When, many years ago, I visited Robert Mondavi and his winery in California’s Napa Valley, the thing that impressed me most was Mondavi’s openness to new ideas and winemaking techniques, and his generosity in sharing them with anybody who was wise enough to listen. I am happy to say that this openness has paid off handsomely: Bob Mondavi has not only produced superb wines, he has become the unofficial spokesman for wine in America.
The excellence of American wine is beginning to be recognized abroad, although here at home the industry is not doing well at all. Per-capita wine consumption in the United States remains at 2.43 gallons a year, compared to a whopping 21.6 gallons in Italy. And not only do we drink little wine, but the increasingly tough regulations against drunken driving, the raising of the drinking age to 21, and the American preoccupation with health, all militate against an increase in wine consumption; the one exception being wine coolers (heavily promoted, fruity, low-alcohol soda pop), which are drunk very cold to suit the American taste for sweet, icy drinks, and especially for such drinks as deliver a slight alcoholic buzz. Though wine-cooler sales in 1986 have shown an increase of 36.8 per cent over 1985, I wonder whether wine-cooler drinkers will mature, as some people hope, into table-wine drinkers; it takes a lot of exposure to develop a taste for dry wines if you have not been familiar with them since childhood. Nevertheless, expensive table wines and costly imports do well with our wine drinkers: we have become a nation in which a few people drink good wines and many others drink no wine at all.
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