You go into a wineshop planning to buy a good bottle or two of wine. The selection is mindboggling, there's no one available to
assist you and maybe you don't really even want someone else's opinion. You would like to make a decision based on the
varietal and the wine region where the winery is located. You know what you like and what you're willing to experiment with,
but that's the point in the story where the great abyss of little or no information begins to yawn in front of you.
If you choose a European wine you're pretty certain that Burgundy is going to be Pinot noir for red and Chardonnay for white
wine and depending on the details on the label you can expect to get a certain type of wine. A Chianti promises the same
fundamental guide lines as do German wines and so on for most of Europe. But when it comes to choosing wines from the New
World and especially American wine, unless you have review in hand or there's the all too infrequent shelf talker you really don't
know what's in the bottle. To make matters worse, you're probably being asked to plunk down somewhere between $13 to
$50 per bottle. What else do you spend so much of your money on that is such a shot in the dark?
American wines have been forced to rely on the grape varietal as an indication of the wine style. It's a young industry and there
hasn't been hundreds of years of tradition and natural selection that has yielded a Napa style or Mendocino or Long Island or
Hudson or New Mexico, to name just a few. American's have wine growing regions but the experimentation and heavy
borrowing from traditional European wine regions have yielded the greatest hodgepodge of wine styles and brand names know
to mankind. Even the clear winners in name recognition, Cabernet sauvignon and Chardonnay, come in such varying styles as to
be no greater indicator of what's in the bottle than the color of red or white.
Clearly, much of the fascination of wine is learning to understand the diversity forced on a type of wine based on the grape
varietal(s), the year of the vintage, the characteristics of the region or vineyard the grapes come from, the style of the wine
maker or winery. It is this last element, the style of the wine maker or winery, that makes choosing a New World wine so
difficult. The wine maker has many arrows in his quiver when it comes to tweaking the way a wine turns out as a finished
product in the barrel. With few restraints imposed by tradition, a wine maker's choices of style are dictated primarily by the
percentage of grape varietal used on the label and what he thinks people will be willing to buy. This only applies if he chooses to
call it by a varietal name, e.g., Merlot, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, etc.. If the wine is given a fanciful name, there are even fewer
guidelines for figuring out what the wine might be like. It is this character of exuberant experimentation that defines America and
American optimism where wine making is concerned. It's of little help, however, when you're faced with a buying decision at the
American wineshop without a wine writer's review or a salesperson's recollection of how it tastes.
There is very little on the horizon to improve the situation either, I'm sorry to say. The burgeoning shelves of your local retail
shop are destined to remain something of an enigma. Which forces you back on somehow finding written information, relying on
the retailer's suggestions, or, in their absence, your own experience , your intuition and how much you like the label design.
A little guidance on the label would be a great help. In today's wine market the one thing that separates one wine from another,
everything else being equal, such as vintage, grape varietal, a blend of grapes or the wine region is frequently how much oak is
apparent. The significant difference lies with the wine maker's choice of how long he ages the wine, in what type of oak, the age
of the barrels and whether he used barrels at all, instead substituting the much less expensive choice of using oak chips.
Winemakers and their customers have demonstrated their varied interests in wines that arrive with oak contact in their
background. A wine maker can use oak barrels to soften the harshness of young wines, to gain complexity through
micro-oxidation, to subtly flavor wines while accomplishing the first two or to simply add flavors to a wine by extracting the
oak's buttery and resinous flavors into the wine.
For myself, I love the benefits of oak that come with using barrels to soften the wine and add complexity through
micro-oxidation. I love just the right white wine lightly flavored with exotic French oak, like Vosges. I'm not a fan of wines made
using American oak, or high amounts of oak, or, especially, oak chips. Everyone has their own preferences. I would find it very
helpful if wineries would put symbols on the label indicating the source of the oak and the concentration of oak. This could be
done very simply by putting little barrel head symbols on the label. There would be from 0 to 3 barrel heads indicating the level
of oak: none, low, medium, high. On the barrel heads there would be a symbol, A for American Oak and E for European oak.
More complex letters could evolve which would indicate a region, e.g., A-O would mean American oak from Oregon; E-Y
would mean European oak from Yugoslavia and so on. Finally, there would be another little symbol which could be used
separately or in conjunction with the barrel head. This symbol would be a gunny sack with ears on each side of the top of the
sack. This symbol would indicate the use of oak chips in flavoring the wine. Again the wine maker would use 0 to 3 to indicate
none, low, medium and high.
This one small addition would produce, I'm convinced, a sea change in the way people buy wine and take a good degree of the
angst out of their next visit to the wine shop. Finally there is one type of ingredient labeling I'm in favor of. Give us the facts
about oak flavoring so we can make an informed decision on how much of it we want and where it comes from.
