The First Three Glasses Were Fine
Industry estimates say that 5%+ (some say much higher) of all cork finished wines are spoiled by TCA infected corks and nowhere near that many bottles are returned to restaurants and wholesalers. That of course means that the vast majority of these faulted wines are consumed, with the drinker either not paying attention or thinking that producer makes crappy wine. Take a second to really smell a wine, which should smell of fresh clean fruit, not old moldy books.
Tasting Walla Walla
An impressive group of Walla Walla's winemakers recently cruised through town and hosted a fairly definitive tasting of the wines of this exciting AVA. Over forty wineries showed a full range of their wines to some eight hundred wine enthusiasts and trade.
Such opportunities bring out the focused madman of my personality and, foolishly, I seriously attempted to attack the room by varietal. Saving the whites for last, which I always think is a good strategy in mass tastings, I first powered through the merlots, circling the room and skipping other wines so as to focus my attention on that variety. Completing the merlots, I headed back to confront the cabernets, which I followed by the blends.
Once again, I confirmed the truth about these mass tastings. That is, that the wineries in the second half of the alphabet, in general, make less interesting wines than those in the first half.
I'm a pro, obsessed with tasting, with three decades of tasting experience and I can't do it. The wines offered by tables in the last half of these tasting marathons just don't have a chance to show well. While a great promo for the AVA, this was certainly no place to judge the quality of the wines or make buying decisions. These mega-tastings should only be considered social events, with a good time for all the only goal, but getting anything but the most general impressions of a certain wine's quality is all that you can hope to discern. Recognize these events as the promotional cocktail parties they are and leave your tasting notes book at home.
Saturday Suppers at the Gelbers
While Teri worked her wizardry in the kitchen we sipped on 1996 Argyle Willamette Valley Extended Tirage Brut, a stunning wine, which I recently wrote about, with olives and fresh roasted almonds. This lovely wine mingling with the aromas of Teri’s cooking put our taste buds into high alert for what was to come.
To match Teri’s luxurious lentil soup, which was followed by fragrant roasted chicken tossed with arucola and gigantic fresh croutons (that must have contained something addicting as I still crave them), Christopher selected two contrasting wines from the last decade.
Older California pinot noir can often be suspect, but this bottle of 1996 Williams Selyem Olivet Lane Pinot Noir was not one of the usual suspects. Despite its 15% alcohol this wine was surprisingly refined and balanced. Sure it had a bit of heat in the finish, but the layers of earthy complexity were more than rewarding enough to make up for it. This is a wine that has completed itself and should be consumed soon.
While the pinot noir was a delicate wine made in a big style, the next wine was just the opposite. The 1998 Alain Voge Cornas Vielles Vignes is as graceful, balanced and refined as a syrah can get. Richly earthy and meaty throughout and laced with a freshly crushed black pepper tang, this now fully mature wine has more grace than brawn and proves that syrah has far more to offer than simple raw power. Perhaps this wine is just past its peak, but what a peak it must have been for this is still an outstanding wine.
With an assortment of French, Oregon and Italian cheeses arrived a bottle of Château d’Arlay Red Macvin from France’s Jura region, which is produced from unfermented pinot noir juice blended with one third marc-brandy, much like Cognac’s Pineau de Charentes . The brandy is mellowed four years in cask and then the blend is aged for another year in old barrels. A deliciously unique drink that, while tasting a bit like a tawny-style Port, has its own distinct fruity sweetness combined with the warming sensation of the brandy. A more charming match with cheeses you will not find.
Sunday suppers at Lucques may be wonderful, but so are Saturday suppers at the Gelbers.
Gallo Hearty Burgundy - In With the In Crowd
Now the darling of the celebrity circuit, Hearty Burgundy was recently splashed across the covers of all the
Fans are even more excited about Gallo’s plans to introduce a new prestige cuvée of Hearty Burgundy in a bottle designed by Ralph Lauren. The price is rumored to break the $300.oo per bottle mark and will be allocated to each market based on their purchases of other Gallo products.
