Check out Dan Berger's absorbing article in the latest edition of Appellation America, "Is the Regional Distinctiveness of Wine a Thing of the Past?"
He quotes an anonymous vintner:
Napa is the brand. That’s the Vintners’ main goal. Protect Napa. Napa is ‘wine country,’ Napa makes the best Cabernet in the world, and Napa is the only thing you need to know if you’re talking about wine.
Berger concludes, sadly: "Napa seems content to let homogeneous $100 wines be its calling card to the world."
You have to wonder just how long the cult of Napa can endure.
So interesting this debate about Napa vs more detailed sub-terroirs; anyway, terroir as meant by the French, as Mike was reminding a few days ago on the italophone usenet of wine, is not limited to soil and climate alone: this (the human factor variation) might be the missing factor explaining why the bottles' content fail to "follow" such a wild soil variation across the Napa territory.
Particularly amusing I found this rush to be part of the Rutherford-Benchitude, and the war for setting the borders of The Bench. That reeaaally reminds me something I am more familiar with :-)))
Posted by: FilippoC | March 12, 2007 at 12:27 PM
Gee, I wonder what that could be...
Ah well, as they say in crime movies, "Follow the money."
Posted by: Terry Hughes | March 12, 2007 at 02:11 PM