I blogged two days ago about how the Sonomans are trying to promote their county’s name by passing a new “conjunctive labeling” law that would append the words “Sonoma County” to all the county’s sub-appellations. Yesterday the Center for Wine Origins (CWO) launched or rather relaunched its ongoing campaign to prevent purloined place names like Port and Champagne from being used anywhere except in their natural origins, where the name refers to the place where the grapes were grown. The CWO is kicking off “the second phase of its ‘Location Matters’ campaign in 2010” in order to prevent “American consumers [from] being misled or deceived.”

It’s perfectly reasonable for regions to want to promote and protect their place-names. If I had a place-name somebody else was using I’d likely do the same. The problem really is one of consumer education, which is badly needed, as some of the comments on my Monday blog made clear. Somebody wrote in to say how he overheard a tourist outside the tasting room tell someone on his cell phone that he was “someplace in Napa” when in fact he was in Sonoma County! In the same way that people need to know Sonoma from Napa, they should understand that real Port is from a delimited area in the Douro region of Portugal and real Champagne is from (or rather in) northern France (and we could add Sherry and a few other wines to the list).

The question, of course, is how to educate Americans about anything these days, when so many of them seem to cherish their ignorance. The obvious answer to the “how to educate?” question is, Through the media. But the media are so fractured that it’s hard to know what “the media” even means anymore. Readers of, say, my magazine, or the Wall Street Journal’s wine column, or Jon Bonné in the San Francisco Chronicle, probably understand the difference between Portuguese Port and California “Port”, but millions of consumers upon whom the industry actually depends probably do not. They will buy what they buy, and the wineries (and distributors) will pocket their profits they can, in these tough times. Let the winners win. So does it really, ultimately matter whether or not people understand the difference between authentic Port and purloined “port”?

The Center for Wine Origins (which if I’m not mistaken is funded by the Champagne and Port producers and is headquartered on Washington, D.C.’s infamous M Street, the world capital of lobbying) certainly believes it matters. I’m less convinced. CWO naturally bases their case on “climate and soil” which “vary extensively by region.” This is the old terroir story, the implication being that nowhere but Champagne can you get anything remotely similar to Champagne because nowhere else are the climate and soil exactly the same. That’s true beyond arguing, but the case that Champagne is superior to (or even distinguishable from) the best California sparkling wine is not so clear. Portuguese Port, on the other hand, is a very great wine and so far there are no other “port”-style wines to equal them, but that, I think, isn’t due solely to the dirt and climate of the Douro but to the fact that the port market is so dead that nobody cares enough to compete. Make Port suddenly a hot, in-demand wine, and you’d see the a real increase in quality

If quality isn’t the thing at stake in protecting origin names then what is? I suppose you could say it’s a romantic, even nostalgic sense of history. The idea of protecting the names of Champagne and Port is an alluring one, especially to the lover of wine with a sense of tradition who feels himself a sort of guardian of what’s right. At the same time, we should keep in mind that, regardless of what the CWO says, their motive is only partly noble. It’s primarily an economic one: to protect and preserve not just the names Champagne and Port, but the profits of the Port shippers and the Champenois. That’s not to say their arguments are bogus. But they should be taken in context.

In a way the debate is already passé. Under agreements previously installed some wineries are permitted, by grandfather clauses, to go on using “Champagne” and “Port.” As for the others, the struggle, which is esssentially between the American wine industry and its E.C. equivalent, goes on inconclusively, rather reminiscent of the trench warfare of WWI in which fights were heavily waged for gains of inches. If I were advising the Europeans, I’d suggest that they not invest too heavily, emotionally or financially, in this contretemps. They’re not likely to win it, and it’s not the most important battle they could strategically wage anyhow. Far more important for them is to convince Americans that (a) Champagne is not just a drink for weddings and New Year’s Eve and (b) sweet red wine has a place on the consumer’s table. Both of these battles they could jointly wage with California producers; together the two sides have more to gain than to lose.

