Letter from London
I am nervous about my 7-year-old son, very afraid that he may grow up to be a marketing guy. Here’s why this horrid thought has embedded itself in my brain: He’ll eat almost anything with chocolate on it – whole-wheat bread (he keeps asking for chocolate sandwiches for lunch), fresh fruits (which he had been avoiding since I made the mistake of saying they were good for him), healthful cereal and probably even green vegetables. I thought it was a minor and singular passing phase, but then I overheard him advising one of his friends to ask for chocolate sauce on a sugarless fresh fruit compote I’d made. “You can scrape it off and eat it,” he whispered, “and then you moosh the other stuff around and say you’re full. It’s easy.”
This struck me as a potential career path to the dark side because it reminded me of the way the wine-marketing folks bring in chardonnay, positioning it as an all-purpose lubricant: They say, “You just take that second-rate sauvignon blanc” [or semillon, viognier, colombard, vermentino – almost any white wine, or combination thereof, will do], “and you pour some chardonnay over it, mention it on the label and you can sell it, easy – the grown-ups think it’s OK.”
Like McDonald’s, subprime loans and “High School Musical,” it’s an American phenomenon that’s had an impact everywhere – hey kids, look at this, chardonnay’s gone global! (Luckily, unlike those other things, I don’t think this trend can be easily traced back to us, so we may at least be off the hook, blame-wise.)
On the vine, chardonnay doesn’t do very well in China, but they’re growing it there anyway. In India, where they can have three wine-grape crops a year, it’s pretty bad, and an Indian winemaker I recently met said they might just have to acknowledge that fact one of these days. It’s flourishing in Jordan, for sale to non-Muslim tourists, and though it’s illegal in Germany except for experimental purposes, believe me, there’s a whole lotta “experimentation” goin’ on. In Italy, they’re blending it into almost everything that flows, even sparkling prosecco (and they’re being awarded the prestigious DOC designation for these dubious concoctions, too). In Australia the last time I was there, small-town grocery stores were chock-full of cheap Semchard (semillon and you-know-what), which at least tasted better than the water, but usually not as good as semillon on its own. And then, of course, perhaps the biggest success story of all, coming soon and often to a supermarket near you, straight from the flat, hot, irrigated and inhospitable San Joaquin Valley, there is “California” chardonnay, otherwise known as “glass o’ white.” The grown-ups think it’s OK pretty much everywhere, you see.
The domestic chardonnay-beats-all phenomenon began, and took the high and low roads, in Sonoma. Hanzell introduced oak-aged, richly Burgundian chardonnay in the late 1950s, and a decade later there were eight Sonoma County wineries producing it (the same number as produced gewürztraminer and what was then called Johannisberg Riesling, in the last gasp of diversity). The other, bland route was taken in the early 1980s, by Glen Ellen winery, which took advantage of a giant loophole in the law and released “Private Reserve” chardonnay in half-gallon jugs. Despite the fact that “reserve” has no legal meaning, and that the grapes were from the Central Valley, which earned the wine a “California” appellation, and that the wine was boring, the stuff quickly surged to sales of more than two million gallons a year, leading to more plantings of chardonnay everywhere, and revving up the blandness cycle. Bruno Benziger, the quintessential marketing guy who created the brand, was unrepentant: “Every wine we make is a reserve wine,” he quipped, on the way to the bank.
Now, of course, it’s everywhere – the most popular wine in the world, we hear. Someday it may even be as popular as chocolate, but I wouldn’t bet on it – we’ll have to wait and see which way my son goes.
Red-wine drinker Brian St. Pierre lives in London and often hangs out at www.foodandwineinlondon.com
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