26
An Epicure Reviews the
West Coast Wine Awards

Published in 1954 by House Beautiful, Fisher offers her take on the best wine picks from the California State Fair wine competition. Unsurprisingly, she seems to favor the wines from her own backyard—Napa and Sonoma.

MOST LOVERS, ADMIRERS AND JUST PLAIN citizens of the state of California admit that it is divided by a clear if intangible Mason-Dixon line into two parts. Whether the Line crosses north or south of Santa Barbara matters a great deal to residents of that city, of course, but to the rest of the Californians it is enough that the Line exists, in everything from “climate” to “culture.”

Among the plainest examples of its subtle power are the two state fairs, one generously financed by the County of Los Angeles and lodged in a small town called Pomona, and the other held with a bow to tradition in the capital, like most other such annual American fiestas.

Each fair has its own official wine jury, to add to the split-personality problems faced by all good Californians, and only the fact that the powerful wine industry accepts both their verdicts makes any sense in the resulting confusion of doubled awards and medals, injured pride and outraged loyalties.

The juries are as disparate as their judgings: “up North,” according to benevolent critics, they are a group of honored scientists, solemnly comparing tartrates and tannic acids; “down South” they are a bunch of locally prominent amateurs, tasting for fun with the idea that most people drink for the same reason. Somewhere and somehow, between the oenologists and the comparatively untutored enthusiasts, a lot of intelligent firm judging emerges, and the medals are passed out with only a mild stir of amazement and headshaking.

1953 was no different, in this respect, from any other year: Pomona and Sacramento simply proved once more, and resoundingly, that California wines can hold their own with the finest anywhere, and that quality in the cask and bottle, as in anything else, increases with the increasing demand for it.

The tried-and-true boys, the Old Reliables like Louis Martini and Beaulieu and Inglenook, held their noble own, or better. The youngsters, like the two Mondavi brothers, who in a few years have brought the Charles Krug label back to its rightful place among the great ones, piled honor upon honor, and properly. The infants, in size if not in age, submitted modest amounts of astonishingly fine wines from their little mountain vineyards. And perhaps most significant of all, the new vogue for “signature” wines had a real chance to prove itself, which it did very proudly.

THERE HAVE BEEN SIGNED BOTTLES FOR CENTURIES, OF course. Any good wine man is glad to write his name on something he has given a good part of his life to produce. In California such minor and diverse deities in the industry as Georges de Latour and Angelo Petri have over the years launched many a good bottle with their penmanship preserved in printer’s ink upon it, and by now the obvious value of this custom has reached imposing commercial proportions.

On the one hand J. F. M. Taylor of the Mayacamas Vineyards near Napa offers to autograph Christmas bottles, but only two to a customer, of his fine Chardonnay 1951. On the other hand, three world-famous authorities on wine, one in Boston and one in Chicago and one, naturally enough, in San Francisco, offer the fruit of their annual judging under a “signature” label marked “Tasters’ Selections.” Each effort, the small and independent vintner’s and the big well-financed and well-backed promotional scheme, is a good one which in such hands should do no harm to the California wine industry, and perhaps much good. Mr. Taylor offers a kind of gastronomical curiosity of real worth; the three epicures, who taste some 200 carefully screened wines each year, are equally sure of making available fourteen or fifteen of them for general consumption, each type sound and clean and good to drink.

In between these extremes in a revived vogue for signatures, there remain the solid stalwarts who go on year after year making good wines and distributing them as widely as interstate laws and international trade agreements will permit. They are people like Herman Wente, of Wente Brothers in Livermore (two Gold Medals this year, for his Sauvignon Blanc and Sweet Semillon); the Mondavi family, whose Charles Krug Winery a little north of St. Helena in Napa County walked off with a formidable total of some forty awards at the two fairs; Joseph Concannon Jr., whose family vineyard in Livermore won Gold Medals for its Zinfandel and Haut Sauternes, and the usual Silvers and Bronzes and so on; Louis Martini in St. Helena, John Daniel of Inglenook, Peter Jurgens of the Almaden vineyards down the Peninsula in Los Gatos—these men and many more like them face the oenological whims of a comparative handful of judges each year in Sacramento and Pomona, and emerge quietly confident that their devotion to the art of wine making will go right on producing fine bottles, this year and next year and the next and the next.

