When a car company decides to make a major change in the way an updated model’s engine is designed to operate, more than likely the vehicle also gets a major change in how it looks.
Cosmetic changes do have a way of attracting new buyers, some of whom are so in love with the new image or color schemes that they could not care less about how the car performs. But most buyers are eager to learn about the additional performance features.
Wine does not really conform to this model. Occasionally, a wine undergoes a major change in style, and the label doesn’t indicate this. Or, conversely, the label changes radically, but the wine stays exactly the same.
For various reasons, wineries like to maintain a certain consistency in how their wines are perceived from vintage to vintage. Making radical changes can turn off regular consumers who are reliant on the brand delivering what it did a year ago.
Yet in its purest form, wine ought to change from year to year, depending on how mother nature dealt with the fruit in the vineyard and accounting for variations that were inevitable in the winery. Wine purists do not expect identicality from one year to the next. Similarity is fine; minor changes are inevitable. Purists accept that.
Other changes can occur slowly over time, such as how the climate has changed in the past 30 years, leading to some of the changes we have seen in all regions where wine is a staple commodity.
Around 1980, the Carneros district south of Napa and Sonoma, bridging the county line, was a classic region for chardonnay and pinot noir grapes. The wines from them were often spoken of as parallels to France’s Burgundy.
This is because the district, still highly regarded for growing wine grapes, has cooling breezes coming up from San Pablo Bay. It still produces attractive wines from the same two grapes. But decades later, global climate change has increased Carneros’ temperature slightly, making it less likely that its wines will be compared to Burgundy.
Similarly, Sonoma County’s handsome Russian River Valley continues to make superb wines. But over the past 30 years, it was found that the area could make sensational pinot noirs, making other grape varieties less profitable.
As a result, other grape varieties have suffered by being removed from vineyards, including zinfandel, gewurztraminer, sauvignon blanc, and cabernet sauvignon. Today, the Russian River Valley really is a two-wine region.
Living in Northern California, I have witnessed these changes. But a lot of the wine education that has been so important to the industry has shifted. Books published 30 years ago about wine, regardless of where, may have referred only to what occurred when they were written.
This includes changes in the style of many different wines. California’s cabernets of the 1970s and 1980s mostly had alcohol levels of about 13 percent and were designed to go with food or be aged for years in a wine cellar.
Starting about 25 years ago, California’s best cabernets began to offer a minimum of 14.5 percent alcohol with many well above 15 percent. Moreover, these wines were made to be consumed sort of like cocktails. They didn’t work with food very amenably.
Recently, I read an article in a major magazine that described cabernet as a wine to go with beef. That vague reference ignored that beef may well be found in Mexican, Thai, and Indian dishes whose seasonings are better paired with either beer or a white wine.
The changes we have seen in wine in just the past few years cannot be ignored, but wine education has, for the most part, relied on cliches that aren’t educational. Mainly, they are myth-making.
