In the summer, except on extraordinarily clear mornings, you can hardly ever see the Sierras from the Valley towns, Lodi and Stockton and Madera—and even when you can see them, it is easy to mistake them for clouds. They stretch interminably along the eastern horizon like the cumulous formations of a distant storm. Below them and in front of them and around you is the shimmering, incandescent haze of the San Joaquin summer.
The west wind generally rises about noon; it blows furiously over the parched fields and whistles through the irrigated orchards and vineyards until after sunset, like a desert wind. The heat is almost as oppressive in the shade as in the sun, and you find it hard to believe that you are less than a hundred miles from foggy San Francisco and the cool Pacific.
Paralleling the Sierra Nevada, watered by dozens of little rivers that are swollen in hot weather with melting snow, irrigated and enormously fertile, the Valley, as far as grapes are concerned, stretches from Lodi to Bakersfield, nearly two hundred and fifty miles. From the point of view of the wine-drinker, this district is a major menace and, at the same time, a potential source of almost limitless quantities of inexpensive wine. It is the principal battlefield of the wine industry in this country.
Obviously, even in the lush days of the wartime wine boom, no one ever considered planting this whole area, or even half of it, to grapes. There are, for example, the “asparagus islands” near Stockton in the Delta, where Filipino laborers are paid thirty dollars a day to cut “grass” under the blinding summer sun; there is “tomato land,” around Tracy, which nourishes the vast, modern Heinz ketchup plant; and a dozen other little districts, equally well defined, have their own specialties and their own years of prosperity and depression.
Basically, however, it is the price of grapes—table grapes, raisin grapes, and wine grapes (for the three are emphatically not the same)—which determines the economy of the Valley and decides whether the demand is to be for new Cadillacs or for second-hand Chevrolets, for air-conditioned ranch houses or for Quonset huts. Grapes in the Valley, within ten years, have sold for as little as ＄15 and as much as ＄140 a ton. Growing them is one of the most speculative agricultural businesses in the world.
In almost all wine-producing countries except the United States, the people who grow grapes make wine. In America, especially in California's Great Central Valley, the farmers sell their grapes by the ton, know practically nothing about wine, and rarely drink it. Wine bottles are as rare on the tables of restaurants in Lodi, Stockton, and Fresno as on the tables of similar restaurants in New Haven, Grand Rapids, and Des Moines. In Burgundy, the Chianti district, and the Douro Valley, wine is the lifeblood as well as the livelihood of a whole countryside; in the Valley, grapes are a crop. The price per ton in a given year has nothing to do with the quality of that year's vintage—grapes are grapes, and their value is governed as remorselessly by supply and demand as the price of a bushel of wheat or corn on the Chicago exchange.
Unlike wheat and corn, however, grapes have to be sold when fresh or must be immediately converted, and they can be stored in only one of three forms—raisins, brandy, or wine. Now, marketable raisins can be made only from certain varieties of grapes, notably the Thompson Seedless. Commercial brandy (as distinguished from fine brandy, cognac, or Armagnac) can be made from any grapes, even culls; and wine of a sort, though not very good wine, to be sure, can be made from almost any grapes, even from those originally and properly destined for the table or for the drying trays of a raisin company. Among Valley growers not interested in quality, the most popular varieties these days are what are known as “three -way grapes,” which can be sold as table grapes when the market is favorable, or as raisins when raisins are high, or, if worst comes to worst, can be converted into wine. No one, needless to say, ever made fine wine out of a three-way grape.
And yet, beyond any question, good wine can be made in the Valley. Not, perhaps, superior table wine, which requires a more temperate climate in America, as abroad. But certainly a far better aperitif wine than most of the California sherry we have so far seen, a better dessert wine than most California port now on the market, and perhaps eventually something unique and American and fine. Granted a few more years, and a dozen producers more interested in their eventual reputation than in their immediate profits, all that the Valley really needs is a willingness on the part of the consumers to pay a small premium for something out of the ordinary. The Sweet Wine Country, as far as quality is concerned, is virgin soil. It will produce wines precisely as good as the American consumer demands, and no better.
Speaking of consumer preferences, it is important to remember that three-quarters of the wine drunk in this country is not table wine, not wine drunk with meals, but sherry, port, muscatel, angelica, and the like. This is what they call “sweet” wine in California, and it comes from the Sweet Wine Country.