JUDGES ARE AS UNPREDICTABLE AS THE INVISIBLE LINE WHICH divides Northern from Southern California, and while the “red table wines” jury in Pomona decided last autumn that the Charles Krug Cabernet was by far the noblest wine submitted to either fair, the Northerners said otherwise, in spite of the fact that the Krug entry, a 1947 of which 352 gallons were submitted fairly at both judgings, easily took a Gold Medal both times.

This would seem to mean that the Cabernet possesses unusual merit, and that it is a wine (as it is) which any man would be proud to serve as well as own, but some of the Sacramento judges were convinced, and perhaps rightly, that the king of all the wines submitted this past year was once more a Pinot Noir sent in by Beaulieu.

The odd thing about this entry is that, although it was a 1946 which had been submitted in both ’51 and ’52 with Gold Medals each time, it got only a Bronze in Sacramento in ’53 and did not even place in Pomona. Louis Martini’s placed first in Pomona and not at all up North, and Pinot Noir entries from both Inglenook and Paul Masson placed well at both fairs, ahead of this Beaulieu wine which one former judge has called “perhaps the greatest red (table wine) which has ever been submitted … since the repeal of Prohibition.” He goes on to say of it “… great by every standard: it has the true Pinot aroma, a bouquet of exceptional degree, breed, fine acid content, charm … in a word, it is distinguished.” What this passionate advocate of the Beaulieu offering of 1,700 gallons of “Beaumont”-labeled Pinot Noir at the past three fairs has probably forgotten is that other judges believe just as passionately in the virtues of a dozen others of the wines judged, and that a majority of the hundreds so judged were “good and satisfying, and wines to drink copiously.”

Some were too good to stay hidden in this agreeable medley, and stood out like bugle calls. More often than not, they got just about the medals they deserved, from both North and South, and close behind them came a symphony of fine varietals, the Gamays and Rieslings, Pinots red and white, Cabernets, Sauvignons. Then, an honorable harmony indeed, came the wines labeled Burgundy, Claret, Sauternes, Chablis, all bottled simply but never carelessly by the good wine men: wines to drink every day, they are fastidious blends of this grape and that, and make honest table wines to drink with honest food.

Red and white, Burgundy and Sauternes, they remain what more and more of us can feel free to serve, thanks to the infinite attentions of the men who produce them. And thanks to such juries as serve in Sacramento and Pomona each autumn, these vintners as well as their admirers know that for the special zest, the exciting companion in everything from a crab leg to a chop, the combined awards of the California fairs can be trusted to supply a fine firm list of exceptional wines.

Lists of all the awards in all classes can be got from the Wine Institute in San Francisco, or from the Fair Associations of Los Angeles County and/or the State of California. They can be seen in several trade journals such as Wines and Vines (September 1953), and reputable liquor stores which handle wines are able to produce one or another of these lists, if you ask for them.

Perhaps the best thing to do about procuring the wines themselves, outside of California and because of the complex interstate regulations, is to write directly to the vineyards and ask for their nearest distributors. And of course the vineyard addresses, thanks to a neat trick of Fate, are most easily gleaned from the labels on their bottles, preferably empty on the dining table—your dining table!

There is a champagne in California now selling for something over a hundred dollars a case when it can be bought at all. It is possibly the best yet produced there, because of the way it is grown and made and bottled by its meticulous owner, Martin Ray of Saratoga. There is also a champagne selling for very much less, very much less indeed: it won a Gold and Silver this year and a couple of Honorable Mentions, and wears the Sutter Home Winery Label in Brut, Pink and Sparkling (or Rouge) on good shelves in almost every part of the country.

This same contrast shows throughout the enormous industry: two signed and costly bottles of the Mayacamas Chardonnay for those who hurry and write to the vineyard … innumerable cases with the “signature” label, widely distributed and comparatively inexpensive … both excellent buys, both helping in their own way to spread the word that California wines are good wines.

If the state split itself ten ways instead of two, with ten juries even more disparate than the two existing ones, the wines would simply win ten gold medals, or ten silver or ten bronze…!