#how to make diego insane about you 101

[qqueenofhades]

the tangled web of fate we weave: vi

shh, this is very therapeutic.

part v/AO3.

Lucy gets through the next several weeks mostly on autopilot. There’s spring break in there somewhere, but she doesn’t really notice, since she spends it working anyway. Her dissertation is inching toward the final finish line, though she still has to write a conclusion, put together her bibliography (which will be an absolutely torturous process of going through the whole thing and copy-pasting every footnote – why hasn’t someone invented a better way to do this yet?) and add her acknowledgments: places she went for trips, foundations who gave her scholarship money, people she’s collaborated with, that kind of thing. Most of it is straightforward, but when Lucy gets to the personal section, where people thank their parents, significant others, grade school teachers, supervisors, etc., she stares at the screen until it goes out of focus. Ordinarily she’d write, Thanks for everything, Mom and Dad, no problem at all, but how can she do that now? Thanks for everything, Mom and Henry Wallace, except for never telling me who my biological father was? Thanks for everything, Mom, but Benjamin Cahill, why?

Lucy leaves that part undone, just adds Amy for now, and finally pushes back her chair and lets out a hoarse war cry of victory, punching the air with both fists and startling the nearby students. She emails it to her supervisor, Dr. Kate Underwood, with the triumphant subject line FIRST COMPLETE DRAFT!!!!, then cleans out her carrel with something probably akin to what a new mother feels, when they finally hand her the baby after the sweat and strife of labor. Not that Lucy’s interested in kids, at least for a while, but still.

She sleeps like the dead for the entire weekend (her neighbors are actually still being quiet, and she certainly isn’t going to tell them that she’s probably never going to see Flynn again) then gets up and goes off to her final review meeting with Dr. Underwood on Monday. Most of the changes she suggests are small, though there’s one part of the last chapter that she pushes Lucy to do a little more with. Nothing outside her usual corrections, but since that was the chapter Lucy was dramatically interrupted from writing with the Weekend of Total Insanity, it triggers something in her. In one of the more embarrassing moments of her life, she bursts into tears in Dr. Underwood’s sunny office, as her supervisor looks bewildered, gingerly hands her Kleenex, and finally asks if everything is all right.

Lucy figures that last-minute nervous breakdowns are far from uncommon for PhD students just about to submit, and there’s a ready-made way to play this off as just that, which she more or less does. There are student counseling services that she could probably make an appointment with, though they’re busy enough at crunch time that it would be another few weeks until anyone saw her. And she just can’t picture sitting across from some graduate-student psychiatrist-in-training and actually making sense of this. Has the usual feeling that she doesn’t need to burden people with her first-world problems – “starving kids in Africa syndrome,” one of her friends called it. This is a little more than ordinary, perhaps, but still.

Having promised that she will have the changes in by next Monday, Lucy confirms the date for her oral examination, six weeks from now, and realizes that she has no idea what she will be doing for that time, aside from sleeping and bingeing on TV shows. Her work is done, she has class to finish teaching but only two days a week, and her schedule gapes perilously wide open. She isn’t good at sitting around and doing nothing; can manage maybe a week or two, then she starts feeling that she needs to be productive. Another gift from her mother. She never let Lucy just veg out during the summer as a kid. She had to be doing an extracurricular, or preparing for a AP exam, or off at Young Achievers Camp, which is exactly as nerdy as it sounds. She’s not sure she even knows how to rest.

Once Dr. Underwood has sent her off with advice to get some sleep and feel proud of her accomplishment, Lucy staggers out into the world beyond Stanford like Rip Van Winkle. It’s a nice day, warm and summery and almost difficult to remember that that whole ridiculous seventy-two hours ever happened, and she pauses. Then on a sudden impulse, she digs out her phone and scrolls through her contacts. Hits call, and waits.

Wyatt Logan picks up on the last ring, sounding slightly breathless. “Hello? Lucy?”

“Hi. I’m sorry, is it a bad time?”

“No, it’s fine. What’s up? Are you all right?”

“I. . . yeah, I am. I just. . . finished my dissertation, actually. And I thought if you were in San Francisco, maybe we could meet up and grab a coffee, or. . . or something?” Her heart flutters in her throat. “Just, you know, to catch up?”

There’s a slightly awkward pause. Then Wyatt says, “I’m, uh, I’m back in San Diego, I’m based out of Pendleton. And I promised my wife we’d go to the beach today, or whatever.”

“Your w – ” Lucy can feel her cheeks turning the color of a fire engine. “Oh my God, I didn’t – I really wasn’t – of course. No, no, of course. I’m sure you’ll have a great time.”

“Yeah.” Wyatt coughs. “Congratulations on finishing your dissertation, that’s an amazing accomplishment. Nothing else weird has happened recently?”

“Not that I’ve noticed. Maybe they’ve given it up.” Lucy knows this is too easy, but she wants to think so. Likewise, she both does and doesn’t want to ask. “Have you heard from Flynn?”

Wyatt hesitates. “No. I called back to the hospital a week later, they said they let him out, but I have no idea where he went. Probably off the grid. I would, if I was him. There’s an APB out, anyone who sees him is supposed to call it in. Whoever Rittenhouse is, they’re still very, very pissed.”

Lucy struggles to take this in. On the one hand, it’s good news, of a sort, that Flynn somewhat recovered and was released from the hospital, but was this because he was ready to roll again, or because he didn’t want to take the risk of lying there waiting for his enemies to show up? There are a nearly unlimited number of ways that they can kill him in a hospital and make it look like an accident, after all. If he is officially persona non grata for a lot of powerful and high-ranking people, and he’s hurt, that doesn’t sound like a good combination. Maybe he’s fled the country, gone up and crossed into British Columbia and hidden out somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. Lucy reminds herself that either way, she shouldn’t care. Whatever the hell his actual feelings on her might be, he made himself clear.

“Thanks,” she says, after a too-long pause. “Let me know if. . . well, whatever happens, all right?”

“Do my best. Congrats again on the dissertation.” Wyatt clears his throat. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Lucy echoes, cheeks still hot, and hangs up rather quickly. Well, that was a disaster. She should have known that the only guy she’s even attempted to ask out recently was unavailable, though there’s a cute-ish geek with glasses who smiles at her whenever he sees her in the coffee line. Lucy thinks his name is Alan. But not even for the principle of the thing can she really work up any desire for a closer approach. After a final moment, she fishes her keys out of her purse, heads to her car, and tries to decide if 280 or 101 will be more congested at this time of day. She ends up taking the latter, despite the unpleasant associations of recent escapades on it, up to Amy’s apartment in South San Francisco.

