New world hero

I was a graduate student in the US of A when I had my first plastic cup of wine in ’88. It was a bag-in-the-box plonk that the venerable E&J Gallo would produce millions of litres of. Not that we cared. It was an inexpensive alternative to beer—a decent party drink that some of us quaffed from plastic cups to stand apart from our lager-dunking buddies. It became a problem only when it sent the confusing signals to women. Those were the days when even women drank Bourbon and America was still wine-innocent.

I was deluged with these memories as I sat down for lunch with my Napa Valley friend, Bruce Cakebread, President of Cakebread Cellars, the brand voted by the Wine & Spirits magazine after a nationwide poll as the most popular wine among restaurant patrons in the US. I was surprised to find Cakebread’s calling card had one side printed in Hindi. We have really progressed since the days when I drank chilled E&J Gallo from a plastic cup —then, blank stares would greet the name India; now, Americans like Cakebread believe they have a durable stake in our market.

It’s somewhat like the Napa Valley story. When Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, spent two months in 1880 with his American wife, Fanny Vandegrift, at Napa Valley, which has been the Cakebread family’s home since 1973, he wrote in The Silverado Squatters that the “experimental” wine industry routinely mis-labelled its products as being Spanish to be able to sell to sceptical Americans. Even when Jack Cakebread, Bruce’s father, and son of an automotive repair shop owner, moved to Napa almost on an impulse in 1973, the valley had more ranches and orange orchards than serious wineries.

Now, Napa is America’s wine capital. It’s the inspiration for the fictional Tuscany Valley on CBS’s night-time soap opera Falcon Crest that ran from 1981 to 1990. It is visited by five million tourists annually, slightly more than what India gets in a year.

But Indians, somehow, are still chary about ordering a good Napa wine when they entertain. Maybe, it’s because American wines tend to be in short supply and more expensive. Even E&J Gallo’s inexpensive entry-level wines don’t enjoy the popularity of, say, a similarly priced Chilean Merlot. Worldwide, the authority of Napa Valley wines was sealed after the watershed 1976 Judgment of Paris, which was a blind tasting organised by the English merchant and writer Steven Spurrier, who was driven by the urge to establish the infallibility of the French wines he sold.

Now the subject of two rival Hollywood films (Bottle Shock, the more controversial of the two), the blind tasting by a panel of 11 experts, mostly French, shocked the Old World by rating two Napa Valley wines—Château Montelena’s 1973 Chadonnay and the 1976 Cabernet Sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars—as the best white and red, respectively. Remember, these were unknowns and were up against the French wine aristocracy.

Napa hasn’t looked back since then. The 1973 Château Montelena is at the Smithsonian Institute and Warren Winiarski, the American wine hero, sold Stag’s Leap for $185 million last August to a joint venture by Château Ste. Michelle of Woodinville, Washington, and Marchesi Antinori of Italy.

No matter what the French say, the Americans can make many things better than cheeseburgers and fries.

— Sourish Bhattacharyya is Executive Editor, Mail Today