Ridiculous, right? Everyone knows that the worlds finest wines are from small producers and very specific vineyards. Mass produced wines like Hearty Burgundy will never be among the world’s elite and were never intended to be. This is a rule that seems to apply to every wine region in the world but one - Champagne. The great pinot noir and chardonnay wines of Burgundy are defined down to the row. Often less than a few hundred cases are produced of the greatest wines. In a testament to their marketing skills, the Grande Marques of Champagne have turned the wine world on its head by convincing consumers that their mass produced brands are their finest wines. Indeed this is just as if Gallo had convinced us that Hearty Burgundy was California’s finest wine.
Consider this, some 2,000,000 bottles of Dom Perignon are produced. That’s almost 167,000 cases and this is supposed to be an elite wine? By the way, Gallo now makes about 200,000 cases of Hearty Burgundy.
I would not ague that Hearty Burgundy and Dom Perignon are on the same quality level, but Hearty Burgundy is a better value. The stunning part of wines like Dom Perginon and other “name” Champagne is that their quality is as good as it is considering how much wine they make.
Fortunately there are now many outstanding grower produced and bottled Champagnes available that reflect the same passion and terroir as Burgundy’s finest domaines as reported on in my previous post, Grower Fizz. It is only in these Champagnes from small producers that you will find the same distinctive and diverse characteristics that have made Burgundy the most interesting of wine regions. That same range of personality and terroir is expressed in this new and growing category that is transforming the Champagne region from a homogenized blend into a region full of nuance and diversity.
Let’s raise a glass of fine grower bubbly and make a toast to the marketing acumen of the big Champagne firms. Its not easy or cheap to impress Paris and Brittany. Let’s let them drink Dom, I’ll take the grower fizz please.
The Eddie Haskell of Wines
“That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing, Mrs. Cleaver.”
Leave It To Beaver’s Eddie Haskell was always ready with a empty compliment designed to cover his real character - or lack thereof. Drinking the 2003 Opus One would be a familiar experience for June Cleaver as this wine well reflects the superficial personality of Haskell.
The 03 Opus is always at the ready with a charming compliment for your palate. Round, sweet tannins here, sweet plush oak there - everywhere your palate looks it’s greeted with oozing charm. However, politeness is the only defining character of this wine. Behind its charming veneer is emptiness. Just when you think you’ve found something interesting it fades away into the sweet, round velvet of bland consumer correctness.
This is probably not a problem for most Opus drinkers who seek nothing beyond that initial charming compliment as it passes their lips without causing an undo interruption of their conversation, causing not another thought until the check arrives.
At $125+ a bottle, polite is not enough.
Kissing the Frogs
• 2003 Château Margaux: $460.00 a bottle
• 2002 Domaine de la Romanee Conti, La Tache: $1300 a bottle
• 2003 Pegau Châteaunuef du Pape, Cuvée de Capo: $500 a bottle.
Let’s face it, when we think of French wine, we think expensive, elegant, sophisticated and chic. They are the wines you drink at Daniel in Manhattan while wearing the latest from Paris. Unfortunately for the French, only a small percentage of the wines they make fall into this elite category, and the vast majority of the wines they make are unknown and ignored by American consumers.
The world’s most famous and expensive wines are French. French wines are the only wines truly sought after by collectors. While pretenders like Screaming Eagle cause feeding frenzies with American collectors, it’s only the elite French producers that really whip both American and international collectors into a lather.
Certainly no one would argue anymore that the French have a monopoly on great wine. While bruised a bit by the worldwide explosion of interesting, well-made wines, the elite French wine juggernaut rolls on. Evidence of this is the massive coverage of the futures offering of the acclaimed 2005 Bordeaux vintage, which has been a focus of the wine media for months. In fact, a good vintage in Bordeaux still has such an impact that those vintages become great vintages for all regions in the mind of the consumer; even those wine regions with weather, vines and geography that have nothing to do with Bordeaux bask in the reflected glory of great Bordeaux vintages.