The term sweet wine is obviously a misnomer—a dry sherry is classified in California as a sweet wine, and a sweet sauterne as a dry. But basically the distinction is pretty clear—a dry wine (or table wine) contains less than 14 per cent of alcohol by volume and involves a government tax of three cents a bottle; a sweet wine (including the driest of dry sherries) generally runs 19 ½ per cent of alcohol or better and involves a government tax of twelve cents.
The British, who are considerably more forthright and less euphemistic when it comes to nomenclature, call sherry, port, Madeira, Marsala, and the like “fortified” wines, which is quite accurate, since all of them have been fairly liberally laced with brandy. But the term fortified is for some reason anathema in California; its use on labels and in advertising has even been legally restricted; so we get sweet wine, dessert wine, and aperitif or appetizer wine, all of which are at least partially inaccurate and none of which really tells the whole story.
Compared to table wine, the production and use of which date back to the early dawn of civilization, sweet wines or fortified wines are comparative parvenus. They were first produced because the poorly made table wines of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a tendency to spoil when shipped, young and in barrel, from Spain, Portugal, and southern France to northern Europe. Dosed with brandy, these wines arrived in what was then considered good condition. Another important early advantage which fortified wines possessed was their sweetness; a fortified sweet wine (and I am here using the word sweet in its ordinary, nontechnical sense) can generally be shipped without much danger of spoilage. On the other hand, it would be a bold vintner, even today, who would ship a young sweet table wine (such as a Chateau Yquem or an Auslese from the Rhineland) in barrel, let alone in tank car. Except in wine-producing districts, therefore, a sweet wine was always, until comparatively recently, a fortified wine. And a great many people, including almost all inexperienced wine-drinkers, prefer a wine when it is sweet.
A final great and still existing advantage which fortified wines possess is that they do not, once opened, almost immediately go sour. A half-empty bottle of Rhine wine or claret is undrinkable after seventy-two hours; sherry and port and Madeira will lose a good deal in a decanter, especially in bouquet, but they will be altogether potable a week after the cork is drawn.
Favored by practical considerations such as these, fortified wines have acquired a dominant place in almost all countries which are not, on the whole, wine-producing and wine-consuming. Of these, unfortunately, the United States is one. Sherry is not the national beverage of Spain, nor port of Portugal nor Marsala of Italy. Yet most of what we consume in America in the way of wine is fortified wine from the Sweet Wine Country of California.
This may be as good a time as any to give, in some detail, a description and definition of our American sweet wines vis-a-vis their European archtypes or counterparts. If the comparison is in most cases to our national disadvantage, we have only ourselves to blame. Had we insisted on something better, we would certainly have got it. But most of the growers of the Great Central Valley, like most of the vintners who buy the Valley grapes, have never demonstrated either an inclination to acquire or a willingness to copy the knowledge and methods of their better competitors abroad. Happily, there are a few important exceptions, but the average California sherry producer has no real idea of how sherry is made in Spain. California ships some thirty million gallons of port a year, but less than 1 per cent of it is made from the celebrated grape varieties of the Douro Valley—the Tinta. Madeira, the Tinta Cao, the Tinta Amarella, and the Bastardo. Nor have the sweet-wine producers shown much in the way of imagination or ingenuity in the creation of new and distinctive American types of wine. They have (again with a few exceptions) been content to follow the line of least resistance, and the least resistance, so far, has been consumer resistance. For anything in the way of genuine progress which has been made, we can thank, principally, the Department of Viticulture of the University of California.
The sweet wines of California are as follows:
Sherry (including dry sherry, cream sherry, etc.)
Flor Sherry (extremely promising but still rare)
Port (including white port)
Muscatel
Malaga
Angelica
Tokay
Madeira
Marsala
Of these, the last two, California Madeira and California Marsala, are now so disprized that they were not even included in the list of recognizable and distinctive wine types at the California State Fair in the summer of 1947. Made from entirely different grapes, by methods completely unlike those employed in Sicily and in Madeira, they have never been anything but imitations, with little or no right to the names they bore. They will probably disappear, and the sooner the better.
The same thing can be said, on the whole, of Angelica, Malaga, and Tokay.
Genuine Tokay is not a fortified wine. It is made in a small, specially favored district in Hungary from a grape known as the Furmint which is not grown, except on an experimental scale, in California. It is sometimes dry but more often fairly sweet, especially when intended for export; the method of its production is unique and certainly not imitable under the climatic conditions of California. It runs from 9 per cent alcohol to about 13 per cent.
One of the most popular table grapes of California—with large bunches of oval, slightly pinkish, firm-fleshed berries—is known, for no good reason so far as anyone is aware, as the Tokay or Flame Tokay. It is a wretched wine grape and hardly ever used for wine.