The question is how we’re going to make our buying decisions (including wine) in the future, when (supposedly) the influence of super-experts will wane in favor of peer recommendations. The conventional wisdom — at least, as expressed by social media advocates and the people who are paid to promote them — is that social media will replace critics in a huge democratization of everything, in which everybody becomes a critic, all the time. The most obvious platform for such a revolution, it is said, is Twitter.

But wait. Is it really? Twitter’s limit (twimit?) is too much democracy too fast. Twitter is as if the ocean were funneled into your kitchen sink, one drop at a time through the faucet, until your entire house is 300 feet underwater. There is no unanimity of opinion (the way there is when a handful of critics raves about a movie). There is no continuity (because what was just expressed is washed away in micro-seconds by what is being said now, and now). There is no time to digest information that arrives in breakneck fashion. Moreover, the information that is incoming does not coincide with the timing of when you need that information in order to make a decision. It is, rather, like not having a hammer when there is a nail you wish to drive in or, conversely, like inconveniently being given a hammer when you neither need nor want one.

It’s for these reasons that I have expressed doubts about the potential of Twitter to transform (twansform?) our consumer culture. But don’t think that the Luddite in me believes that the Internet is incapable of such radical transformation. There is one such technology that shows the potential of driving sales as radically as any social media devotee could ever wish for, and that is Yelp.

What is Yelp? “A web-based community which allows users to share the experiences they’ve had world-wide,” in the words of this slideshow, although “world-wide” exaggerates Yelp’s real focus, which is city-wide (or local). If you’re on a business trip to Duluth and are looking for Thai food, Twitter isn’t likely to help (“the information that is incoming does not necessarily coincide with the timing of when you need that information”) but Yelp can. Yelp can steer you to “businesses within walking distance” no matter where or when you are, which is why Google is in discussions to buy it, according to last Saturday’s New York Times.

Is Yelp “social media”? By the widest definition, certainly. It started in San Francisco as an email recommendation service, so its peer-to-peer nature made it “social” while its email platform made it “media.” Today, of course, Yelp operates out of numerous U.S. cities, and you can browse by 22 categories (nightlife, religious organizations, beauty and spas), of which “wine” is not one; but the search engine lets you find reccos for wine bars, wineries, wine stores, wine clubs and the like, each of them accompanied by user comments that range from snarky to complimentary.

Still, when it comes to wine, there’s one thing Yelp doesn’t yet offer and probably never will, and that’s to give shoppers an overwhelmingly persuasive reason to buy one particular bottle over all the others. Even if Yelp enabled users to sound off on wine, all it would become is another, well, Twitter: a cacophony of dissonant opinion, with Johnny praising that Sauvignon Blanc while Susie accuses it of smelling like cat piss. Then too, Yelp’s revenue stream, which “lets businesses sponsor their search results” thus allowing them “to pay Yelp to display themselves higher on searches,” makes its objectivity suspect, no less so than Zagat’s reccos are similarly suspect (because the restaurant owner’s extended family and employees can say the most glowing things). So there’s no reason for a savvy shopper to believe anything qualitative or subjective on Yelp. He might find directions to that Thai restaurant in Duluth, but it could be the worst meal he ever had.

So what will replace the critics? You’re back in Duluth. You’ve opted out of the Thai restaurant, preferring instead to spring for French (you’re on a per diem from your company). Yelp leads you to Au Contraire, which boasts the town’s best Provençal. You pick up the wine list. It’s indecipherable; you barely recognize the appellations, much less the chateaux. You could ask the sommelier but, this being Duluth, Au Contraire doesn’t have one, just a waitron of doubtful apprehension. Fortunately, there is a solution. You take your iPhone, to which you’ve downloaded wine recommendation apps. (There are several, including the Wine Enthusiast Guide, which has sold 85,000 copies in the last 12 months). Suddenly you feel on surer footing; you no longer have to guess. You have highest of high-tech mobile platforms to make an informed wine-buying decision — where you are, when you need it, from a source you trust. The Death of Print? We can argue about that, but not, obviously, about the death of the critic, who lives on to give advice, with a digital voice over your cell phone.