As great and historically important as the most famous French wines are, the most exciting thing about French wine is not the bottles for those with trust funds and Ferraris, but the fact that the French are making the best wine values in the world. They simply cannot be beat in the under-$20 a bottle range for making wines that still offer character, personality, and, most of all terroir — that unique sense of place that makes a wine distinct and exciting to drink.
I’ll repeat that: the best wine values in the market today are almost all French. It’s not the new world that offers wine bargains: Australian wines should actually be singular not plural, as they’re all the same jammy syrup with different labels. California wine is personality-free industrial wine produced from the same UC Davis oak-chip recipe; South American wines are thin, flavorless and produced from hopelessly over-cropped vineyards. Only their European neighbors Italy and Spain offer the French any real competition in this under-$20 category.
Ironically, as good as the French (with a lot of help from the British) were at marketing their wines over the past centuries, today they don’t seem able to sell their way out of a brown paper bag. They’ve been blasted out of the value end of the wine market by a bunch of New World wines with cute animals on their labels and snappy names that are easy to remember. This is not to say the French are blameless for this situation — all that junky wine with varietal labels from the Languedoc that flooded the market in the ‘90s convinced a lot of consumers to look elsewhere for everyday wines.
The French Appellation Contrôlée (controlled place-name) system of wine regulations established the structure that allowed French wines to dominate the market for so many years. These regulations established minimum standards for how a wine was grown and made before it could be sold with a particular name. These names were based on place above all else. The variety was important and precisely controlled. For example, a red Burgundy must be 100% pinot noir, and a Sancerre must be 100% sauvignon blanc. You won’t see those names on the label, but their regulation is far more stringent than varietal labeling as used in the New World. For example, a winemaker in California has to use only 75% pinot noir to use the name. While the best California producers would never do that to their pampered pinot noir, you can bet few under $20 are not blended with other, less noble, varietals.
While I love this commitment to place and individual personality in winemaking, the plethora of wine names this has created made a marketing nightmare for the French. Should they give up and change over to naming a wine for the grapes instead of the land? I hope they don’t, and considering the French attitude about all things French I think the names will stay the same. This means that consumers who want to drink good wine at good prices will have to do some homework.
There are so many wonderful French wines out there — the Loire Valley alone is so packed with wine best-buys that to try to keep track of only them can seem daunting. Muscadet shines as the best white wine value in the world right now. Sancerre/Pouilly Fume neighbors Quincy and Menetou-Salon produce stunning, racy sauvignon blancs. The cabernet franc wines from Chinon and Bourgueil are incredibly fragrant and seductive. The list of values from throughout France is endless, with stunning wines coming from Beaujolais, the Rhône, Provence, Lanquedoc-Roussillon and the southwest. Many of these wines come from grapes you have never heard of, but should have — like tannat, manseng, cot, picpoul and poulsard.
Such an extensive list of new words and places can be more intimidating than inspirational, and can make that giant stacking of Yellow Tail at the grocery store look tempting. However, as a few importers are willing do to the work required to not only find such wines and then to hand-sell them bottle-by-bottle, instead of memorizing The Oxford Companion to Wine, just learning the names of these brave few is enough to begin rescuing your palate from the industrial wine that has lulled it into a nap. A quick poll of the patients at WineTherapy.com came up with a list of key importers to search out for French wine bargains:
• Louis/DressnerYou’ll find their names on the back label, which means all you have to do is pick up that bottle with the strange name and turn it around to see if it’s something worth trying. That’s not too much work, is it?
• Kermit Lynch
• Weygandt/Metzler
• Neal Rosenthal
• Robert Chadderdon
• Charles Neal
World Wine Cup
Vinography Fermentation PinotBlogger
I think both sides are missing the point as all such tastings do is show what wines taste better when compared with other wines. What they don’t show is what bottles will better grace your dinner table. Proving that we all come from the same genetic code, the French judges showed they have the same human faults as Americans when presented with rows and rows of glasses to rank the bigger, oakier and fruitier wines won out.
Think not? Check out the results for the most part the bigger wines are at the top of the charts, while more elegant bottles languish at the bottom. So you get winners like the Beringer, Valandraud, Latour and Shafer and losers like Margaux, Spottswoode, Dominus and Cheval Blanc.
