Washington Wines & Wineries

Seattle wine writer Paul Gregutt's new book Washington Wines & Wineries: The Essential Guide has just been published by the University of California Press. It is the kind of wine book that brings immediate pleasure and promises to be a useful companion in the future. I especially appreciate Gregutt's sense of history. Knowing history always helps me make better sense of what I see today.

The book is organized into three sections. The first provides background in the form of brief surveys of the history of wine in Washington, the AVAs, the grape varieties and the top ten vineyards. The chapter on grapes explains where and how each varietal fits into the Washington wine puzzle and a brief list of "best bottles." This is just about only place in the book where Gregutt (hereafter PG) ranks individual wines, which is fine with me. There are lots of places to go for wine ratings and rankings (including PG's own blog at http://paulgregutt.com/) and a book is actually the wrong place to do this because of the dynamic nature of the wine market and the less-than-dynamic time frame of book publication. Lots of interesting and useful information is presented here in a lively style.

The second section provides usefully detailed descriptions of more than 100 Washington wineries (out of the 500+ wineries currently producing). An innovation here is the use of a 100-point scale to rate the wineries (not individual wines). PG rates each producer according to style (30 points), consistency (30 points), value (30 points) and its contribution to the development and improvement of the Washington wine industry (10 points). Everything about this rating system is subjective, of course, but I find it interesting nonetheless (although I must admit that my first reaction was not so favorable -- Karen Wade encouraged me to take a second look at it and I am glad I did). Consistency and value in particular are two factors that are important to wine buyers but that do not always show up clearly in the rankings of individual wines. A reputation for consistency and value is a good thing.

The top winery in Washington? Quilceda Creek, with its perfect 100 Robert Parker point Cabernet Sauvignon, also gets a perfect PG score (30/30/30/10). Leonetti ranks second with 98 points (30/28/30/10). Columbia Crest, a volume producer, earns a surprisingly high 92 points (26/26/30/10), reflecting its good value and all that it (and Chateau Ste Michelle) have done to promote Washington wines in general.

The part of the book that is most directly relevant to this blog comes at the end, when PG considers the future of Washington wine, asking some pointed questions to industry leaders including Ted Baseler of Chateau Ste Michelle, Bob Betz, Tom Hedges, Allen Shoup and David Lake. One of the questions is, how well do Washington wines compete in the global marketplace (and how can they do better)? Here is summary of some of the responses:

1. Although Washington wines are currently exported to 40 foreign countries, the export market is not yet very significant. Most Washington wine is sold domestically.

2. Profit margins on exports are lower than on domestic sales, so at this point exports are done either for personality satisfaction (the ego factor) or as part of a long term market development strategy. There are good economic reasons to privilege domestic over foreign sales now, although that could change in the future as competition for the U.S. market intensifies.

3. It is difficult to sell Washington wines abroad because no one really knows that they are. Are they like California wines (in which case, why not just buy California wines and be done with it)? David Lake says that he tells people that Washington wines are as different from those from California as New Zealand wines are from Australian products. I think that comparison is both valid and persuasive, but ...

4) Foreign consumers generally don't know when they are buying a Washington wine because the bottle doesn't say Washington except in fine print on the back. New Zealand wines, on the other hand, typically say New Zealand clearly on the front label. New Zealand wines systematically reinforce a regional identity; Washington wines do not.

The source of Washington wines is usually listed by AVA: Columbia Valley, Yakima Valley, Red Mountain, and so forth. You and I might know that all these wines come from Washignton, but a British supermarket customer or Japanese restaurant patron probably doesn't. The AVA system that individual wineries use to differentiate their products from others in Washignton makes it more difficult for Washington wines in general to develop a clear identity of their own -- the sort of identity that's needed for successful global market penetration.

5) New Zealand's success in the global wine market is clearly on everyone's mind. New Zealand's growth was made possible by the exceptional quality of one wine: Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. That wine opened doors around the world for all New Zealand wines. That's what we need, several of the experts say, we need one distinctive Washington wine that we can promote aggressively. That signature wine will carry the rest of the industry into the global market.

Yes, yes, but which wine? Jancis Robinson famous said that Washington Merlot is as good as it gets for Merlot, but so what? She didn't seem to think that you could build a global market identity on the back of merely Merlot. (She doesn't have much that is good to say about Chardonnay, either. Don't get her started.)

