800 Words On Bad Wine
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Dear Maryland Wineries,
Shape up.
You pitch your wines as a boutique product, with prices to match. I’m not going to pay $20+ a bottle for wine that’s quite obviously inferior to $7 California plonk I can pick up at any wine shop. I’m not going to go out of my way for your products, because they don’t offer anything more than a warm fuzzy feeling for supporting local producers. That isn’t enough. Goodwill only goes so far.
I spent a day at the Maryland Wine Festival in Westminster, MD on the 21st of September. I visited the tents of every winery there. Of the 3 hours I spent sampling wine, I found fewer than a half dozen that were even average examples of their type. There were many horrible wines – oxidized whites with sherry aromas, bitter reds, sharp, sour, and tasteless varietals that poorly represented their key characteristics, and dessert wines that taste little better than slightly alcoholic grocery-store grape juice. In this day and age, there is no excuse for producing undrinkable wine, but you all are managing it with aplomb.
No wonder sweet wines are your biggest sellers – your dry table wines are just not good. Do you even drink wine? Do you appreciate what makes wine appealing, and what qualities make up a good wine? Do you really believe that your products compare favorably to those readily available to the wine consumer? I find it hard to believe that you can honestly, and with a straight face, put a Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc out on the market for $15-25 that lacks the even a hint of the balance of fruit and acid, minerality and toastiness that even the most average $10-14 bottle from New Zealand, California, or Italy offers. If the examples I tasted this weekend are the best you can manage, you are delusional.
Flaunt your Governor’s Cup medals all you want – they’re bloody meaningless and they’re awarded in unseemly volume. I’d really be interested in seeing those scores, because there are gold- and silver-medal winners listed here that I immediately dumped after the first taste, as they were wretched. The state agriculture folks need to stop rewarding bad product – you as winemakers need a reality check, and the state organizations need to stop cheerleading for inferior goods. It does you and the state of Maryland no favors.
Stop trying to grow Pinot Noir. It all sucks. It is a very challenging grape, and Maryland does not have the climate nor terroir to support good Pinot. Just because it’s the hot varietal doesn’t mean you should plant it. Retire your DVD of Sideways and leave Pinot Noir to the Willamette Valley, Santa Barbara, Sonoma County, and Burgundy. Neither does Cabernet Sauvignon do all that well here – it’s thin and lacks body. It’s best blended with other varietals, not sold as a pure alternative to the excellent offerings from Napa. Riesling requires cool summers and mild transitions to colder weather to develop their famous acidity – our hot summers produce flabby Rieslings.
Find varietals that do well here in the Mid-Atlantic and exploit them to their fullest. Take a cue from Virginia and pursue perfecting Cabernet Franc and Viognier, grapes that seem to thrive on Mid-Atlantic hillsides. Your Chardonnays are middling, and that can be helped with better treatment in the winery, especially through eschewing aging in wood. Italian grapes like Sangiovese and Barbera show some promise. Stop trying to be Napa Valley. Maryland is not Napa, not Sonoma – it’s Maryland.
Oak is not your savior. Oak is not a magic spell that makes poor wine good. Please, please, please quit over-oaking your wines. I got so sick of smelling funky, overwhelmingly woody oak barrels every time I lifted a glass to my nose. I don’t want to taste barrel, I want to taste fruit and acidity and grape tannins, with oak’s vanilla components as a complement. I don’t want to feel like I’m chewing a mouthful of oak chips along with every sip. I don’t want to be roughed up with a two-by-four in every glass. More oak does not equal more quality or more class. Learn what the hell stainless steel tanks are good for. Limit the amount of time your wines spend in wood, or use older casks. Right now, the signature Maryland wine characteristic is not that of the vineyard or winery, but that of a lumberyard.
If you’re going to pretend to being serious winemakers, get serious. Find out what works, and take maximum advantage of it. Drop varietals that have no business growing in our climate. If your wines cannot stand alone without massive amounts of oaking to add body, then you need to fix that. If you really love wine, show it.
Because right now, you’re a joke. Your wines are an insult.
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