It is ridiculous to try to prove somehow that French wines are better than California wines or Italian wines or Australian wines for that matter. The wines of each country and region are supposed to taste different. All these competitions do is fuel the fire that is burning away those individual characteristics in the pressure cooker of commercial realities.
Hopefully, someday we once again can think of wine as part of a meal instead a culinary World Cup.
Below are the results of the Grand Jury. What each of these wines have in common is their excellence - something demeaned by putting them in such a ranking. There in last place at #39 is the Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill made by winemaker Al Brounstein who recently passed away. Such a wine and such a winemaker deserve more respect. As the Californians rejoice over their latest victory they should remember as long as we judge wines in such a pointless way that their turn will come - just like it has for the French. We can only hope that the Australians don’t catch on.
1 Abreu (Madrona Ranch)
1 Beringer Private Reserve
3 Pahlmeyer Propriatory Red
3 Valandraud
5 Latour
5 Shafer Hillside Select
7 Arrowood Cabernet Sauvignon Special Reserve
7 Ausone
9 Leoville Les Cases
9 Phelps Insignia
11 Mouton Rothschild
12 Mondavi Reserve
13 Cheval Blanc
13 Palmer
15 Staglin Family Vineyard Cabernet
16 Trotonoy
17 Araujo
18 La Jota Anniversary Reserve
18 Le Bon Pasteur
20 Pride Reserve
21 Haut Condissas
22 Spring Mountain
23 Petrus
23 Rollan de By
25 Chateau Montelena
26 Mouton Rothschild
27 Monte Bello Ridge
28 Cheval Blanc
29 Dominus
30 Colgin
31 Margaux
32 Spotteswoode
33 Le Tertre Roteboeuf
34 Haut Brion
35 La Mission Haut Brion
36 Croix de Labrie
37 Screaming Eagle
38 Harlan Estate
39 Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill
IPNC 06 #4: Wine and Food
There was a seemingly endless stretch of fine pinot noir wines to taste at this year’s International Pinot Noir Celebration held in McMinnville Oregon. Table after table of of wines produced by some of the most passionate pinot noir producers on the planet. I tasted and tasted - concentrated and concentrated - took detailed note after detailed note. It was a wonderful intellectual experience.
The next day it was off to the vineyards and our bus drew the lovely Lemelson Winery in the Yamhill Carlton district of the northern Willamette Valley of Oregon. There waiting for us with a staff busily at work creating our lunch was the outstanding Portland chef Cathy Whims whose restaurant Nostrana was selected as Portland’s best new restaurant in 2006. The menu was sumptuous starting with huge platters of Salumi salami (from the famous Batali family) followed by spaghetti with roasted eggplant sugo. The suitably dramatic main course was Bisteca alla Fiorentina followed by a refreshing Cavaillon melon with a counterpoint of rich Montellet cheese from Northwest cheese producer Fromagerie Mejean. Cathy’s menu was a delight and served as an amplifier for the fine wines chosen to marry with these lovingly prepared dishes.
The wines for this mouthwatering lunch were from the host Eric Lemelson and the guest winery from Burgundy, Domaine Christian Clerget. An extra bonus was our moderator Allen Meadows of Burghound. The wines presented with our luncheon - excellent all and all highly recommended - were:
- 2004 Lemelson Vineyards Pinot Noir, Thea’s Selection
- 2002 Lemelson Vineyards Pinot Noir, Thea’s Selection
- 2004 Lemelson Vineyards Pinot Noir, Stermer Vineyards
- 2003 Domaine Christian Clerget, Chambolle Musigny
- 2003 Domaine Christian Clerget, Echezeaux Grand Cru
Feeling perhaps a bit whimsical from Cathy’s wonderful lunch, I could not help but ponder the fact that all five of these wines seemed far more alive than the wines tasted at the other formal tasting events. I concentrated on these wines too, took plenty of notes and discussed them ad nauseam with the other pinot noir nuts in attendance. However, you could not deny the clear fact that everything about these wines was brighter, more alive and more exciting than the wines tasted complimented only by other wines.