Oh man, this is gonna be a good fight. Some of Sonoma County’s most powerful organizations want to force the county’s sub-appellations to include “Sonoma County” on the label of every bottle of wine made there.

The Sonoma County Vintners is pushing the idea. Its executive director, Honore Comfort, was quoted in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat as saying that adding Sonoma County to all the county’s appellations [e.g., Chalk Hill, Dry Creek Valley, Alexander Valley, Knights Valley, etc.] will bring “significant potential benefit to Sonoma County wineries, grape growers and tourism.”

The Press-Democrat, however, cited a couple vintners, among them Tom Hinde, president of Flowers, as being more skeptical. Hinde predicted “vibrant debate” around the issue. Greg Bjornstad, of Bjornstad Cellars, told me, “I’d be concerned about an extra layer of compliance that wineries would need to adhere to, much less any extra expense for redesigning labels to include new verbiage,” although he added, “On the up side, I suppose it could help bring some more recognition to Sonoma.” Other winemakers are all in favor. Bob Cabral, at Williams Selyem, told me, “I think it is a wonderful idea…If we ever want the consumers to understand appellations, like RRV or Dry Creek Valley, we need to start broad geographically with the county.” Having a broader “Sonoma County” identity on each bottle, he believes, “reinforces the message to the consumers that Sonoma County is NOT Napa!”

Sonoma’s always had a Rodney Dangerfield attitude with respect to their neighbor “over the hill,” Napa Valley. This proposed new move is an effort to promote Sonoma to the consumer as vigorously as does Napa (which pushed through its own so-called “conjunctive labeling” law in 1987). I’ve written many times, both here and in my books, about how Sonoma was in such a hurry to sub-appellate, in the 1980s, that they carved up their county like a holiday turkey before anyone really understood its terroir. Napa Valley, on the other hand, took more of a wait-and-see approach, and today, their sub-AVAs — mainly mountains and the towns along Highway 29 — make much more sense than do Sonoma’s, which resemble a cracked up Humpty Dumpty.

There is a sense of too little, too late to Sonoma’s conjunctive labeling proposal. True, if “Sonoma County” appeared on every bottle of wine coming from there, there probably would be “100 million faces [of Sonoma] on retail shelves and wine lists,” in the words of Nick Frey, the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission’s president, who’s in favor of the idea. But “Made in China” appears on hundreds of millions of products and nobody rushes out to buy them because of where they were made. It’s also not clear to me that there wouldn’t be a corresponding dilution of Sonoma’s sub-appellations. Russian River Valley, for example, has tried so hard, and with so much success, to advance its reputation. How would appending “Sonoma County” to it help? It might not hurt, but if I were a Russian River Valley winery, the fact that “it might not hurt” my business is hardly an encouraging reason to support it.

There’s also the problem that what worked for Napa Valley will not necessarily work for anyplace else. To mimic a competitor’s business model is seldom a formula for success. In business and elsewhere, we see that in order to achieve something lasting, you have to come up with something original. Besides, I don’t think that origin is as important as it used to be. The consumer now has access to wines from everywhere in the world, and is guided by factors far more important (to him) than appellation. Price, good reviews, peer recommendations, wine type, shelf talkers and even label design play more into buying decisions, I suspect, than where the grapes were grown.

Sonoma County, like all wine regions, suffers from an inherent tension: each winery wishes to promote itself above all the others, and sometimes that involves competing against its neighbors. A winery that promotes its greater appellation runs the risk of hurting itself by make its competitors more illustrious. This is why there has always been an historic push-pull within regional winery associations. If you’re a winery, belonging to a regional association is a double-edged sword, because a rising tide lifts all boats, not just your own. I’ve said before that the best way for Sonoma County wineries to promote themselves is to make the very best wine they can. We’ve seen throughout history that that’s how great wineries survive and thrive, not by tinkering with what they say on their labels.