Lucy turns into the complex, parks, and heads up the steps to Amy’s place. She rents it with two of her friends, one of whom is named Sage Tranquility and the other of whom is usually getting arrested at protests. There’s plenty of room at the Preston house in Mountain View, it’s not like Amy had to move out, but she’s always butted heads with their mother far more than Lucy has. Said that she would rather live in a shitty apartment, away from Carol’s domineering and constant questioning about why she’s doing this sociology degree and wasting her potential, and build something that was hers. Lucy doesn’t know how much she should tell Amy, but she is the only person she feels like confiding to.

Amy opens the door a few moments after Lucy’s knock, her headphones around her neck still emitting the echoes of her music, but she pauses it at the sight of her sister. “Hey, you. What are you doing here? Aren’t you still working on your dissertation?”

“No, I just finished it. Just. Hey, are you doing anything right now?”

“No. Come in.” Amy frowns. “You don’t seem super jubilant, Luce.”

“I. . . have a lot on my mind.” Lucy blows out a breath. “I’d kind of like to talk.”

Amy agrees, gestures her in, and goes to fetch some cookies from the kitchen, before they got to the secondhand futon, Amy sits down, and beckons Lucy to put her head in her lap. “Okay,” she says. “So talk.”

As Amy gives her a head rub, which feels heavenly, Lucy closes her eyes, tries to find somewhere to start, and can’t think of any way to do this delicately. She teeters and stumbles at the edge, then finally comes clean about Flynn, about Rittenhouse, about Benjamin Cahill, about Wyatt, about everything. That it turns out they’re only half-sisters, that Carol has lied to them – to her – her entire life. That her real father is Corporate Darth Vader, and all of this. . . all of this. . . she’s slowly losing her mind, and has just squashed it down and put it away to concentrate on finishing. Now that’s done, and she’s. . . here.

Amy stays quiet as Lucy talks, until she finally chokes up and can’t finish. Then she grips Lucy’s shoulder hard and says fiercely, “We’re sisters, all right? We’re sisters. I don’t care what Mom did or did not tell you, it doesn’t change anything. We’re just the same as we’ve always been, and nothing is ever going to take that away from us.”

“Thanks.” Lucy’s voice remains stuck in her throat. “I just. . . this has been a lot.”

“Shyeah.” Amy reaches over her for a cookie, breaks off a bite, and dangles it above Lucy’s mouth like a zookeeper feeding the seals. Lucy manages a weak laugh and snaps it up, as a sigh shudders through her from head to heel. They remain in silence for several more moments, until Amy says, “So, this Flynn guy. You have feelings of some kind for him, but he’s a complete emotional disaster, not to mention possibly on the run from the feds for God knows what or where or why. Accurate?”

“I don’t – ” Lucy opens and shuts her mouth. “I wouldn’t say I have feelings feelings for him, he’s – I don’t really – ”

Amy raises one eyebrow. “Now who’s being the emotional disaster?”

Lucy feels as if this is rather unfair – she’s here sharing her problems and trying to work through them like a grownup, even if, yes, she did repress them for several weeks beforehand and hope they would go away. “I’m not the one who set my phone passcode as the day he saved my life, then told me not to fool myself that he wanted to see me again and basically vanished off the face of the earth!”

“Fair.” Amy considers this. “But you do feel something.”

“He saved my life. Twice. He did endanger it the second time, but. . .” Lucy stops. “Maybe there was something between us, or I believed a little too hard in fate or design or whatever. I could have been imagining it, but. . .”

“But you don’t think you were,” Amy completes. “He just blew it. Super hard. Complete buffoonery.”

Lucy snorts. “Remind me why I bother with men again?”

“You could always date another lady,” Amy points out. “I liked Carine.”

Strictly speaking, this is true, and does have a certain appeal after the recent overabundance of testosterone in Lucy’s life. But she dated Carine Leclerc, a journalism student from Montreal, for eight months in her senior year, and while Carine was making noises about looking for jobs in California after she graduated, it stalled over the fact that Lucy never got around to introducing her to Carol. It wasn’t exactly a secret – Amy knew, her friends knew, they went to a pride parade, there were pictures – but Lucy never talked about it directly with her mom. It wasn’t the queer thing, exactly. Just that whenever Carol discussed Lucy’s future, it always seemed to involve a husband and kids. Not because of any awe or reverence for the patriarchy – Carol gave both her daughters her own surname, rather than, apparently, either of their fathers’, and was a women’s studies professor for many years – but, well. It just did. And while you can obviously have a family by non-traditional methods – adoption, fostering, surrogacy, whatever – Lucy somehow didn’t get the impression that was what her mom had in mind. The kids just seem to be part of it. It’s why, although she’s not really had any enthusiasm for the idea now, she’s subconsciously penciled it in for five or eight years in the future, once she’s presumably met Mr. Right. Lucy has all kinds of arguments with herself over whether that makes her a bad feminist. But because it’s what her mom wants –

“Oh, God,” Lucy says hoarsely. She raises both hands to her face, then drops them. “You’re right. I really have let Mom dictate my life, haven’t I?”

The expression on Amy’s face clearly says, no duh, although she charitably refrains from uttering it aloud. Instead she says, “I still think you should have followed through on that band thing. At least it would have shown her that you can stand up to her.”

“I – no, that was definitely a bad idea, I’m glad I didn’t.” Lucy is still Lucy, and thus cannot believe that she ever treated the prospect of her education so frivolously. “But maybe if I went over there now and confronted her about Cahill – ”

“You’re sure that’s a good idea?”

“What? You’re always the one telling me to push back against her more!”

“Yeah, I know.” Amy chews on a thumbnail. “But this is more than about just that, isn’t it? From what you said about Cahill, it sounds like he’s mixed up in some pretty skeevy shit. I give Mom a hard time a lot, but maybe she did have a good reason for separating us from all that. Are you sure you want to know?”

“If they come back, I should at least know the truth.” Lucy rubs at her tired eyes with her fingertips. “I’d like to think they just gave up, but I’m not sure. Maybe if I tell her that I know, it might help clear the air.”

Amy gives her a probing look. “And are you going to tell her about Flynn?”

That catches Lucy short. She wants to say that she will, that if she’s demanding or even requesting honesty from her mother, she should be prepared to return the favor. But something – she doesn’t even know what, not quite what it was with Carine – gives her pause. “Why would I?” she says feebly. “It’s not like anything actually happened.”

“Aside from him turning up and you two going on a three-day joyride that ended with him getting shot and telling you to go piss up a rope.” Amy’s tone is more or less lighthearted, but her expression is serious. “That’s definitely something that happened.”

