Whine Country
On seeing a snapshot and not an end state
I was in Discourse Magazine recently, writing about a visit to the wine country on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Spoiler: we didn’t like the wine (except for the famous ice wine, which actually requires cold weather to make):
We’d booked a small tour and found that we were the only people under 60 on the tour, save a young woman accompanying her mother. Were all the young people joyriding around wine country in their private cars? Or were they not going at all? The introductions and the guide’s ongoing remarks were hokey stuff. The sort of G-rated raunch—“I was married, once—and I’m never doing it again!”—that kept reminding me I was among the very few people under 60.
The tour was fun. And it looked like wine country. But I’m not sure it tasted like wine country. The trappings were there: vineyards, barrels, well-appointed rustic tasting rooms, full slates of red and white, bottles draped in medals which, somehow, find their way into nearly every tasting room I’ve ever seen.
But the wines themselves were underwhelming. I didn’t want them to be; I wanted to be impressed. I tried to put the best gloss on them. Wine glass half-full, if you will. But it was difficult.
People will say the wine is getting better. That just makes me wonder what they were making 20 or 30 years ago, and why anybody bought it.
But I don’t entirely mean that. I observe in the piece that winemaking is manufacturing, in a sense, as much as it is agriculture. There’s a tremendous amount of hard-earned accumulated experience that goes into it. The Old World has centuries of winemaking experience; California has decades. Most other places only have 10, 20, 30 years of making wine with modern methods and at real volume. I wonder, then, how we can really know if we’re looking at poor wine region, or the very beginning of a climb that could end at Bordeaux or Napa Valley.
The article is about wine but I gave a specific manufacturing example:
If this sounds a little bit like manufacturing, that’s because, in a lot of ways, the same principles are in operation. An industry is a body of accumulated knowledge. There is a reason the first electronics out of South Korea, or even Japan, were junky, while today a “made in Korea” or “made in Japan” stamp is a mark of high quality. Ditto “Napa Valley.” Maybe one day, “Niagara” or “Maryland” will be, too.
Friendly laws, raw talent and accumulated experience can together produce something almost like magic. You can almost begin to transcend circumstances and conditions; you can almost squeeze water from a rock. Or maybe catch lightning in a wine bottle.
One example of that knowledge is figuring out which grapes and styles work best in a given climate. We’ve had a lot of thin, sour, flat wine from places like Maryland and New Jersey, and that’s what the Niagara wines were mostly like too. Maybe the making knowledge isn’t there, but most likely the climate just can’t support whatever the winemaker was going for.
The same was true of Virginia wine 10 or 20 years ago, at least based on what I’ve read and experienced. Basically, a lot of it was just poor California-style imitations. Nowadays, a good number of Virginia wineries have found their groove, and you can get some very full, lush wines that are just different from a good California bottle. Maybe a different winemaking method, but largely a different set of grapes (viognier, traminette, cabernet franc, chambourcin).
Pinot noir and zinfandel don’t grow well out here. There’s a Virginia winery that makes a wonderful pinot noir with West Coast grapes, and there’s a Maryland winery that makes a credible but not incredible zinfandel, supposedly the only estate-grown zinfandel in the state, probably for good reason.
The other piece of this, aside from time and knowledge, is regulation which suppresses the accumulation of that knowledge. Virginia might be better suited for wine, as Virginia winemakers will tell you, but it’s also roughly a couple of decades ahead of Maryland on the deregulation/industry experience journey. Look at this:
Maryland, with a not terribly different climate [from Virginia], has a tougher regulatory environment. Direct shipping of wine was only permitted in 2011. One writer related the general regulatory situation as of a few years ago: “Wineries were permitted to have tasting rooms in 2000 (subsequently improved with the Maryland Winery Modernization Act in 2010), to ship directly to consumers in 2011, and to sell at farmers markets in 2013.”
No tasting rooms until the year 2000! When you make a business that onerous, you slow down its development. “Deregulation” is a really bland way of saying “Give people the room to be experiment and be creative, and you never know what they’ll come up with.” It’s not corporate profits I’m thinking about when I think about cutting regulations like this. It’s the cultivation of human excellence and passion.
Read the whole piece, and if you’re a wine person, tell me about the state of the industry and craft in your place!
Related Reading:
You Never Know How It Falls Apart
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Addison - I think you’d find this article interesting about Missouri wine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/man-saving-americas-forgotten-grapes-180983239/
I feel like Arizona wines are in the same place you describe - I want them to be better than they are! Though the few who are starting to get their groove are producing heavier wines than I generally like (eg Stronghold's Tempranillo) and that may be what we're going to get in a relatively hot region.