6) So what wine will it be? Winemakers who have already invested a lot in establishing an identity for their products are unlikely to want to shift attention to a different varietal, AVA or designation in order to help establish an Washignton State Wine brand that is of uncertain value to them. Hard to imagine that a consensus will be easily reached.

So maybe it will be left to the market to decide. I think that's how it actually happened in New Zealand.

It would be ironic if Washington's special wine turned out to be Riesling, the varietal on which the industry was built in the 1970s and one that is experiencing a market renaissance today (Riesling is Jancis Robinson's favorite wine, I think). Washington is the world's largest producer of Riesling wines, but they don't get much respect here compared with red wines, even though some of them are very good. (Hmmm. The Germans who make great Riesling prefer to drink red wines, too.)

Maybe Riesling is it and we just haven't realized it. It would be ironic if Washington winemakers and consumers were the last to know what the region's signature wine really is!

Put a Cork in It?

To Cork or Not to Cork: Tradition, Romance, Science and the Battle for the Wine Bottle by George M. Taber. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Former Time writer and editor George Taber was the only reporter present at the famous 1976 Paris wine tasting where California wines showed that they could compete with the great wines of France. He wrote about this event and its implications is his wonderful 2005 book The Judgment of Paris, which was named best wine book of the year by Decanter magazine.

The 1976 tasting is one of those defining moments, when a great many forces, issues and personalities came together to change the way we think about the world of wine,. This book is about another defining moment, but a completely quotidian one: the moment when you open the bottle. It's something we do every day. That moment also connects us with some powerful personalities and a complex set of scientific, economic and psychological issues, which Taber explains in a way that makes this a wine-nerd book that will be read and enjoyed by a wider audience than just people like you and me. (Admit it, you must be a bit of a wine nerd to be reading this blog.)

There are all sorts of ways to keep wine in and air out of a container: natural corks, composite cork stoppers, screw caps with tin liners, screw caps with plastic liners, plastic corks of many types, elegant glass stoppers and practical soda pop crown caps. And this is only for wine in glass bottles: you can also package wine in aluminum cans, juice boxes, plastic soda bottles and bag-in-box "casks." Sealing the 20 billion bottles of wine that will be produced this year is a $4 billion business.

I learned a lot from this book. There is no best way to seal wine, there are only better ways under different circumstances with different trade-offs. Natural cork-sealed wines age and develop in the bottle, can be "corked" or suffer from TCA contamination. Plastic corks usually won't contaminate the wine, but they don't always seal tightly over time, so the wine can be oxidized after a couple of years. Screw caps are TCA-free, but they, can seal too tightly, with the result that the wine can suffer sulfur reduction, which gives it a rubbery or rotten egg smell, and screw cap wine can fail to develop as it ages. No matter what stopper winemakers use, they can never be sure that the wine they put in will be the wine that you pour out.

You might think that global wine market competition would have produced a "best practice" solution for wine closures, but the market is too complicated and diverse for that. The science may be universal, but the people (both producers and consumers the the middlemen in between) have their own quirks. In France, for example, it is hard to sell a screw top wine, at least for now, because of the strong attachment to tradition. I can appreciate this. I have friends who get great pleasure from the ritual use of elaborate corkscrews. Screwcaps leave them cold.

In Great Britain, on the other hand, it is apparently getting somewhat harder to find a natural cork in a popularly-priced wine because the supermarket buyers, who wield such market power, are strongly biased in favor of plastic and screw top closures. Like many in the business, they have been burned too many times by problems they associate with bad corks. Here in the United States there is some evidence of the market bifurcating, with plastic and screw tops for wines bought for early consumption (under $20) and high quality corks for expensive and age-worthy bottles.

Taber ends his book with an indirect commentary on wine globalization, which is worth noting here given this blog's theme. Finding a solution to the wine closure dilemma is a worldwide problem and the global market competition is forcing the stopper makers to innovate and make better and better closures and forcing winemakers to get better, too, since they can no longer automatically blame any flaws in their wines on bad corks. "Unfettered competition," he writes, "remains a powerful driving force for good."

I think Taber is right but for now I'm just standing here in the basement, looking with suspicion at the wine in my little cellar, trying to guess what is going on beneath the lids. Having read Taber's book, I now know enough to be anxious about each and every bottle!