Lucy opens her mouth, then shuts it. She reaches for the last cookie and eats it, partly to give herself an excuse not to talk, then brushes off the crumbs and gets to her feet. “Well, if I am heading over there today, I should get going before the traffic gets too bad. I should at least tell her that I finished.”

“Because you’re hoping she’ll finally tell you that she’s proud of you?” Amy glances up at her. “You know you did a good job even if she can’t choke it out, right?”

“Of course I know.” Lucy manages a smile, picking up her purse. “See you later, Ames.”

Her baby sister hugs her, not without a final look, and Lucy lets herself out, heading to the parking lot and getting into her car. She drives down to the Preston family home in Mountain View, the attractive four-bedroom ranch house on an affluent, leafy street where Lucy grew up. Worth a tidy chunk of change if Carol decided to downsize, since it’s currently just her living there, but she has held onto it. Not good at letting go of things, Carol Preston. It is only in the last few days that Lucy has realized just how much, and it saddens her.

A light is on in the kitchen as Lucy parks by the curb and gets out. She heads up the front steps, noting that the plants could use some watering; it’s not like her mother to let things droop, or look anything less than perfect, daughters or azaleas alike. This is her house as much as anyone’s, and yet Lucy stands there for a long moment, feeling as unwelcome as a door-to-door salesman or friendly local Jehovah’s Witness. It feels as if she finally got here the way she was intending to do seven years ago – before the accident, before nearly dying, before Flynn, before Flynn’s reappearance, before Benjamin Cahill and Rittenhouse, before everything that’s brought her back. She tries to rehearse words in her head, questions, justifications. Nothing really occurs to her.

Lucy swallows hard, and rings the bell.

It takes a bit before she hears footsteps, and then Carol Preston opens the door. She looks down at her eldest daughter in surprise, or perhaps confusion. Something about her seems as off, less than pristine, as the drying flowers, and her makeup is slightly smeared, though Lucy can’t imagine her mother actually crying. “Lucy,” Carol says. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I’ve been finishing my dissertation.” Lucy twists her fingers together anxiously. “I – I did finish, by the way. Just today. Dr. Underwood gave me her final changes, Dr. Gardener in anthropology still has to look it over as well, but he’s at a conference until Friday, so that will take a little longer. But – yeah, it’s done, I did it.”

“I see.” Carol considers, then steps back. “I think we should talk. Come in.”

Lucy follows her mother inside, wondering if Carol’s guessed somehow, if Cahill came by to creep on her as well or ask why she never told Lucy the truth, and feels absurdly guilty for causing more trouble. She almost starts to apologize, though with no idea what for, and a tiny, ridiculous part of her half-hopes that Flynn will be sitting in the kitchen, somewhat recovered if doubtless no more tactful, come by to ask Carol what she knows about Rittenhouse. Which seems like a bold move, given that he’s a wanted fugitive from the government, but reality doesn’t have much to do with Lucy’s thought process just now.

Nonetheless, it comes crashing back in in a cold, sobering wave when they step ins. There’s a piece of paper lying on the counter, and Lucy can’t see the wording, but it looks clinical. Hospital. Carol turns it over as Lucy tries to get a better look, then says, “Tea?”

“No, it’s all right, I was just over at – ” Lucy stops. “Mom, is… is everything…?”

“I went to get that cough checked out, like you wanted,” Carol says, after a slight pause. “And, well, the scan turned something up in one of my lungs. They’re going to run more tests, they can’t be sure, but there’s a possibility it’s malignant.”

She says this like the professor she’s been for thirty years, explaining a difficult fact with her usual classroom voice, and so it takes Lucy a moment to understand. Then she does, and it feels as if the world has gone out from under her feet. “M… malignant? As in cancer?”

“Yes.” Carol takes a deep breath. “I suppose it’s not entirely unexpected – your father was a heavy smoker, after all, and I never picked up the habit until I met him. I stopped when he died, of course, but if this does come back positive…”

Part of Lucy wants to inform Carol point-blank that she knows Henry Wallace isn’t her father and never was. The rest of her wonders how awful you have to be, to confront your mother about that when she’s just told you that she might have cancer. “I – I, I’m so sorry,” she stammers, once more as if this is her fault, has not gotten the right score on a test or has whined about never having summers off. “Mom, I’m sure it’s fine, but if – ”

“But if it’s not?” Carol looks at her levelly. “I know we’ve had a bit of distance recently, Lucy, but this is the sort of news to put things in perspective. Of course, there’s medicine, there’s chemotherapy, there’s options. We don’t know anything yet. But if the worst-case scenario does come to pass, I really want to make the most of whatever time I have with you. There’s still so much I need to teach you, to talk with you about.”

Yes, Lucy thinks, there is. But any urgent desire to force answers to all her questions has vanished in her flood of guilt and fear and concern. “Of course, Mom, of course. If there’s anything I can do – and I’m sure Amy too, we’d both be happy to – ”

“I’m not sure about Amy.” Carol sighs. “But if you have finished your dissertation, like you said, and therefore don’t need to be at campus every day… I’ve seen that apartment of yours, Lucy. It’s terrible. Is there any way you might consider moving back in? We would be closer here, we’d be together. It would be easier, and if I did get sick…”

“No, of course. Of course I’ll move back in. Absolutely, you don’t have to worry about that at all. My lease on campus runs through the end of the school year, but – ”

“I’ll pay your early termination fees.” Carol takes Lucy’s hand. “I really want us to be together again. Believe me.”

“Me too,” Lucy says in a rush. “But – if the test did come back clean – if you’re not really… well.” She can’t bring herself to utter the name aloud, speak of the devil and he will appear. “If you’re not… sick, do you… will you still want me back?”

“Why on earth wouldn’t I?” Carol looks hurt. “Do you think I only love you when you’re useful? You are my daughter, my eldest daughter. So much like me, my historian. You’re so bright and you’ve worked so hard. Of course I want you back.”

Lucy opens and shuts her mouth, then reaches out, and Carol wraps her arms around her, pulling her close, as Lucy rests her chin on her mother’s shoulder and has to struggle to blink back tears. And so, within ten minutes of going home with the intention of some final confrontation, some ultimatum or insistence on separating herself from Carol’s trunk, Lucy instead cleaves back in, root and branch, and promises that she will never bring it up again.

There really isn’t time to arrange a move – even a short-range one – between the last-minute rush of dissertation edits, job applications, and graduation plans, and Lucy’s apartment has a few pitiful half-full boxes sitting around, which she will toss things into when she remembers. She feels like a terrible daughter, which is not helped when Amy calls her up at the end of the week and wants to know what happened to telling Mom off. “You know how she is, Lucy! Even if – God forbid – she was actually sick, doesn’t this seem a little…?”