California Tokay wine, however, is in most cases not made from the California Tokay grape, and certainly not from the Furmint of the real Tokay country. It is generally a blend of angelica and sherry, with a little port added to give it a pinkish color. It runs from 19 ½ to 21 per cent alcohol, and it is nothing that deserves a place in a respectable cellar.
Angelica (and here is an American invention, though surely one of which we have no reason to be very proud) would be classified in most countries not as a wine but as a mistelle, or fortified grape juice. It is extremely sweet, highly alcoholic, generally sold when quite young since it gains nothing with age, golden in color, and usually made from the commoner varieties of red grape in the mass-production areas. It, too, deserves to disappear.
Malaga takes its name from the city of Malaga on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. But the predominant grape of this Spanish district is the Pedro Ximenes, which is as unknown in California as the Furmint of true Tokay. The Malaga grape, in California, is an excellent and popular table grape, quite incapable of yielding any wine worth drinking. Malaga wine, however, in this country, is neither made from the Malaga grape nor from the grape of Malaga (the Pedro Ximenes). In most cases it is nothing more or less than a heavily baked, extremely sweet, dark-colored California sherry. As such, and carrying the name of Malaga, it is a monstrosity.
It is possible to deal rather more kindly and speak somewhat more hopefully of all of the other California sweet wines except one. That one, and I am afraid it is a really hopeless one, is California white port. Even in Portugal, white port is regarded as a freak, but at least it has the golden color of well-made, sweet white wine. In California, it can be as pale as gin, like bleached angelica. I have never tasted a fair, let alone a good, one; it is only with difficulty that I shall ever be persuaded to taste another.
And now, having kept the best for the last, let us speak of pleasanter things.
Excellent sherry, especially Flor sherry, which is light, clean, dry, and pale, can be made in California out of the proper grapes, with proper aging in small cooperage, and with proper care. Good port can be made if real attention is paid to the essential details: grape varieties, careful vinification, the use of good sound brandy for fortification, intelligent blending, and adequate aging in small oak casks, not in twenty- or fifty-thousand-gallon tanks of redwood or concrete. Good muscatel can be made in California, but with two or three possible exceptions, no muscatel the world over ever ranked as a distinguished wine. And until some gifted wine-producer, endowed with imagination and great patience, arrives through trial and error at something new, this, I am afraid, is the whole California sweet wine story—three potentially good wines, or perhaps two and a half. No amount of billboard advertising and no singing commercials can add to this story even half a line.
Still, if we ever make in California three good fortified wines, or even two and a half, we shall be doing better than any European country has ever done. And along these lines there is some encouraging progress to report.
More and more often we are beginning to see, if not on the front at least on the back label of better California sherries, the grape name Palomino. This is the admirable variety responsible for almost all Spanish sherries; its increasing use in California and the pride that those who grow it are beginning to take in the name are favorable omens indeed. The Federal regulations have recently been amended to permit the production of 17 ½ per cent sherry (dry sherries generally taste hot and coarse if much over 18 per cent) and there is reason to believe that the obsolete and ridiculous California State regulations, which require 19 ½ per cent of all sweet wines, will shortly be corrected to the same end. A few enterprising producers have gone so far as to set up genuine soleras (of which more later), using oak sherry butts, imported from Spain, for the purpose. And most important of all, the technicians of the University of California at Berkeley and Davis have brought over from Jerez cultures of the Flor yeasts which are responsible for the basic character and flavor of Spanish sherry, and have made these available to all producers who are genuinely trying to make something, in California, which tastes like sherry from Spain.
If there was one single suggestion which an innocent consumer might make, in the interest of better quality, to those who are responsible for California sweet wines today, it would be that they take a trip to Europe. The most extraordinary misconceptions imaginable concerning wine production in Europe and the European wine trade exist in California, and have existed for generations. Since the days of Frona Eunice Wait, who wrote a half century ago that the Spaniards take the sherries “for aging, to the equator, in the Mediterranean Sea” (the equator being some three thousand miles from the Mediterranean), California has had little but misinformation about its European contemporaries. The ridiculous old fable, to the effect that California wines, before prohibition, were shipped to France and then back to this country as French wines, is still repeated by a certain number of native sons who have never ventured to taste a Chambertin or a Chateau Latour. And I have repeatedly been informed by vintners in the Great Central Valley that Spanish sherries owe their character and flavor to the fact that they are “weathered,” or left for a period of months or years in casks out in the sun and wind and rain.
