Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [39]
On the viticulture side, there’s a marketing reason for this interest in the coast. You might have noticed that, on moderately priced wines these days, “Coastal” shows up on labels a lot more than, say, “Napa Valley.” A few years ago, a vine ailment called phylloxera (fuh-LOCK-sir-uh) struck California, hitting famous coastal zones like the Napa Valley especially hard. To maintain production levels, wineries had to source fruit from other coastal growing zones, and also develop new ones. The term Coastal is typically used for wines that are blended from a lot of different coastal regions, or from coastal regions that lack consumer name recognition.
In terms of tradition, delineating a wine as Coastal distances it from the products of the Central Valley, whose quality reputation suffers from the fact that its warm growing conditions have long been exploited for generic and jug wine production—the lowest common denominator in terms of quality. The fact is that, as varietal wines have gained favor over generics in the past few years, the trend in this region has turned toward wines with improving balance and notably higher quality, with the jug stigma on the wane. Stay tuned.
Although you need not memorize the details of each region, you should keep in mind the significant quality impact of bodies of water (oceans, rivers, lakes) on the world of wine.
The list of famous wine regions below underscores this point:
ALTITUDE Altitude is rarely cited on wine labels, but I mention it here because it, too, helps explain some of the cool spots on the Flavor Map. If you think of snow-capped mountains in summer, this one is obvious. Very simply, a higher altitude makes for a cooler microclimate. Australia is a warm place, but you would hardly recognize the usual Aussie characteristics in the Rieslings and Chardonnays grown in the Adelaide Hills and Eden Valley districts, which are at higher altitudes and thus show up as cool spots on the Flavor Map.
A Taste Tour of the Flavor Map
Aside from a corkscrew, your best tool to navigate the Flavor Map is an open mind, and maybe a bit of poetic license. This is important to remember as you do the tastings in this chapter. By now, your senses of smell and taste are well-honed, so you are going to notice the fruit-flavor differences in the wines as you compare them. But you may not yet have the words for the flavors; that comes with experience, which is, of course, what the tastings are for. As we taste, I will help you with the vocabulary. If you don’t agree with one of my descriptions, insert your own. The fruit styles on the Flavor Map are reference points for the taster, not hard-and-fast rules set by the Wine Police.
Sampling the Local Flavor
Some fruit descriptions for wine, like apples, have universal acceptance because most everyone is familiar with them. But there are many fruits that are local to a particular area. As such, it can get a little confusing when they are used to describe a wine. Here are the ones commonly used by wineries and on bottle labels, with their source and a short description of the style.
Blackcurrant British and French tasters use this moderate-zone fruit flavor to describe the classic taste of Cabernet Sauvignon, yet it leaves many Americans in the dark because blackcurrants are not widely grown here. (I finally found a farm growing them in upstate New York, and went there just to taste them.) A related word is cassis, which is the liqueur made from blackcurrants that you can find in liquor stores if you want to learn this flavor and scent. Another thing to try is blackcurrant jam or preserves, sold in supermarkets and specialty food stores.
Redcurrant This is a