“A little what?” Lucy challenges. “Are you really going to accuse our mother of faking possible lung cancer just because she wants – I don’t know what, something?”

“I didn’t say she was faking,” Amy says reluctantly. “I’ve been worried about her health too. But Mom has a couple nest eggs, you know she does. If it got to the point that she needed a live-in helper, she could hire someone who actually knew what they were doing and would get properly paid for it. That’s not your job. You’re not that kind of doctor.”

“I know.” Lucy shifts the phone to her other shoulder. “But – look, I know what we talked about, I know what we said. I just don’t think this is the right time to bring it up.”

Amy doesn’t argue with her again, but Lucy can sense that she still isn’t pleased. And yet, all of that goes out the window when Carol calls them both and says they should come by, there’s something she needs to tell them. That doesn’t sound like the kind of invitation that ends with “and nothing’s wrong, the doctor said I’m fine,” and indeed, it doesn’t. The biopsy results came back. It’s cancer. Carol’s prognosis isn’t terrible – they caught it before it was already irreversible – but it’s not particularly great either. The words fifty-fifty chance are used. A lot will depend on how she responds to treatment.

Amy starts to cry – she and Mom have fought a lot, but they do still love each other – and Lucy puts an arm around her, feeling numb. It feels crass to ask for any graduation celebration, even if she’d like one. Suddenly, even applying for jobs is up in the air. Lucy doesn’t want to complain about being inconvenienced by her mother’s serious illness, but she was so ready to start her own life, do something else, stretch her wings, and now she’s back in the birdcage, throwing away the key. It just doesn’t seem (and she winces at the thought) fair.

Lucy finishes the rest of the revisions recommended by her second supervisor in a blur. At the last meeting before this three-hundred-page monster is sent off to the committee for reading and to the printing service for binding, Dr. Underwood mentions that she’s been in contact with the history department at Kenyon College in Ohio. Kenyon is a small liberal arts college, upper-tier and avant-garde, and while it would unfortunately mean living in Ohio, there is currently an opening in the faculty for a junior lecturer with almost exactly Lucy’s research specialty. Dr. Underwood has passed her name on, and the people at Kenyon would like to speak to her next week, if that works.

Lucy’s first reaction is delight and disbelief. Tailor-made opportunities for academic jobs at places where you would like to work, and that are looking for your research interests, are as rare as the proverbial rain on the Sahara. She’s thought for a while that she’d like to teach at a small liberal arts school, one of the places that doesn’t think SAT scores are a good measure of academic performance and give a lot of focus to student development – somewhere in the Northeast, maybe. Sarah Lawrence, Vassar, Middlebury, Wellesley, something in that vein, the usual schools described as “diehard liberal” by U.S News and World Report in their college rankings. Stanford is obviously Stanford, but it takes a lot of work not to get lost in the machine, and plenty of students who come through Lucy’s classes now are clearly just checking elective boxes and playing on their laptops during lecture. At a place like Kenyon, she could actually talk to them more, have smaller and more immersive seminars, supervise senior projects and have more of a say in shaping the department. Have that exact chance to make it her own, rather than following in predestined footsteps.

At that, however, something catches Lucy short. She remembers Benjamin Cahill essentially promising her that he could get her any dream job she wanted, anywhere in the country. Is this Rittenhouse’s clever new strategy? Realize that the face-to-face approach backfired bombastically, and take a more subtle approach, pull some strings and call in some favors so this fat juicy worm just happened to land on the right hook? Would she move there and find herself surrounded by their people, or expected to pay something substantial back?

Asking Dr. Underwood about this, however, just makes Lucy sound crazy. She doesn’t mention anyone by name, but she delicately probes whether anyone just happened to call up and offer this, and if so, why. Dr. Underwood is puzzled, says that no, this has been in the works for a while and it just happened to time well with Lucy’s completion. Due to someone who knows Dr. Underwood, who supervised so-and-so’s thesis, etc. – not the creepy Rittenhouse networks of patronage, but just the usual byzantine channels of academia – Lucy currently holds right of first refusal on the job. If she turns it down, they’ll shop it more broadly, but assuming she doesn’t completely bomb the interview, buys some winter clothes, and is all right exchanging Palo Alto for Gambier, it’s hers if she wants it.

“I…” Lucy hesitates. “My… my mom was just… she was actually just diagnosed. With cancer. She wants me to move back in and spend more time with her. I don’t know if I could justify going to Ohio instead. That’s the exact opposite of what she wants.”

Dr. Underwood hastens to offer her sympathy, and appreciates that this is a difficult decision for Lucy to make. However, while she knows family commitments are important, ultimately Lucy needs to think about what she wants from her career and getting established and so on. If Lucy does decide to stay in California, there will probably be several teaching opportunities at Stanford for her, and she’ll submit papers to journals and attend conferences and the rest of the rigmarole that it takes to be a Professional Academic ™. It’s not necessarily the wrong thing to do. But Dr. Underwood thinks Lucy should consider the Kenyon job carefully. She knew Carol when they were both faculty in the department, knows what kind of personality she had, and maybe it’s not the worst thing for Lucy to go.

Lucy nods and smiles, even as she wants to go somewhere private, put her face in a pillow, and scream. At least the damn dissertation is done, exam date is firmly set, no more of that, no more, praise Jesus, NO MORE. She picks up her bag, swings it to her shoulder, and heads out of Dr. Underwood’s office, riding down the elevator and stepping out into the foyer. As she does, she collides with someone coming the other way, and starts into the usual apology. But as she does, she catches a glimpse of the face under the hat, and freezes. Reaches out to grab at his jacket sleeve, her voice a hiss.

“Flynn?”

Garcia Flynn has not been having the greatest week. Or two. Or three.

He stayed for six days in the hospital, being cared for by a doctor named Noah who was entirely professional to all outward manners and appearances, but who kept shooting him looks out of the corner of his eye that made Flynn suspect the worst. Either he’s a Rittenhouse agent, or he used to be some sort of gentleman acquaintance to Lucy, and Flynn would almost prefer the former. At least that way he could kill him without anyone being too upset about it.