This last absurd notion is said to have had its origin in the publication of a photograph in some obscure viticultural paper, prior to prohibition. The photograph showed the courtyard of a bodega, or wine shop, in the Sherry Country, and the whole courtyard, up to the very doors of the low buildings in the back- ground, was full of barrels.
Until recently, all of the principal sherry shippers of Spain exported most of their wine in butt or cask. They had their own vast cooperage shops and made most of the barrels they used; many of them still do. As these barrels are manufactured, they have to be put some place, and when space is short, they are left in the courtyard. Nevertheless, one snapshot of a few hundred casks, almost certainly empty, served to create a legend, and a fair number of well-meaning producers set out to produce “Spanish-type” sherry by a method as unknown in Jerez as it ever was in America. In many cases what they turned out was far better than average—the wine at least had the benefit of a few months in small oak barrels—but it was not “Spanish-type” sherry by a jugful.
The true method by which Spanish sherry is made is fairly complicated, and the interested consumer need pay attention only to its broad lines: Sherry, abroad, is a fortified wine, made generally from Palomino grapes. It is fermented and developed with the aid of a special yeast, known as a flor or “flower,” which is native to the sherry district although nonexistent in most other wine-producing areas; it is aged in 132- gallon barrels, rather than in large tanks or vats, and it is blended and finished in what is known as a solera. This word, certain Californians to the contrary notwithstanding, has no connection with the Spanish sol, or sun. It is defined in most dictionaries as the “mother liquor of wine”; in practice, it means nothing more or less than a pile of barrels.
There can be fifteen butts or fifteen hundred in a solera; they can be arranged in three tiers or four or five, and the wines that they contain can be comparatively young or extremely old. The important and essential facts are these: first, a solera is never empty; second, the young wine goes into the barrels in the top tier while the old wine for bottling is drawn out of the bottom tier; third, each tier save the highest (and youngest) is replenished out of the tier above; fourth, no more than half, and preferably no more than a third, of the wine in the lowest casks is ever drawn off for bottling at one time; fifth, only wines of a predetermined quality and type are used to refill the barrels in the highest tier.
What the solera does, therefore, and does incomparably well, is blend to type. The selected young wines mingling constantly with their elders and betters, ac- quire graces and qualities—in brief, a finish—which they would never acquire by themselves. And it is only through the use of soleras that the great sherry houses are able to ship, year after year, under a given label, an absolutely consistent and unvarying wine.
And now back to California.
A few of the finer California sherries are made from the Palomino grape, which thrives and bears well in the Great Central Valley; most of the cheaper ones, unfortunately, are made from the Thompson Seedless.
Flor yeast, brought over from Spain and made available by the University of California, is used in sherry-making by perhaps a dozen producers in all, and by most of them on an experimental scale. The results are quite surprising, and the best West Coast Flor sherries are astonishingly similar in character and flavor to the light, dry Finos, Montillas, and Amontillados of Spain. Once they can legally be shipped at 18 per cent, rather than at 19 ½ per cent alcohol, they will be even closer to their Spanish prototypes. But only a fraction—alas!—of California sherry is so made or will be so made in the next five or ten years. The commercial sherries produced in this country are “cooked” or “baked”—heated, that is to say, to somewhere between 120 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit and held at this temperature for a period of several weeks. Their sherry flavor is really the taste of oxidized and caramelized white wine; the result can be fairly good, but it is certainly no very close approximation of what is known as sherry in Spain.
This cooking or baking process is not infrequently employed abroad. It plays a major role, although with a good many refinements, in the production of most Madeira, most Marsala, and some Malaga. But it has no connection with the making of sherry, except possibly of certain very heavy, sweet brown sherries which are no great credit to their name. The cooked taste of a mediocre California sherry is easy to recognize; it is the unmistakable hallmark of a poor wine.
Perhaps more than any other wines, sherries and their brothers and cousins improve when stored in oak. The unpleasant woody taste of a claret or Burgundy long in barrel becomes altogether agreeable and quite different in a sherry similarly kept, and without such aging no sherry ever acquires much in the way of finesse or balance. Small oak casks, unfortunately, are the exception rather than the rule in wineries in the Sweet Wine Country; most young wines are stored and educated, so to speak, in concrete or redwood; and really advanced institutions, such as soleras, are almost unknown. It has nevertheless been demonstrated that California wines gain as much through solera blending as the most lordly Amontillados of Spain. Ten years from now, it is quite possible that we shall have soleras in every Valley winery; such is certainly not the case, by a long, long way, today.