At both tastings there was plenty of focus and intellectual appreciation of the wines presented, but there can be no greater experience of a fine wine than with fine food. One without the other leaves gaps in the other. When I experience wines of this quality, produced by people with the passion of Eric Lemelson and Christian Clerget I want to taste their delights as the winemakers intended - as part of a dining experience.
(pictured above: “The Enterprise” at Lemelson during crush.)
Snake Oil
- Riedel Vinum Burgundy
- Stölzle Burgundy
- Eisch “Breathable Glass” Burgundy
What’s that? Breathable glass? I thought it sounded a bit like a snake oil salesman or the huckster at the county fair. In their brochure, Eisch claims that four minutes in their “breathable” glasses opens a wine up like an hour or two in a decanter. What do they take me for, a fool?
But, believe it or not - it actually seems to work.
The Barolo in the Riedel glass was focused and precise. Clean and tight just like you would expect. In the Stölzle the wine seemed less precise and the bouquet more defuse. In the Eisch after just a few minutes this lovely Barolo was clearly more floral and softer on the palate. No, I can’t explain how this happens even after reading their literature, but you can’t argue with the glasses in front of your nose.
The end result of this is that I have purchased a set of Eisch Burgundy and Bordeaux glasses because the reality of the situation is on a day-to-day basis I (like everybody else) drinks wines that are too young. As always, nothing can replace slowly letting a wine develop with time, but when you pull a cork on a wine that is too young these Eisch glasses are a crystal clear alternative.
Requiem for a Wine Region
Needless to say, Alsatian wine holds a place dear to my heart. Yet there was even more, when I entered the wine business in 1979 everyone that knew what-was-what about wine loved and drank the hard, mineraly, acid driven wines of Alsace. Times being very different than the dog-eat-dog world of wine sales today, the small group of wine professionals that were really into wine would gather at group picnics and parties, even though we were competitors, and share bottles we loved. When it came to dry white wines those bottles were invariably Burgundy and Alsace.
Today things have changed in both the wine business and Alsace. This weekend, while perusing the list of a very good Indian restaurant with a nice wine list, I sadly passed over the Alsatian wines. No great wine region has been more deformed and disfigured by modern winemaking fads than Alsace and it is with great sadness that I actually recommend not buying these wines, which have lost their individual character and their reason for being because everything they are trying to do someone else does better.
Today’s Alsatian wines are great examples of the more-is-better school of winemaking that chases points instead of grace at the table. They are “Too” wines: too ripe, too extracted, too botrytized, too sweet, too alcoholic, too flabby and too boring to drink. The Alsatians make the foie gras of white wines. Just like real foie gras is made by force feeding the bird, Alsatians are force feeding their grapes with the end result being their wines only taste good with foie gras - a somewhat limited use.
Perhaps if we avoid these distended wines a new generation of Alsatian winemakers will return to their roots and make some of the world’s greatest white wines. I hope so because I miss them.
Tepid Enthusiasm
The restaurant was stunningly elegant - they must have spent millions. Everything in its place and everyone
It was a beautiful warm West Coast day, 85 degrees with no humidity, so the broad glass doors that formed the perimeter of the dining room were thrown open to let the evening’s cool breezes slip gently through the room. It was that sublime type of warm that oozes comfort. After stretching the limits of my wife’s patience, I finally made a choice from the comprehensive wine list. With distinguished fanfare the bottle arrived at the table, the cork was removed and sniffed. A small splash was poured into my gigantic Riedel and I took a sniff and a sip. Although it was not corked, it was not right. There is just something not enjoyable about a 14% alcohol wine served at the temperature of bath water.
Tepid red wine is not pleasurable to drink.
Why is it that restaurants that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on custom display wine racks and hyper-expensive glassware can’t bother to serve their wines at the proper temperature? There are the bottles on dramatic wall racks or lined behind the bar, only to spend the night with the A/C turned off or warming up to the open-air temperature of a warm summer day. Red wines should be served at 68 degrees not 78 degrees.