Of course, and regretfully, killing is off the table, at least for the moment. At least for Flynn himself, as he’s fairly sure that Rittenhouse has authorized everything short of public beheading to apprehend him, and which was why he decided that he was no longer going to trust to the dubious safety of Santa Rosa Memorial and the judgment of Noah. . . whatever his damn last name is, Flynn hasn’t been arsed either to find out or remember it. So he checked himself out against medical advice, gave a fake name and address for the bill (the American health system is a racket anyway, and technically he’s supposed to have insurance – yes, the NSA does offer dental) and left the rental car in the garage. It’s too conspicuous, and he has bigger fish to fry than whether he is blacklisted by Enterprise in the future. They can take it up with John Thompkins, later.

After which, Flynn rode a Greyhound (yes, it’s as miserable as you’d think, especially when you’re six-foot-four) to some shithole Inland Empire city, somewhere in California close to the Nevada border where nobody goes if they can possibly avoid it, probably still riddled with decades-old radiation from the Las Vegas test site. Rented a room in some motel that definitely has one filled with haunted clown dolls, laid low, gingerly tended his raw wounds with over-the-counter antibiotics and sutures, and was forced to admit it was a good thing he did not die of septicemia. He hasn’t succeeded in coming up with a new plan just yet, as it’s clear that he’s been cut off from the usual channels with extreme prejudice. He has kept his old phone with the NSA numbers, but keeps it switched off and hasn’t used it. He can’t risk calling Karl to see what he did, or did not, know about the Wyatt Logan fiasco.

And so, Flynn grimly considers his options. He can try to throw together another fake identity and go to Canada, or travel on his real name back to Europe and hope they haven’t gotten Interpol on this, or just lie here in a motel room that might literally be the manifestation of hell on earth, with air conditioner that barely works in 25-plus Celsius heat and a stain that looks like a murder victim on the carpet. If Rittenhouse is after him, no holds barred, he may just be able to avoid their notice if he stays, especially for a man whose professional tradecraft is disappearing. And yet.

The more Flynn thinks it over, the more he can’t account for everything going sideways as fast and as comprehensively as it did, unless Rittenhouse was plugged into the whole thing almost from the beginning. They must have multiple high-level operatives across several branches of government, focusing on the ones you’d expect – CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, whoever’s stealing your personal information these days – but by no means limited to them. They could be salted through every level of middle bureaucracy (he wonders if all DMV and IRS workers get an automatic membership) and beyond. It sounds ridiculously, relentlessly paranoid, like that prizewinning intellectual who insists that the Royal Family and other leading British celebrities are all secretly lizard people. But given what Flynn saw at the gala, Cahill and his powerful, well-connected, wealthy friends, this also might not be entirely off the ranch, and that means he has to do more digging. Where?

It takes him a bit, but he recalls what Lucy said to him at their first (well, first real) meeting. Something about David Rittenhouse, who Flynn discovered to be a famous eighteenth-century astronomer and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and asking if he founded it. Flynn doesn’t know the answer to that question, but it seems to strain credulity that the man it’s literally named after has nothing to do with it. It also is not a given that Rittenhouse’s secret archives are housed somewhere at UPenn, but there are several things named after the man in Philadelphia. It’s not entirely implausible.

That, therefore, is where Flynn is faced with the final part of the plan. It’s going to be hard enough for him to get in as it is, what with the Take Dead or Alive order they probably have out on his head. But if he didn’t appear to be attached to it – if it was just an innocent research visit from an up-and-coming academic who would have plenty of legit business with UPenn’s history collections on colonial America, and he just so happened to appear –

Flynn is well aware that this is quite a reach. That it’s dangerous, that it’s unfair, that he doesn’t really have any right to ask it, given how their last parting went, and what he said then. That she has any number of things to do right now, and none of them necessarily involve dropping all her work and heading cross-country to pick up, again, the world’s most demented and dangerous scavenger hunt with him. No sir.

He checks out of the motel and hops a ride with a trucker the next morning.

As they stare at each other for a very long and very excruciating moment, all Lucy can think is that he shouldn’t be here. Rittenhouse could have been watching her from afar, guessing (correctly, apparently) that she will prove too tempting a target for Flynn to resist contacting again. Maybe this is the moment they jump out and dogpile them both, or – or –

Lucy hesitates only a split second before tightening her grip on Flynn and dragging him around the corner into an unused classroom. She bangs shut the door behind them and leans against it, legs trembling. “You need to get out of here.”

“You just shut me in.” Trust Flynn to have a smart-aleck response readily at hand, as he watches her from under hooded eyes. “We would need to try reversing that first.”

“Just be quiet.” Lucy clenches her fists, fighting a brief urge to slap him. “Did anyone see you?”

He shrugs. “It’s a public university, I imagine they did. Nobody who seemed to recognize me, though.”

Lucy blows out a breath, getting the table between them just so there will be something to prevent her – or him – from anything intemperate. “You’re such a bastard.”

A hard, sardonic smile glimmers in the edges of his mouth. He seems unruffled by the accusation, almost even pleased. He does not bother with small talk, explaining where he’s been, or why he said everything he did in the hospital. (Don’t fool yourself that I want to see you again. . . this is my war, I don’t need you and yet, lo and behold, here he is. He’s a disaster.) Instead he says, “Did you finish your dissertation?”

“Yes,” Lucy says, curt and unwilling. “I have a lot going on, a lot, so why don’t you just – ”

“Is there anything else you can pretend to be working on?”

“What?” Screw the table, she might want to do something intemperate after all. “Why?”

His eyes remain on hers, cool and unswerving. “I need your help.”

[wineanddinosaur]

Wine 101: The Judgment of Paris — 45th Anniversary

This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Pahlmeyer. For more than 30 years, Pahlmeyer has been crafting extraordinary wines from the mountain vineyards of Napa Valley. Rooted in the founder’s dream to rival the best of Bordeaux, Pahlmeyer offers an extraordinary portfolio of celebrated wines with a long pedigree, including two rare 100 point scores from the Wine Advocate. As producers of age-worthy, site-specific wines, Pahlmeyer is building a new legacy inspired by Bordeaux and rooted in Napa Valley. Come experience where tradition and ambition meet: Pahlmeyer.

In this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses the Judgment of Paris, a monumental event that changed American wine culture forever. Beavers details the history of how the tasting — which compared American and French wines — led to the worldwide recognition of Napa Valley.

Listeners will learn about trailblazers who planned the tasting — including Patricia Gustad-Gallagher and Joanne Dickinson DePuy, without whom the Judgement of Paris could have never occurred. Beavers also explains how George Tabor’s Time Magazine article boosted the event’s impact by painting what was meant to be a friendly tasting as an intense wine competition.

Tune in to learn more about the Judgment of Paris.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and you know what I love about “Star Wars”? Well, a lot of things. But No. 1, it’s an ongoing story. It’s not an adaptation.

