1963 California Wine Industry - 4-Page Vintage Article

Description

1963 California Wine Industry - 4-Page Vintage Article
Original, vintage magazine article
Page Size: Approx. 10 1/2" x 13 1/2" (27 cm x 34 cm) each page
Condition: Good
The case of California wines is a
handy example of the occasionally
perverse American taste for endowing
something the country does very well
with a faint, lingering bouquet of infe-
riority. The difference in attitude toward
European and California wines can be
found in the rhetoric used to describe
them. The label on one bottle of Swiss
vintage proclaims it to be “a wine of
sound bearing, affectionate and noble,
cordial without being a great babbler,
velvet outside but nerves and muscles
inside.” In Livermore, California, by
contrast, Karl Wentc sampled his 1962
Wcnte Bros. Pinot Chardonnay recently
and contented himself with remarking,
“She's going to be a big girl.”
Despite the lack of rhetoric, however,
Americans are drinking more and better
wine every year. And of the 172,000,000
gallons drunk last year in the United
States, roughly 78 percent came from
California’s 460,000 acres of vineyards,
and 15 percent from Eastern wineries.
The tiny remainder was imported from
Europe and elsewhere.
The White House today has a wine
cellar stocked with California products.
Yet it was less than 15 years ago that
California wines were broached at a
Presidential inaugural dinner for the first
lime. This was done at Harry Truman’s
banquet as much to reward a faithful
party worker, who just happened to be
a salesman of Paul Masson California
wines, as to honor the merits of the wines.
“I was asked,” said the party worker,
who has since moved up in the Masson
hierarchy, “to set up the banquet with
the Mayflower Hotel’s maitre d’. 1 put
down only one of my wines and two of
somebody clse’s. American wines—that
was the idea. I would have settled for
anyone’s. My boss insisted I use at least
I two of mine.”
Politics aside, when California wines
are matched against European vintages
in blind tastings, they hold their own
nicely. Louis Untcrmeyer, the poet and
former consultant on poetry to the Li-
brary of Congress, once had reason to
entertain a Rothschild of Chateau Lafitc-
Rothschild and served him a bottle of the
Rothschilds’ own wine, its label hidden
in the serving basket. "Aha,” said the
Frenchman after taking an appreciative
sip, "one of your interesting California
wines, no doubt." European vintners po-
litely but invariably refuse to participate...
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