America is the country where we serve our white wines too cold and our red wines too warm. That old saw about serving red wines at room temperature was conceived by some old British Lord sitting in a damp old castle, not some gleaming restaurant in LA or Manhattan.
Restaurants have made great strides in wine service. Wine lists have improved dramatically and great glassware is the norm, not the exception, in almost any good restaurant. Now they need to take those few last steps. I am tired of having to ask for an ice bucket for my red wine, which I have to do in almost every restaurant I visit from June to September. With the price most restaurants painfully extract from the consumer, the very least they could do is serve the wine at an enjoyable temperature.
Bad Vintage = Great Wine
Bad Vintage = Great Wine. Not the equation you usually think of, but it is often a reality. Well, it’s a reality in the hands of a great winemaker. What the best winemakers do when that bad year hits is do everything thing they can do in the vineyard, then brutally select out the best wines in the cellar and then declassify them to a humbler place name or label. The result is wines from great vineyards that usually sell at stratospheric prices are released at a fraction of the price. While they may indeed be a fraction of the wine these vineyards can produce in a good vintage, they still can offer exceptional value and let the consumer come in contact with some of the elements that can make such wines unforgettable at their best.
One such wine is the 2002 Giuseppe Quintarelli Primofiore. Quintarelli’s Primofiore is always a delight,
but when vintages like 2002 curse the Veneto, wines that would normally be destined for his rightfully exalted Amarone end up in Primofiore and the results are stunning. Primofiore is a first pressing and includes all of the varietals Quintarelli grows including: Corvina Veronese, Corvinone, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc, which are partially dried before fermentation, then a touch of lees from the fresh Amarone (or in the case of 2002, probably Rosso del Bepi) adds depth, structure and body. While Primofiore is only a faint shadow of the incomparable Quintarelli Amarone, it is a very lovely shadow indeed. The finish of this wine is a haunting reminder of the layered greatness of the Amarone - just at a much lower volume. However, with Quintarelli’s Amarone approaching $300 a bottle, if you are lucky enough to find some, Primofiore will only set you back $40.
I.G.T. - Indicazione Geografica Tipica
"IGT!"
"Gesundheit."
No that wasn’t a sneeze, it was I.G.T. or Indicazione Geografica Tipica: the new wine classification introduced in
1992 as part of a general reorganization of the D.O.C. (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) Italian wine law. I.G.T. was to be a new controlled quality level just below the D.O.C. to create a home for wines that, for many reasons, did not met the D.O.C. requirements, but had regional character.
Predictably, the introduction of the I.G.T. has been a mere sneeze as far as consumers are concerned — and a great example of a bureaucratic shell game.
The creation of I.G.T. was made necessary by the inadequacies of the D.O.C. regulations and by the widespread revolt against them by many famous and politically powerful wine producers. These producers were being forced to give their top wines, often internationally styled ones that did not follow D.O.C. rules, the lowly Vino da Tavola (table wine) designation.
Vino da Tavola had been the catch-all category for everyday wines until the super-Tuscan revolution hit Chianti and Maremma. Famous wines like Le Pergole Torte, Tignanello, and Sassicaia, which did not meet D.O.C. requirements, had to compete internationally against the world’s finest wines with this common name on their labels. To further confuse the matter, the phrase "table wine" in the US is a legal designation set by the government to denote all wines of less than 14.5% alcohol.
The end result is that I.G.T. has basically replaced the Vino da Tavola category for exported wines and does not provide much more of a guarantee of quality than Vino da Tavola did. Aa-choo!
There are oceans of "Veneto I.G.T." wine arriving in the USA now so let’s look at those regulations. The wines can be white, red, or rose produced in lightly sparking or novella (new) style. There are 39 permitted grape varieties and the grapes can come from any of 7 provinces. Pretty demanding requirements, right? So now exceptional wines made by great Veneto producers like Anselmi and Inama still carry the same designation as bulk wines made at the cooperatives. Exactly the same situation as before.