What’s going on, wine lovers? Welcome to episode 27 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. It’s Season 2. I’m the tastings director of VinePair. What are you guys doing today? What’s going on today?

OK. This one, guys? This story is awesome, complicated, and foggy. We’re going to clear it up. It’s important. Let’s do this. Judgment of Paris.

Here we are, wine lovers. We talk about the history of American wine and when I’m talking about wine regions, I often mention this moment in our history where I call it the watershed moment. The moment where we as an American wine- drinking culture started really coming back from Prohibition. Prohibition really messed us up, guys! It really messed us up. A decade, 10 years, of illegal alcohol. That is just crazy.

When it was repealed, there were still so many problems. Every state has its own liquor laws. It’s insane. For us as a drinking culture, man, it took us a while to get back to what we were doing before Prohibition. From the Gold Rush until Prohibition, we were on track to be one of the major wine-producing regions in the world. Then, we had 10 years of Prohibition that messed all that up. We had to rebuild our wine industry after that.

The people in Napa got started pretty quickly. In the 1940s, they created something called the Napa Valley Vintners Association, which is still around today. They started conceiving of a wine region that was more than just a regular wine region. It was more of a fine-wine region. We had the whole Napa episode from last season, but none of this would have been possible. I mean, I’m sure at some point it would, but it was expedited. Our clout on the world stage was expedited by one event called the Judgment of Paris in 1976. In the early days after Prohibition, between the mid- and late 1930s, there were a bunch of winemakers really trying to recreate what they had lost 10 years earlier. One of those wineries was Beaulieu Vineyards, which is down in what is today Rutherford. It was owned by Georges de Latour and his wife, Fernande. The two of them were looking to get some young, new energy into this wine region that they loved so much.

They ended up going to France and convincing a man by the name of André Tchelistcheff to leave his very important work in France and come over to the United States. He was to help consult with them and make wine in a way that the region hadn’t seen before. André Tchelistcheff went on to be the most important winemaker in Napa, in California, and probably the United States.

His story is awesome, and I can’t get into all of it here, but what’s important about him, and about what we’re talking about today, is his influence on the winemakers that were making wine in the late 1960s and early ‘70s in Napa Valley. One of the most important roles André Tchelistcheff had besides making wine and being innovative about winemaking processes, is mentoring the future of winemaking in Napa. That is what was happening in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Now, I’m not sure how familiar you are with this event called the Judgment of Paris. I mean, it’s an intense name for an event. It’s actually Greek mythology, but the term the Judgment of Paris was conceived by a man named George Tabor. He was a journalist for Time Magazine, and he wrote a story about an event that he witnessed in Paris. This event, which he called the Judgment of Paris, was really just an educational wine tasting with California wines and French wines as a comparative thing. That right there is what is important about what this event did.

It wasn’t so much the story in Time Magazine as it was what actually happened. What is known as the Judgment of Paris in 1976 only happened because of two figures. In the early ‘70s, a young American from Delaware by the name of Patricia Gustad-Gallagher was in Paris working for the International Herald Tribune. Obviously, she started to develop a passion for wine in Paris. I mean, that makes sense.

In 1971, she answered a classified ad for the release of the new Beaujolais Nouveau. And the way she puts it, she arrives at this place and she sees this guy unloading a ton of Beaujolais Nouveau from his station wagon. He had apparently driven from Beaujolais to Paris overnight to have it in his store. The store was called Academie du Vin, which was also a wine school, and this was the perfect opportunity. I don’t know if Patricia knew what she was getting herself into, but she and Steven Spurrier became very good friends.

She began to work at his shop and the wine school. One of the focuses of their work were the tastings they would do. I’m not sure if they were monthly or annually, but they would do these big educational tastings through the ‘70s and I’m not sure how this worked out, but Patricia did have a sister in San Diego. I’m not sure if that’s how it happened, but she started hearing rumblings of good wine being made in Northern California.

Patricia had this proud American thing going on. She really wanted to show and share American wines with the people in the Academie du Vin. Unfortunately, the wines that were provided by the embassy just weren’t wines they wanted to share with the French. Also, as an American in 1975, she saw that in 1976 the bicentennial was coming up, so she conceived this grand idea. Where were these fabled northern Californian wines?

Napa was not being imported to France at this time, so she needed to find those wines because she had this really cool idea. She was going to get all these French wine experts in a room, and she was going to do a comparative tasting with French wine and American wine. Not to show who is better than the other, but just to show that the United States is making pretty amazing wine. She was determined to make this happen, brought the idea up to Steven Spurrier, who thought it was a great idea. So what does she do about it?

She went to California to visit her sister in San Diego and tacked on a few days in Northern California to see what was going on up there. At the time, in Napa, there was a very famous wine writer by the name of Robert Finnegan. He had a newsletter called Private Wine Guide. He was basically the guy before Robert Parker. She reached out to him. He recommended a bunch of wineries. She went to taste mostly in Napa. She really liked everything she tasted mostly, but two wineries really stood out to her. It was Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. She also enjoyed wine from Freemark Abbey, a very historic winery in California.

She goes back to Paris, talks to Steve about what she experienced, and Steve gets very excited about all this. So he and his wife Bella decide that they’re going to go to California and experience it for themselves. This is in 1976, which is months before this whole event is supposed to go down.

Joanne Dickinson DePuy had lived in Napa Valley since 1949. In 1973, she was getting a divorce. Her kids were grown, and she thought, “I never really held a full-time job. I’ve only had a part-time job at a travel agency. I have to figure out my life.” She’s quoted as saying that she was going to give herself six months to figure it out. She loved two things: tennis and wine.

Then, she decided to launch two businesses, a wine tour company, and a tennis tour company. Now, I don’t know what happened to the tennis tour company, but I do know about the wine tour company, which is pretty amazing. Her idea, which I think is pretty innovative in the 1970s for what she wanted to do, was she wanted to bridge Napa to other wine regions and vice versa — meaning she wanted to take winemakers from Napa to places in other countries to see how wine is made and how their cultures are. She wanted to take people from other countries, specifically France, from their countries to Napa and show them Napa. It’s a bridge to both, which is a pretty amazing idea.

It was going pretty well. She convinced the secretary of state of California to lead a tour to China. Her clout was rising. In 1976, when Steven and Bella Spurrier wanted to come to Northern California to see what was going on, she’s the person they called. Joanne DePuy takes the couple to Chateau Montelena, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Freemark Abbey, and other places. Actually, the Spurriers declined a visit to the Mondavi Estate because they wanted to find winemakers that were still under the radar. Yeah, Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars were under the radar. Woah.

