EUROPE VS USA
I’m in thrall to the phrase “go to school on someone else,” as in “learn from others’ mistakes.”
But we can just as well learn from others’ strengths, too. I am thinking of the old dead horse forever getting the whack “Who makes better wine? Europe or America?” (You sometimes hear the question as “Old World versus New World? Whose wine wins?”)
I’d rather frame the issue as “What can we learn from each other in order to make better wine ourselves?”
What we can learn from them
The first thing about wine to impress a visitor to Europe is the price. In Portugal, for example, you’d swear it was a misprint to read the equivalent in euros of $5-$10 a bottle on a restaurant wine list.
We won’t see that figure in our country, ever. But it’s the second impression about European wine that’s worth emulating; it’s the variety, especially of grapes that make wine. A restaurant wine list in Italy reads like the Jersey “families.” You’ve got your sangioveses, nebbiolos, aglianicos, your barberas and primitivos.
In our country, we’re stuck in a cabernet-chardonnay rut, with forks in the road such as pinot noir or sauvignon blanc that are nearly as monotonous a ride. The great strength of European wine is its startling diversity, many indigenous varieties producing the better wines of their native regions. For our part, we don’t have indigenous varieties worth their wine, but we could plant more exciting vines and stretch our palates.
Second, it’s a commonplace for an American winemaker to want to make syrah “like they do in the Rhone,” for instance, or pinot noir “as comes from Burgundy.” Even though we’re no slackers with either grape, Europe remains a benchmark for what many a winemaker wishes to achieve with a given grape.
But the aura isn’t skill or craft. It’s place. European wines, by and large, have a sense of coming from somewhere rather than being fashioned in some manner or style. There’s no way for us to reduplicate those places simply because we cannot bring them here. So for all our pining over how well Europeans do with this or that grape, we’ll never make precisely the same wine.
We are beginning to find those places in our winemaking lands that speak in their unique voice through their wine. But, by and large, we’re still hooked on craft and style. There isn’t anything distinctive, for example, about so many American chardonnays tasting exactly alike.
Third, we could learn something about finesse (or, another way put, humility) from the wines of Europe. The other day I overheard someone say about a California chardonnay, “You need a spoon to eat this wine” because it sported 15% alcohol and was thick with extract. His companion added, “Or a buzz saw” about the wine’s in-your-face oak.
Hubert Trimbach, the scion of a centuries-old winemaking family in Alsace, France, once told me “Don’t even think about drinking our wines without food. We do not make ‘beverages’; we make part of your meal.”
His point was that Trimbach wines complement the table; they’re not to be consumed apart from it. That’s because Trimbach wines, for all their intensity of flavor, are etched with a fine hand. Their moderate alcohol and high acidity come about on purpose.
What they can learn from us
On the other hand—and I admit this is a near about-face—Europeans might begin to make more wine as “beverages.” The generally taut, lean and linear European wine is, as Trimbach suggests, difficult to enjoy by itself.
Whatever you say about all that’s going on in a typical glass of New World wine, it is admittedly close to being a complete food and hence delicious by itself. Low acidity, gobs of flavor and extract, even a dollop of booze, all make for a nice “beverage,” if you will, especially as a prelude to, not necessarily a component of, a meal.
It follows that Europe produce wines in a certain style rather than wines that speak of certain place. They have begun to do just that; note the many juicy wines labeled simply “chardonnay” or “syrah” from southern France (place names in small print). It’s happy news that Europeans would never, though, consider the wholesale making of wines without a sense of terroir or place. In a way, it isn’t possible.
Second, some in Europe can yet learn about the precision brought by our standards of hygiene and advances in winemaking technology (talkin’ to you, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia and Ukraine). And third, Europe can go to school on the New World’s innovative and, often, low-carbon packaging of wine. Australia and New Zealand, especially, can teach all of us much about that.