Friday, Sep. 01, 2000

So long to chablis, champagne

By Ken Robertson

Q. I frequently used to see titles used on American wines that were the same as many of those used in France, such as Chablis, Champagne and Burgundy. In recent years, they've mostly disappeared. Why?

A. Congratulations. Your tastes have improved. About the only place you see these titles anymore is on U.S. jug wines. But it used to be common for American wineries to borrow heavily and heedlessly from the well-known and well-regarded French names of that nation's various "areas of origin," especially Chablis, Burgundy and Champagne, as you noted.

These titles have largely disappeared from U.S. labels posted on higher-quality wines for several reasons. The jealous French grew tired of having their reputations ripped off, especially for Chablis and Champagne, when many of the American wines so labeled were pretty bland stuff.

And when California and Northwest wines actually began to rival the quality of the finer French products, enough was indeed enough! Upset French Champagne and Chablis vintners, facing world trade competition and well versed in its regulations, pressed the United States to end the practice.

In place of these names, the U.S. industry has engaged in aggressive marketing to build a premium wine image that in nonsparkling wines was focused on the varieties instead, such as chardonnay, merlot and cabernet sauvignon. The resounding success of that campaign has even prompted the Europeans to follow suit — thus the recent blossoming of French-labeled merlot, chardonnay and so on.

In addition, some U.S. regions, such as Oregon, have banned using the phony appellations on grapes grown in specific areas. So instead of seeing an Oregon chablis, for example, a wine might be titled blanc de blanc.

And Washington state's new Wine Quality Alliance has banned geographic terms such as Bordeaux and Chablis.

At the grocery or liquor store, there still are bottles of American wine labeled "chablis" and "burgundy" but almost always in jug wines of lackluster quality. Once in a while, though, a nice surprise still pops up. A couple years ago, I happened on a California wine labeled "Black Burgundy" that appeared to be an old-style Mediterranean vineyard mix of red grape vines such as petit syrah, zinfandel and other reds, probably from a several-decades-old vineyard. The wine was quite a nice bottling and a substantial improvement over the lesser-quality wines with the phony area-of-origin titles.

Q. Many of the bottles of wine now on the market have the new plastic corks. Do these wines still need to be stored on their sides to keep the corks in good shape? I had one that was hard to pull. Was that because it wasn't stored properly?

A. In a word, no. Don't worry too much about storing bottles with polymer — a fancy name for plastic — corks on their side. The stoppers won't dry out, shrink or otherwise degrade, according to Supreme Corq, the Kent, Wash.-based maker of most of the synthetic corks Northwesterners are likely to see. A small proportion of them, however, reportedly are difficult to pull.

Hogue Cellars of Prosser, Wash., for example, recently had a handful of consumer complaints about hard-to-pull polymer corks. David Forsyth, director of winemaking at Hogue, said as a result the winery has backed away, until the problem is solved, from its plans to shift to the synthetics.

"It's not a cost issue, it's a quality issue," he said of the debate about whether the synthetic corks are better than natural cork, whose reputation has taken a beating in recent years. Natural corks are blamed for tainting wines with TCA — trichloroanisole — a chemical that at its worst can ruin a wine, leaving it smelling like wet cardboard. Estimates of the spoilage rate vary. Cork industry sources say it's as little as 1.7 percent. Winemakers, now that they have synthetic corks as a control agent, say it's much higher.

"We're finding corkiness runs as high as 40 percent at low levels," Forsyth said.

Switching to the synthetics has its own problems. "We knew when we were going to get into synthetic corks there would be some problems," Forsyth said. "It's kind of an engineering feat (to create the synthetics) because natural cork in some sense is the perfect closure. ... The obvious problem with cork is the TCA, but we also get a lot of leakers."

While the producers of the synthetic and the natural corks struggle to solve their problems, Forsyth's advice for handling a stuck-tight synthetic cork is simple: "In a pinch, warm the neck of the bottle under the (hot water) tap over the very end of the bottle. It warms the lubricant and should allow you to get the cork out. We've only had one bottle show up (at the winery tasting room), and we open up hundreds of bottles."

And yes, there are lubricants — silicone or paraffin — applied to both natural and synthetic corks to make the corks easier to pull. They are tasteless, odorless and almost invisible.

• Comments
• Add Comment
• Disclaimer