The Spurriers bought a bunch of wine — 24 bottles from different wineries — and they were going to have these wines sent over to France for this little thing they were doing. Patricia was stoked. Now, for Joanne and her company, one of the bucket-list situations she wanted was to get André Tchelistcheff, the famous winemaker who was still around mentoring everybody — the big deal — to do one of these tours. It took some doing, but she finally convinced him to do a vintners-only tour to France.

Since André Tchelistcheff was leading this, it attracted some of the most well-known winemakers in Napa at the time. Two of those people were the owners of Chateau Montelena, Jim and Laura Barrett. They were there just because of André Tchelistcheff. It was just pure coincidence that their wine was being brought to France for a tasting. Right before Joanne was about to take these vintners on a tour, she gets a call from Steven Spurrier in France saying, “Oh, no, the wines are not going to clear customs. Would it be OK if you guys could each put a bottle or two in your luggage to bring it over to help us out?” Joanne said, “Yeah, we can do that.”

Now, it was a lot more difficult than that, but she was able to wrap all these wines up in boxes and convince the people at TWA to put these on the plane and really try to get them over there safely. One bottle ended up breaking. It was a Freemark Abbey Cabernet Sauvignon, but that’s OK because that wine was still tasted in the tasting.

I wonder what was going through Jim and Laura Barrett’s minds. One of their wines is now with them going on a plane to Paris, which they will eventually go off into France and just have a tour of French vineyards, mostly in Bordeaux, and their wines are going to stay in Paris. In Paris, I’m sure that Steven and Patricia are sighing with relief. Steven Spurrier is trying to find press that would cover this thing, because it’s a big deal. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was a big deal. Patricia thought it was a big deal to her. Her family was a colonial family in the United States, so it was a big deal.

They managed to get one person to attend the event from the media, a man by the name of George Taber with Time Magazine. Now, this is where things got a little weird, mainly for Patricia. I am not really sure how Steven Spurrier took it, but the panel of wine experts that were asked to be part of this tasting were some of the most popular and well-known wine critics in France. It was one of the reasons why Steven Spurrier was trying to get media attention for it, but they weren’t judges. They were just experts. This was supposed to be just a fun, comparative tasting that was hopefully going to get some media attention and would be really cool to show how American wines were faring these days.

It was to be a blind tasting. Whites being blinded against whites. Reds are being blinded against reds from each country. Of course, the American wines were from Napa, and the French wines were from Burgundy and Bordeaux, white and red. As this tasting progressed, George Taber, the media guy, saw something. He didn’t see these wine experts as experts doing a comparative fun educational tasting. He said, “Oh, my gosh, this is a blind tasting.”.

He saw it as a competition, and he saw these wine experts as judges. This guy would go on to write an article in Time Magazine about what he witnessed and then because of the impact of this particular event in American culture, he ended up writing a book and calling it “The Judgment of Paris.”

Even though it was an educational tasting, these wine experts were taking notes. They were actually taking scores, and this is what you do in tastings. You score wines, and it’s not necessarily a competition-based idea for scoring as it is for you to understand your own preferences. What got really crazy is when people started realizing that the American wines were being scored higher than the French wines.

In Taber’s book, he describes tension in the room, a little bit of frustration, murmuring, people wondering what was going on, not understanding what was happening. On a side table, scores were being tallied up. I don’t know that these scores were meant specifically for winners and losers, but George Taber saw it like that. He was noticing something pretty fascinating. He was looking at the top 10 whites and the top 10 reds, and he was losing his mind.

The No. 1 white wine in a blind comparative tasting between French Chardonnays and American Chardonnays, the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay came in at No. 1. Chalone Vineyards 1974 Chardonnay comes in third. Spring Mountain Chardonnay 1973 comes in fourth. Freemark Abbey Chardonnay 1972 comes in sixth. Veedercrest Vineyards 1972 comes in ninth, and David Bruce Winery Chardonnay 1973 comes in 10th.

Then, over in the red, things really got crazy. The No. 1 red, according to the scores, was Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon. Number 5 was Ridge Vineyards 1971 Cabernet Sauvignon. Number 7 was Mayacamas Vineyard 1971. Number 8 is Clos du Val Winery 1972. Number 9 was Heitz Wine Cellars 1970, and Freemark Abbey 1969 was No. 10.

On the surface, wow, right? It was supposed to be just this fun, educational, momentous event with experts tasting wine from France and the United States and understanding the difference between the two to see where the United States is on the map right now. Since George Taber and Steven Spurrier were working together to make this into a media event, it started to look like a competition. To the point where one of the judges, Odette Khan, who was one of the most famous wine critics in France at the time, demanded her scores back because she was worried that this is going to be a competition and not an educated tasting. Then, she worried her results were going to be published and she was going to have to deal with the fallout of that.

According to Patricia, she was also very upset with this idea. She thought, “Wait, what’s happening?” She had conceived of this entire thing. This is her idea and it was being turned into a competition when she conceived of it as a fun, educational, comparative tasting. Alas, George Taber would write a very good piece about this event in Time Magazine, but he framed it as a competition of the Old World versus the New World. Thus, that massive statement made a huge impact on the American wine-drinking culture.

It didn’t really have a big impact on France because no one thought of it as a competition. What’s interesting is George Taber ran the call, the winemakers that had won. It just so happened that Laura and Jim Barrett, the owners of Chateau Montelena, were actually in Bordeaux at the time with André Tchelistcheff. They got a phone call at a restaurant they were at, and they thought something was wrong but turns out they found out they “won,” and they lost their minds. They thought it was really cool. I mean, you imagine being a winemaker in the United States, in Northern California. There are no wine regions, you are just making wine, and you try to make it the best you can. Then, all of a sudden there’s this event happening in Paris, and your wine is going to Paris, but you don’t really know what it means. You happen to be in France when you get a phone call saying the wine that you sent out to Paris actually became No. 1 in a comparative tasting that ended up being a competition? Yeah, I’d be pretty stoked.

What I find really wonderful about some of the “winners” of this Judgment of Paris, is those winemakers were the winemakers that were mentored by André Tchelistcheff. Full circle, people. Very cool.

That was in 1976. By 1980, Napa was the second AVA to be awarded in the United States, and that began the new era of wine in the United States, bringing us into the modern culture that we have now. Fun little side note here: Thirty years later, they opened up the same vintages again to see how they were aging. Again, the American wines came out on top.

This was a big moment for us in the history of American wine. This is huge! The fact that it happened and palates thought that these wines were superior or just beautiful in general is such a big deal. If it wasn’t for Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher and Steven Spurrier working together with this awesome idea that she conceived of, and if it wasn’t for Joanne DePuy of the international wine tours in California, this would never have happened. The wines that were on this list, that were in this tasting, are today some of the most famous wineries in the United States.