The last few months have seen the usual Fall influx of sparkling wines coming in for review, as the wineries try to get their scores posted in time for the holiday season. So this time of the year always gets me thinking about California bubbly.

As good as it is — and it’s become quite good on a world-class level — California sparkling wine suffers from an identity crisis. As everybody knows, sales for years have been flat or down (as they are for sparkling wines of all regions, including Champagne), and if you ask the average, or even the semi-knowledgeable, wine lover what they know about sparkling wine, he or she would probably run out of things to say, beyond “It’s bubbly.” That’s compared to, say, Cabernet Sauvignon, which would likely elicit something about Napa Valley, or Pinot Noir, which might bring forth comments about cool climates and could even turn up references to specific regions, like Russian River Valley or Santa Rita Hills.

But California sparkling wine? Does anybody even know where it’s grown? Does anyone know if it matters where it’s grown? Granted, some might surmise — if they knew — that, since it’s usually comprised of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, it ought to be grown in cool regions. But someone else, equally knowledgeable if a bit mischievous, might remind them that, since the grapes that go into sparkling wine are picked less than ripe, it hardly matters where they’re grown. This is, of course, a specious argument, but it underscores the point that one of the reasons California sparkling wine doesn’t do better with consumers is because they’re unable to associate it with a region or appellation, and if there’s one thing consumers can get their (already information-sated) minds around, it’s appellations.

In Spain (as I was reminded re-reading Tom Stevenson’s wonderful “World Encyclopedia of Champagne and Sparkling Wine”), when Spain was told by the EU that the regulations demanded that appellations be linked to specific growing regions, that country shrewdly gerrymandered their various Cava production areas so that all of them, scattered across the nation, can now officially be called Cava. That ploy was taken due to the eccentricities of the EU system which we, in the States, of course, don’t have to care about. But it set me thinking: Why couldn’t California create a new appellation (or American Viticultural Area, as they’re called in America) that would encompass the best sparkling wine-growing regions?

Would it be legal? Well, I think so. An AVA is only an indication of geographic origin. If we drew up a sparkling wine AVA that ran from, say, Anderson Valley (Roederer, Handley) through Sonoma County (Iron Horse, J), Napa Valley (Schramsberg, Mumm) and Carneros (Gloria Ferrer, Domaine Chandon), then down through the Arroyo Grande (Laetitia), it would constitute a defined geographic area. And since AVAs are allowed to cross county lines (e.g. Carneros), that’s not a problem.

One potential problem could be a clause in the TTB’s statutes (the TTB is in charge of granting AVAs) that requires “Evidence that the name of the proposed viticultural area is locally and/or nationally known as referring to the area specified in the petition,” but I think that could be dealt with. It might not be easy, but it could be done, probably using the (admittedly politically-fraught) word “coastal”. Other than that, TTB’s additional requirements, such as evidence of distinguishing geographical and climate features, should present no difficulties. The band of any sparkling wine AVA would probably include U.C. Davis climate regions I and II or (in the case of Napa), lower III, and lie within a 5-30 mile distance inland from the Coast.

Imagine if there were a sparkling wine AVA. The marketing and P.R. firms, and the wineries themselves, would have a ball promoting it. Think of the maps, the brochures; there could even be a special seal on the label. Of course, sparkling wine producers from outside the appellation would howl, but there’s nothing wrong with a little controversy (or buzz, as the case may be). This might even be a good opportunity to get the message across, at long last, that sparkling wine is not just something for weddings and New Year’s Eve.

From the consumer’s point of view, wine buyers really would be the utmost beneficiaries of a new AVA, because they would have one more powerful piece of information at hand when making a buying decision: the best sparkling wines really do come from that narrow coastal strip between Mendocino County and San Luis Obispo County (and I suppose Santa Barbara County could get into the act if they wanted to, if someone in the Santa Rita Hills got serious about sparkling wine, which, of course, they’re not likely to, since a SRH Pinot Noir is worth so much more than a SRH bubbly would be. But that’s another story).

