I’ve always been a staunch admirer of California wines, but now I am beginning to wonder how many of their producers suffer from a certain folie de grandeur. This thought comes out of a season of endless wine tastings, of being bombarded with promotional material from producers and their agencies, of reading the rhapsodic prose of wine writers, of seeing wine competitions like the one at the Los Angeles County Fair award scores and scores of medals, of watching the constant opening of small wineries—a continuing hysteria which distorts the subject, making wine an elitist, snobbish cult. And the prices! Five, ten, fifteen dollars and more, for a bottle for which you can find a European equivalent that costs at least a third less.
The culprits are not the big producers like Gallo, Almaden, Christian Brothers, Taylor California Cellars, Sebastiani, C. K. Mondavi, to mention just a few prominent names, who have built their reputation on inexpensive, dependable jugs. Their wines may not always be complex or interesting, but they are excellent value for the price and, as anybody who has drunk the vin ordinaire or vin du pays or vino da tavola or Sehoppenwein in Europe knows, far more foolproof than most of these. The parties responsible for making wine an inbred and precious business are the well-heeled people who open a winery, however small, as a status symbol, and the established winemakers who go in for wine fashions as if they worked on Seventh Avenue.
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