California | Wine Terms

WINE TERMS

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California

The California wine industry is said to have started during the period from 1769 to 1823 when the Franciscan monks began planting vineyards as they worked their way from southern to northern California establishing their missions. Unfortunately, the grape they planted was the MISSION, which produces wines of poor to medium quality. It wasn’t until about 1830 that Jean-Louis Vignes began to import higher-quality VITIS VINIFERA grapevines. In the 1850s and 1860s, AGOSTON HARASZTHY expanded the effort by trying to determine which grape varieties would work best in various locations in the state. To this end, he imported thousands of CUTTINGS of about 300 different grape varieties. In addition to planting these vines in SONOMA COUNTY, he sold cuttings in various parts of the state, primarily in the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas. The California wine-producing industry went through numerous ups and downs over the next 80 years, but the PHYLLOXERA infestation in the 1890s and PROHIBITION from 1920 to 1933 severely curtailed wine business growth. The industry continued to grow sporadically from 1933 on, but most of the production was fairly ordinary wine from the giant CENTRAL VALLEY. At the time, most wines were made from grapes like THOMPSON SEEDLESS, Emperor, and Flame Tokay, which could also be used for table grapes or raisins. This trend began to change in the 1960s when Joe Heitz C started Heitz Wine Cellars in 1964, Dick Graff established Chalone Vineyard in 1965, and Robert Mondavi left the family (Charles Krug) winery and established his own in 1966. At that time, the boom for quality wine took off, with dramatic increases in acreage allotted to grapes like CABERNET SAUVIGNON and CHARDONNAY. In the year 2000, the California Department of Food and Agriculture estimated that there were about 568,000 acres of wine grapes planted. Chardonnay is the most widely planted white wine grape, with over 103,000 acres, followed by French COLOMBARD, with less than half that amount. (This compares with a 1959 total of about 80,000 acres for all of California’s wine grapes.) After Chardonnay and French Colombard, the white grapes in order of total acreage are CHENIN BLANC, SAUVIGNON BLANC, RIESLING, GEWÜRZTRAMINER, PINOT BLANC, and MUSCAT. The most widely planted red grape (with about 70,000 acres) is Cabernet Sauvignon; ZINFANDEL has about 50,000 acres. These two varieties are followed in order of total acreage by MERLOT, PINOT NOIR, RUBIRED, BARBERA, GRENACHE, SYRAH, RUBY CABERNET, CARIGNANE, PETITE SIRAH, and CABERNET FRANC. At this writing, California produces about 90 percent of the wine made in the United States. Although it now competes favorably in producing some of the world’s finest wines, it also still produces plenty of ordinary wine with over 70 percent of California wine production coming from the hot Central Valley. Much of this wine is still undistinguished, although the quality is higher than in the past because of modernized equipment and better crop selection. For fine California wines, the climate of the cooler growing areas along the coast is best. Because of this, the NAPA VALLEY has become one of the premier wine-producing areas in the world. But it is not alone in the production of fine wine, as evidenced by other areas of the NORTH COAST in the counties of LAKE, SONOMA, MENDOCINO, SOLANO, and SONOMA. As the California wine industry continues to grow, other quality VITICULTURAL AREAS are being discovered, including numerous locations in the CENTRAL COAST region and selected areas in the SIERRA FOOTHILLS. In an effort to define growing areas around the state, California uses a system known variously as degree days, heat summation method, Winkler Scale, and Regions I–V (see CLIMATE REGIONS OF CALIFORNIA). California has almost ninety AMERICAN VITICULTURAL AREAS (AVA); however, this system is still in its infancy, and there are myriad issues yet to be resolved. As California growers and winemakers understand more about the elements of what the French call TERROIR, petitions are being submitted for subsections of larger AVAs to further define the areas where wines are produced.

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