a tank-car wine is anything but cheap. But if we are buying ordinaire, we can afford to look on the despised tank car with affectionate respect—it may save us as much as a dollar a case.
All this is rather negative—perhaps a few positive suggestions would prove helpful.
First, confine your searches for vin ordinaire to wine from California. Neither in New York State nor in Ohio nor in Michigan can grapes be grown cheaply enough to permit the sale of well-made wine at much under ＄1 a bottle, and here we are talking of wine at 60 or 70 cents.
Second, try, if possible, to get a wine from one of the north coast counties—Sonoma, Napa, Santa Clara, San Benito, Alameda (which includes the Livermore Valley), and Santa Cruz. Far too much of the wine produced in the central valleys, around Lodi, Stockton, Manteca, Modesto, Madera, Fresno, and Delano, is made out of what are known as “three-way grapes.” This innocent-sounding term means a raisin grape which can be sold as a table grape when raisin prices are low or, if worst comes to worst, can be used for wine. Such wine may be passable raw material for the manufacture of cheap domestic sherry, but it goes to market all too often as Chablis or Sauterne; it is flat, neutral, and about as appetizing as colored water.
Third, remember that the post office address of a winery on a label means precisely nothing at all. A “producer” in Napa can sell unblended Fresno wine if he sees fit, and a single winery near Livermore has actually bottled and sold, in the last five years, at least twice as much wine as the whole Livermore Valley produced. If you want to be sure of the origin of your wine, insist on some appellation like Sonoma Claret or Santa Clara Zinfandel.
Fourth, if you are experimenting in an effort to find something you like, tell your wine merchant what you are doing and give him your frank and outspoken opinion of the wines you try. Other people may be doing the same thing—they can benefit by your experience and you by theirs.
A great bottle of wine, in a well-ordered house, has its quiet and respected place in the cellar, and its last mile to the execution block on the diningroom table is as hedged round with etiquette and ceremony as a Spanish bull-fight. A vin ordinaire, on the other hand, is a friendly and familiar little job, and the less etiquette the better. My own favorite way of serving it is in an earth-enware carafe, or in a wooden pichet, made out of beautifully coopered little oak staves, with a copper handle and copper lip—I bought it years ago in France. But a simple glass carafe will do as well and will give your guests and yourself the impression that you are drinking, not the fixed contents of a bottle, but as much or as little as you happen to want. Which, incidentally, is the way to drink vin ordinaire.
Belonging as it does in the kitchen, and not in the padlocked wine cellar, vin ordinaire should be consumed as one's thirst dictates, but it should never be wasted. To throw away half a bottle or half a gallon of wine is as poor housekeeping as to throw away half a chicken or half a leg of lamb. Wine, even common wine, it is true, has to be handled with a certain amount of care unless you want vinegar on your hands, but the rules for storing wine are simple and require no special equipment or special knowledge.
- Wine is liable to spoil if kept for more than a day or so at a temperature of over 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Wine will certainly spoil within a matter of hours if exposed to the air; never, therefore, try to keep a half-empty bottle or half-empty jug, even in a refrigerator, and even if corked.
- The best plan is to have on hand a collection of empty bottles of various sizes and a few corks (ordinary, conical drugstore corks will do); as soon as you open your gallon or half-gallon jug, or your full bottle, pour off the wine that you do not expect to use immediately, into one or more of your empties, and cork them, leaving not more than a quarter of an inch of air space between the wine and the cork. So rebottled, the wine will be good for at least two or three months.
- Bottled wines with corks should be stored lying down—this keeps the corks moist and tight. But such precautions are unnecessary if you expect to use the wine within less than a week.
- You can keep white vin ordinaire in the refrigerator indefinitely, but the ideal temperature is between 50 and 60 degrees. Repeated chillings, if the wine is allowed to warm up each time, will damage any wine.
- The best storage temperature for red wine is 60 degrees, but ten degrees higher or lower are of no importance to an ordinaire.
- Most jugs, gallon or half-gallon, are hermetically sealed with a screwcap, and it makes little difference whether you store them standing upright or on their side. The latter is perhaps preferable if you propose to keep them for any length of time.
- Sunlight is bad for wine, especially wine in clear white bottles or jugs.
- The cheapest way to buy wine is in gallon jugs, which come four to the case, as compared with six half-gallon jugs (3 gallons) or twelve bottles (2.4 gallons).
- Forty million Frenchmen, and an unknown number of Italians, Spaniards, and Americans, have demonstrated the fact that vin ordinaire is habit-forming. The author wishes to state in closing that you will have a hard time finding a more pleasant habit to form.