I can’t think of single case in which getting an AVA didn’t help promote its grapes and wines, especially those along the coast that make superior wine anyway. Look at the history of AVAs in California, from Napa Valley through Santa Lucia Highlands and Santa, err, excuse me, Sta. Rita Hills. So, all you coastal sparkling wine houses, how about it? You have nothing to lose but your, uhh, lack of sales. (And maybe TTB would let you continue to use your existing appellation along with the new one, e.g. “Anderson Valley/California Coastal”.)

* * * * * *
Dept. of What were they thinking?

Got a nice holiday greeting postcard from the “Sweet and Fortified Wine Assocation” wishing me best wishes, etc., which was very nice of this trade group I’ve never heard of. I’m always happy to hear from a wine association I can learn more about, but in this case the postcard had no contact information at all. Not a website, not an address, not a phone number, nada. Just the group’s name.

As it turns out, they have a website, but it’s perhaps indicative of the weakness of sweet and fortified California wines in America that they would send a postcard to a critic, without any way of finding out who they are except through Google.

The climate change deniers, bless their dumb little hearts, are getting lots of buzz lately, but I’ll side with the scientists, the majority of whom are absolutely sure that warming is occurring and that it’s getting dangerously too late to do anything about it.

The latest — as if we didn’t have enough evidence — comes from Stanford, where UPI is reporting that a team led by Noah Diffenbaugh “say they’ve determined global warming could significantly negatively impact U.S. wine and corn production.” (I’m not going to write here about corn except to say that I love it when it’s ripe in the summertime and will miss it if it goes away.) They go on to say that “global warming could reduce the current U.S. wine grape region by 81 percent by the end of the century” due to hotter and hotter days in wine country like California’s, which, in places like Napa Valley, is already pretty hot.

(Diffenbaugh presents his formal study today at an American Geophysical Union held in Moscone Center and I’m sure it will be widely reported.)

It’s not just that excessive heat could make even coastal valleys inappropriate for delicate varieties, like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. A warming climate could upset the ecosystem in much more fundamental ways. Science Daily describes how, “if spring-like weather arrives earlier than usual, and flowers bloom and wither before the pollinators [like bees] appear,” then wines might not even produce fruit. Earlier, scientists had calculated that a rise of only 2-4 degrees Celsius in grape regions could cause “losses [to be] be as high as 40 percent by mid-century.” In a previous study, Diffenbaugh determined that temperatures “from the principal wine regions of California, Oregon and Washington” already have risen in recent years by nearly 1 degree Celsius, and that was before some of the hottest years on record were yet to come.

It’s been surmised for years that other areas of the United States and North America could become more amenable to fine wine (vitis vinifera) growing as California gets too hot. Diffenbaugh warned as early as 2006 that by the end of this century “wine growing areas will be largely limited to the Northeast, including parts of upstate New York and Long Island.” And, of course, it was reported just yesterday that “there are some places in the world, such as the English vineyards, which stand to benefit from warmer temperatures.”

I know that some people don’t like it when I get all political on this blog which is a wine blog not a political blog or a scientific blog. But can we agree that a topic like climate change isn’t just scientific or political but may potentially impact us all? The leaked emails from a week or so ago gave ammunition to the deniers but as The [San Francisco] Examiner reported 3 days ago, the conservative furor over the emails “is much ado about nothing” and “the evidence of global warming is overwhelming.” Since I’m unable to conduct my own research into climate change, and don’t have the time or technical expertise to wade through mountains of studies and data, I have to put my trust in something; and I choose to believe the credible scientists from around the world and in every agency of every country I’m aware of (including the U.N.) that climate change is upon us, and one of its manifestations will be increased warming — perhaps not everywhere, or all at once, but California seems to be at risk, which means winegrapes are too, and that worries me.