John Briscoe - Crush: The Triumph of California Wine

Love of good living is one of the peculiarities of the nation, possibly, but in California the national weakness is a ruling passion.

NOAH BROOKS, Restaurant Life in San Francisco, Overland Monthly

CALIFORNIANS TALK WINE more than they do weather; but, unlike weather, they actually do something about wine. They swirl it, peer at and through it, inhale it, sip it, and guzzle it. They also make itin both small and prodigious quantities, and in qualities ranging from nearly swill to rather swell.

And they write about it. Californians, native or adopted, have been writing about wine for as long as theyve been making it. Father (now Saint) Junpero Serra, the Spanish founder of the California mission system, bemoaned in his letters the short supply of wine. The putative father of California wine, Agoston Haraszthy, wrote scientific treatises on it in the mid-nineteenth century, both for the California legislature and for readers in general; he was followed by more historicalor, at least, anecdotalwriters like Frona Eunice Wait. Writing about California wine then proliferated in the twentieth century. Some discussed just one varietyZinfandel, for example; others described a particular growing region, like Napa Valley. Still others addressed only a particular terroirthe particular blend of soil, climate, and sunlight that make any grape its ownwithin a region. Some are serious, scholarly works; some, though no less serious, are intended for the nonacademic reader; and some, notwithstanding the very self-serious nature of wine and winemaking in California, are light, effervescenteven gossipy.

So why another book about California wineor, more precisely, why this particular addition to the prolific and proliferating literature on the subject? For one, the history of wine and wine-making in California is entwined with the tumultuous boom-and-bust history of this stateeven, dare I say, with the history of the world. Yet the many excellent books on wine and its historyin California do not sufficiently reference or illuminate the larger history in which took place, for example, the fiasco of 1915namely the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Indeed, this leads to the second point: the 1915 debacle was just one of several crushing setbacks to the wine industry, and yet most histories recognize just the disaster brought on by Prohibition. And third, while several of the books have a richness, even a surfeit of details, none teases out the most pertinent strands of Californias wine historynotable for five high points and four devastating low ones. One history of winemaking in California (assiduously researched, maddeningly unfootnoted) doesnt even mention a significant pinnacle of California winemaking, a blind tasting in Paris in 1976even though the event occurred a mere seven years before that books publication.

A fourth reason is particularly impressive. San Franciscos culinary traditionand, by extension, Californiasbegan in the Gold Rush of 1849, from which it catapulted to ambrosial heights. No city on earth, that we know of, had attained such greatness in any endeavorbe that food, wine, art, or military conquestin such short order.

The wine tradition of California began as early as 1769. But it would take more than two hundred years before any authority would rank California wines as having achieved world-class statusand even then the winners would likely not have been selected had they been identified as Californian.

In the end, there are many stories of wine and California. This particular one suggested itselfwith an insistent, almost audible ahemas being worthy of writing.

Notes

. Serra, Writings of Junpero Serra, 1:263, 281.