Meanwhile, the thing to look for in California sherries is progress in this general direction: the word Palomino on a front or back label, an indication that flor yeast has been used, that the wine has been stored in small oak barrels, or finished and blended by the solera system. These, basically, are the steps toward what can and will eventually be a distinguished aperitif wine made in this country.
Year in and year out, more port than sherry is produced in California. Only the worst of it is as bad as bad California sherry, but even the best of it is nowhere near so close to its European counterpart as is good Flor sherry. Port, in Portugal, is made from grapes grown in steep, picturesque vineyards in the Douro Valley, almost all of them planted to one of four or five or six varieties of grape. No California port, produced in commercial quantities, is made from any one of these grapes. Instead, we get port made out of almost every variety of grape used for table wine (Zinfandel, Carignane, Grenache, Petit Sirah), out of grapes which have no virtue except the color they can impart to a wine too pale (Salvador, Alicante Bouschet), and out of grapes which have no attraction except the fact that they are cheap.
No less than sherry, good port is completely transformed by proper aging in small barrels. Very like the standard 132-gallon butt of the Sherry Country, although tapering a little more sharply at both ends, the traditional port “pipe,” or cask, is invariably of oak, and the ruby and tawny ports of Portugal spend a minimum of three years in such containers, the true tawnies generally nearer six than three.
At least 50 per cent of the port produced in California is less than two years old when it goes to market, and certainly less than 10 per cent of it has ever been in oak, let alone in barrels as small as the pipes of Oporto. It is legally and perhaps therefore legitimately-? sold as port in this country; most of it is about as different from what is shipped out of the storied wine lodges of Villa Nova de Gaia as a red, sweet, fortified wine well could be.
The things to look for in California port are therefore indications that some special care and attention have been given to its manufacture, such as the name of a specific grape on the label—the Tinta Cao, the Tinta Madeira (let us hope that some such name as Tinta Port is created one of these days), the Trousseau, which was well known before prohibition, or even the fairly ordinary Grenache. Any statement regarding age or storage in oak is likely to be equally significant, since the Federal Government is a pretty strict censor of such claims. Really fine California port is not likely to appear on the market for another five or six years; it is on its way, and the apprentices are worthy of encouragement and patronage.
Muscatel, by definition, is a wine made from one of the muscat grapes. But sparkling moscato is made both in Italy and in Chile; a sound dry muscat is produced in California's Napa Valley, and the most famous wine of the island of Elba is a sweet red muscatel called Aleatico. The muscat, in short, is not a grape but a whole family of grapes, all with the unmistakable family characteristic of an easy-to-recognize bouquet and flavor, but varying enormously as to quality and yield.
The best, as far as wine is concerned, are the muscat of Canelli and the muscat of Frontignan. Experts have more than once described them as identical. The Frontignan branch of the family is grown along the Mediterranean coast of France, around Frontignan and Lunel, and yields a rich, golden, honey-sweet dessert wine which is certainly fine but to many palates a little cloying. The Canelli cousins produce the famous Est Est Est wine of Montefiascone and in their native Piedmont, around Canelli, give a wine used in the making of Ital- ian vermouth. A local bard once expressed the high esteem in which the Canelli muscat is held in Piedmont, in the following terms:
Ma lodato
Celebrato
Coronato
Sia l'eroe che nelle vigne
Di Petraia e di Castello
Pianto prima il Moscadello
This, in case your Italian is rusty, means that “the hero who first planted the muscat grape in the vineyards of [two rather insignificant villages called] Petraia and Castello should be crowned, celebrated, and praised.”
Less than 5 per cent of California muscatel is made out of the muscats of Frontignan and Canelli, and practically none from the best red grape of the family, the Aleatico of Elba. What we get on the West Coast is the muscat of Alexandria, a good table grape often used for raisins, but a very poor wine grape by any standards. A few pro- ducers, notably Beaulieu, have tried fairly successfully to make superior wine from the muscat of Frontignan, and a few, less profitably, to concentrate on the muscat of Canelli. I have yet to see a good California Aleatico on the market, but it will come before long, and all of these steps, so obviously in the right direction, should be encouraged. Apart from these, California muscatel can hardly be taken seriously by anyone who knows and loves fine wine.
California's Sweet Wine Country, as I have said, is virgin soil. It will produce what it is capable of producing only when those of us who can tell good from bad insist on receiving its best.