Of Wine and Vinegar
When Does a Wine Taste Like Chicken?

– By Cai Palmer –

Do you remember when you first saw a knobby-looking green fruit that purported to be an apple, but wasn't perfect? It might not have been entirely red, wasn't a perfect circle or all shiny as if someone had just polished it with Pledge. It was actually an “organic” apple, grown without clouds of spray, and it tasted deliciously of ... apple.
How does this relate to the world of wine? Think ‘small grower production wines’. Families who make wine because it is their heart and soul will probably make a better wine than the conglomerate whose concern is profit above all else.

Not that we’re knocking conglomerates. Without their commitment to producing the most wine at the lowest cost and for the highest possible margin, many wine areas, especially in this country, would never have begun life. The wine industry in Washington State in the early 1980s was little more than a handful of hopefuls trying to make an impression on the world with their miniscule production of slightly overworked wines. Along came a man from Gallo, Allen Shoup, who in 1979 joined Chateau Ste. Michelle. During his tenure, a 4,000-acre region of unsung vineyards was transformed into 30,000 productive acres.

Then something interesting happened. Shoup retired from St. Michelle and began a second career. He built five wineries along the Snake River in the Columbia Valley. “Build it and they will come” was his motto. He invited several of the world’s most celebrated vintners to make wine at his wineries and with his grapes; and he allowed them free reign so that their personalities may be reflected in each of the wines. Five sensational wines, none of which have a case production of more than 1,750. Allen Shoup went from producing tens of millions of bottles a year to creating fewer than 6,000 cases of treasured wines from the world’s greatest wine makers.

Back home in England where I grew up, Sunday lunch meant Sunday roast. Some weeks we would have a juicy, bleeding standing prime rib, other weeks it would be perfectly moist roast pork with a thick layer of crackling, but the roast I enjoyed the most was chicken. Back then, chicken tasted of chicken. It was discernible. It was the King of Sunday Roasts! Nowadays, I’m practically a vegetarian. I don’t miss the watered-down, overly-steroidal birds that land in the oven. Nor do I miss the fact that many meats pretty much taste the same. Take a bland, synthetically-raised, 100% lean (how do they do that?) pork chop. Compare it blind with an equally bland, supermarket-processed chicken breast. Can you taste the difference?

In the world of wine this mass processing has led to the absolute disintegration of the grape.

A prime example of where grower-produced wines excel over their homogenized siblings is in the region of Champagne, north east of Paris, France. Champagne can only be made from three grapes, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay. The regulations surrounding the manufacture of Champagne are some of the most stringent in any wine making region, anywhere in the world. And yet the popularity of Champagne has exceeded most makers’ wildest dreams.

Now take Veuve Cliquot. One of the most heavily-branded and recognized champagnes in the world – it’s commonly called Agent Orange by those who would prefer not to sell it! Guesstimates of their annual production run to the tens of millions of bottles.

By contrast, small growers, or ‘recoltant-manipulants’, handcraft their limited quantities of champagne from individual villages and parcels where the inherent qualities of the vineyard imprint themselves into the wines. Theirs is a life-work in a bottle. These champagnes are, in my opinion, some of the greatest wines in the world. Their names are not household bywords – Christian Etienne, Chartogne-Taillet, Benoit-Lahaye, to name a few.

This holiday season, take a moment to think what is more important: a bottle of bubbly that everyone recognizes and as such takes for granted, or a bottle of something special made by the man who owns the farm and adds the passion that branded champagnes lack. When you taste true champagne, you will appreciate that all wine does not have to taste like chicken.