To be fair the I.G.T. regulations are more stringent than those for Vino da Tavola and they do restrict the wine named to be at least of a defined region, while Vino da Tavolo could be produced from wines produced anywhere in Italy — and sometimes Italy seemed to mean the borders of the Roman Empire. However, the reality of the situation is that I.G.T. is a shallow marketing tool: a fancier name for almost the same thing.
I.G.T. wines are basically divided into three groups, all labeled the same: industrial grade, good solid country wines, and hyper-expensive superstars (sometimes they are only hyper-expensive). You can’t tell the players without a scorecard. Unfortunately, price is the first giveaway. When you see an I.G.T. wine at $50.00 you have a pretty good idea it is not in the industrial grade category. But sorry, no guarantees.
For anyone unfamiliar with the best estates the best reference point is still the importer or a passionate retailer. For instance, Neil Empson offers Monte Antico, a reliable value in I.G.T. Toscano. What makes this wine reliable is the Empson name on the bottle. This same is true also for a wine like Castel di Salve, Santi Medici, Salento I.G.T. imported by Vin Divino, another very reliable importer. There are many poor Salento I.G.T. and Toscano I.G.T. wines, but when selected by a dedicated importer you have a much better chance of finding a good wine, and a good value.
Italian wine law is bursting at the seams from its own rich diet. Italy is overwhelmed by excellent wines, but they just don’t fit well into the few categories and the constrictions of D.O.C.G., D.O.C. and I.G.T.
"IGT!"
"Gesundheit."
DOCG
Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita. It sounds grand. It sounds like it should be wearing a sash with
the colors of the Italian flag like the mayor did at our wedding. Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita or D.O.C.G. was designed to be the ultimate level of wine law in Italy. In English it means that the place of origin is controlled and guaranteed for quality. In Italian it means another good idea sinks into bureaucratic hell.
I was contemplating this the other day on an AlItalia flight as I broke the D.O.C.G. strip stuck over the screw-cap on a 187 ml. bottle of basic industrial Chianti that came with my dinner. So much for the glory and the sash.
It was just 1963 when the Italian government implemented the D.O.C. (Denominazioni di Origine Controllata) to protect and promote Italian wines — and to better compete with the French. Only 17 years later they were forced to introduce the D.O.C.G. concept because the D.O.C. laws had lost all of their credibility as thousands of poor wines sported the designation.
The D.O.C.G. was to change all of this by protecting the great names of Italian wine. So the government selected five of the most important, world famous vineyard areas of Italy to be crowned in 1987 with the D.O.C.G. title. Those five were: Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello di Montalcino, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and Albana di Romagna.
Whoa … wait a second. Albana di Romagna you’re asking, what’s that? For those who care, Albana di Romagna is an average quality white wine and there was no reason in the world to include it with this elite group. To select this wine as the first white D.O.C.G. destroyed the credibility of the new classification from the start. Bureaucrats 1; Consumers 0.
Italy is blessed and cursed by its own diversity. Nowhere is there a country that produces a broader range of high quality wine styles from such a confusing number of grape varieties. This diversity makes for interesting drinking but bad wine law. The Italians wanted to compete with the French system of Appellation Controleé (AOC), but the sheer numbers of wine growing regions, varietals, and growers make the establishment of a definitive law impossible.
To add to the confusion the wide variety of styles being produced makes D.O.C. and D.O.C.G. more a simple geographical address instead of any kind of indication of quality. For instance, having a D.O.C. Riccardo Cotarella (the superstar consulting winemaker) would be more a more accurate indicator of style than the current geographical designations.
Take a D.O.C.G. like Barolo — clear cut, right? Exact laws, clearly defined vineyards, very specific wine making regulations, and only one allowed grape variety. What could the confusion be here? Just taste a Barolo by Elio Altare next to the Barolo produced by Giacomo Conterno and you will be mystified. They taste nothing alike. How can this happen with all those rules and the lofty D.O.C.G. designation protecting the name? It can happen because wine making is a complicated process offering the winemaker a myriad of choices that affect the final style of the wine — even in an environment with supposedly stringent regulation. In this glorious maze of wines the name of the producer is the only reliable indicator of quality.