If you’re a wine lover and you’ve lived all your life in New Jersey or Virginia, chances are you like Chianti. You know the good ones from the mediocre and don’t mind splurging every now and then for a Brunello di Montalcino.
If you’re a lifelong Californian wine lover, chances are you prefer richer, softer reds and don’t like Chianti very much—and you think Brunello di Montalcino is a Verdi opera tenor.
Where we were reared tells us much about what our wine preferences are, and that relates to U.S. transportation systems dating back generations—in some cases, all the way back to the end of Prohibition, whose 100th anniversary we'll re-celebrate in just 11 more years!
It’s been only about 75 years since regular, affordable transcontinental rail service allowed bulk wine to be shipped east from California. And it’s been only 50 years since the country’s fledgling national highway system had refrigerated trucks carrying bottled California wine to the east.
Before then, the vast majority of wines available to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest were European, most styled in classical European traditions based on cooler continental climates that featured modest sunlight, rains during the growing season, low alcohol levels, and high acid levels.
As such, most of the wines consumed in the East and Midwest were designed to be put on dinner tables. They were racy and tart.
By contrast, California wines have always been made in areas renowned for warmth, higher temperatures, lots of sun, and thus lower acids and higher alcohols. The wines were bigger, richer, and softer. So, Californians grew up on that style of wine.
It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that East Coasters began to experience California wines. Until then, most of what they knew wine to be was lean and edgy.
As Easterners matured from teens into adults and began to experience wine in home settings, they consumed what their parents were familiar with. These usually were the wines coming direct from Europe to the East Coast.
Historically, most people appreciated the wines they grew up with—made in the styles their grandparents and parents knew. Some of the best European wines remain better appreciated on the East Coast than in the West.
A reader sent me an email recently that said he was not much of a fan of serving California wine with food. He said they were best served all by themselves, which was his main frame of reference for most of the California wines he was consuming.
And he added, interestingly, that on the rare occasion when he drank a European wine, he noted that it was really best when paired with food.
By coincidence, another reader said in a different email that he had noted over the last few years that quite a few European wines he was trying had alcohol levels that were much higher than they had been about 20 years earlier, and he wondered how this trend developed.
After noting that I, too, had seen more alcohol in European wines, I suggested that most of those that are being imported here with alcohols about 15 percent, for instance, might have been created specifically for the U.S. market, and that these offerings likely wouldn’t sell as well on the continent.
Additionally, I have noted that when I have traveled to Europe, many of the local cafe red wines tend to be lighter in color than are our West Coast red wine counterparts.
People who consume mostly California wine seem to love the darker colors and darker flavors in the wines they praise the most. East Coast wine buyers, who seem to appreciate Euro styles, care much less about color and prefer wines that enhance victuals.
To sum up this thesis, I quote the late winemaker Louis M. Martini: “The wines we like best are those to which we have become accustomed.”
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