fun

For Our Independent Judges

The UK, after all, is the second-largest export market for the fourth-biggest wine producing region (after France, Italy and Spain) in the world. And, in terms of value, American wine (the vast majority of it Californian) is easily the biggest US agricultural product imported into the UK, accounting for around 15% of total US agricultural exports, according to the Wine Institute of California.

And yet, surprise was a repeated theme when the judges for this year’s California Collection convened after they’d finished tasting through their flights of several dozen California wines (all of them exclusive to the UK’s independent sector) earlier this year. Time and again, the judges, all of them experienced independent wine merchants, and some of them specialists in California wine, expressed surprise at what they’d tasted. There was surprise at price. Many of the judges were happy to find good-quality wines at the sort of mid-range price points where California – with its reputation as a provider of successful mass-market brands and some of the world’s most in-demand, high-priced fine wines – is sometimes assumed to be weak: the £10-to-£20 and £20-to-£30 brackets provided many of the judges’ most highly rated wines in this year’s final selection of 50 wines, with many more only narrowly missing the cut.

No less significantly, there was surprise at California’s stylistic range, and the quality found in each style and grape variety. As the Collection line-up presented over the following pages shows, our judges were very impressed by the increasingly confident cool-climate winemaking represented by many of the Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs. But they were also reminded of how good Californian winemakers are at what might be regarded as their traditional strengths. That might be the “fatter, richer style” of Chardonnay which, as Holly Willcocks of Half Cut Wines says, “you don’t find elsewhere”. Or it might be the “more full-bodied reds” – the Cabernet and Zinfandel – that “pleasantly surprised” Sarah Hatton and Virginia Myers of Tenaya Wine, for example. Further stereotype-busting fun could be found in the very presence of wines made from such diverse and unusual grapes as Albariño, Picpoul, Grenache Blanc, Viognier, Trousseau, Petite Sirah and Carignan, while a variety that has fallen from fashion’s frontline, Merlot, was responsible, either on its own or as part of a blend, for some of the highest-scoring wines in the tasting.

The variety – of price point, style and grape variety – is the product of a winemaking scene that has never been more vibrantly diverse, with the producers responsible for the 50 California Collection wines ranging from hipster micro negociants and historic small family producers sourcing from single vineyards to quality-conscious large producers working with growers across the state.

Collectively these producers are changing outdated perceptions of California wine, although not everything they do is a surprise. As Emily Silva, of the Oxford Wine Company, said of her flights, “I was hoping and expecting to taste some delicious wines and that is what happened.” In this way, at least, California is only too predictable.