These winemakers would go on to mentor other people, and this is how we grew as an American wine culture and how we’re still growing today. The history of wine in America is such a fascinating story. This is just one little gold nugget of awesomeness that helped us on our journey.

I want to give a big shout-out to my father-in-law. He and my mother-in-law live in Petaluma, and he sends me wine information all the time that he reads in the newspapers. In 2018, he sent me an article by Esther Mobley in the San Francisco Chronicle about Patricia and Joanne. It’s because of that article that this episode happened and the way the story has been told. Thank you, Dean Dizikes. Keep sending those communiqués.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now for some totally awesome credits.

“Wine 101” was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darbi Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The Judgment of Paris — 45th Anniversary appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-judgement-of-paris/

[johnboothus]

Wine 101: The Judgment of Paris 45th Anniversary

This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Pahlmeyer. For more than 30 years, Pahlmeyer has been crafting extraordinary wines from the mountain vineyards of Napa Valley. Rooted in the founder’s dream to rival the best of Bordeaux, Pahlmeyer offers an extraordinary portfolio of celebrated wines with a long pedigree, including two rare 100 point scores from the Wine Advocate. As producers of age-worthy, site-specific wines, Pahlmeyer is building a new legacy inspired by Bordeaux and rooted in Napa Valley. Come experience where tradition and ambition meet: Pahlmeyer.

In this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses the Judgment of Paris, a monumental event that changed American wine culture forever. Beavers details the history of how the tasting — which compared American and French wines — led to the worldwide recognition of Napa Valley.

Listeners will learn about trailblazers who planned the tasting — including Patricia Gustad-Gallagher and Joanne Dickinson DePuy, without whom the Judgement of Paris could have never occurred. Beavers also explains how George Tabor’s Time Magazine article boosted the event’s impact by painting what was meant to be a friendly tasting as an intense wine competition.

Tune in to learn more about the Judgment of Paris.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Or Check out the Conversation Here

Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and you know what I love about “Star Wars”? Well, a lot of things. But No. 1, it’s an ongoing story. It’s not an adaptation.

What’s going on, wine lovers? Welcome to episode 27 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. It’s Season 2. I’m the tastings director of VinePair. What are you guys doing today? What’s going on today?

OK. This one, guys? This story is awesome, complicated, and foggy. We’re going to clear it up. It’s important. Let’s do this. Judgment of Paris.

Here we are, wine lovers. We talk about the history of American wine and when I’m talking about wine regions, I often mention this moment in our history where I call it the watershed moment. The moment where we as an American wine- drinking culture started really coming back from Prohibition. Prohibition really messed us up, guys! It really messed us up. A decade, 10 years, of illegal alcohol. That is just crazy.

When it was repealed, there were still so many problems. Every state has its own liquor laws. It’s insane. For us as a drinking culture, man, it took us a while to get back to what we were doing before Prohibition. From the Gold Rush until Prohibition, we were on track to be one of the major wine-producing regions in the world. Then, we had 10 years of Prohibition that messed all that up. We had to rebuild our wine industry after that.

The people in Napa got started pretty quickly. In the 1940s, they created something called the Napa Valley Vintners Association, which is still around today. They started conceiving of a wine region that was more than just a regular wine region. It was more of a fine-wine region. We had the whole Napa episode from last season, but none of this would have been possible. I mean, I’m sure at some point it would, but it was expedited. Our clout on the world stage was expedited by one event called the Judgment of Paris in 1976. In the early days after Prohibition, between the mid- and late 1930s, there were a bunch of winemakers really trying to recreate what they had lost 10 years earlier. One of those wineries was Beaulieu Vineyards, which is down in what is today Rutherford. It was owned by Georges de Latour and his wife, Fernande. The two of them were looking to get some young, new energy into this wine region that they loved so much.

They ended up going to France and convincing a man by the name of André Tchelistcheff to leave his very important work in France and come over to the United States. He was to help consult with them and make wine in a way that the region hadn’t seen before. André Tchelistcheff went on to be the most important winemaker in Napa, in California, and probably the United States.

His story is awesome, and I can’t get into all of it here, but what’s important about him, and about what we’re talking about today, is his influence on the winemakers that were making wine in the late 1960s and early ‘70s in Napa Valley. One of the most important roles André Tchelistcheff had besides making wine and being innovative about winemaking processes, is mentoring the future of winemaking in Napa. That is what was happening in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Now, I’m not sure how familiar you are with this event called the Judgment of Paris. I mean, it’s an intense name for an event. It’s actually Greek mythology, but the term the Judgment of Paris was conceived by a man named George Tabor. He was a journalist for Time Magazine, and he wrote a story about an event that he witnessed in Paris. This event, which he called the Judgment of Paris, was really just an educational wine tasting with California wines and French wines as a comparative thing. That right there is what is important about what this event did.

It wasn’t so much the story in Time Magazine as it was what actually happened. What is known as the Judgment of Paris in 1976 only happened because of two figures. In the early ‘70s, a young American from Delaware by the name of Patricia Gustad-Gallagher was in Paris working for the International Herald Tribune. Obviously, she started to develop a passion for wine in Paris. I mean, that makes sense.

In 1971, she answered a classified ad for the release of the new Beaujolais Nouveau. And the way she puts it, she arrives at this place and she sees this guy unloading a ton of Beaujolais Nouveau from his station wagon. He had apparently driven from Beaujolais to Paris overnight to have it in his store. The store was called Academie du Vin, which was also a wine school, and this was the perfect opportunity. I don’t know if Patricia knew what she was getting herself into, but she and Steven Spurrier became very good friends.

She began to work at his shop and the wine school. One of the focuses of their work were the tastings they would do. I’m not sure if they were monthly or annually, but they would do these big educational tastings through the ‘70s and I’m not sure how this worked out, but Patricia did have a sister in San Diego. I’m not sure if that’s how it happened, but she started hearing rumblings of good wine being made in Northern California.

Patricia had this proud American thing going on. She really wanted to show and share American wines with the people in the Academie du Vin. Unfortunately, the wines that were provided by the embassy just weren’t wines they wanted to share with the French. Also, as an American in 1975, she saw that in 1976 the bicentennial was coming up, so she conceived this grand idea. Where were these fabled northern Californian wines?

Napa was not being imported to France at this time, so she needed to find those wines because she had this really cool idea. She was going to get all these French wine experts in a room, and she was going to do a comparative tasting with French wine and American wine. Not to show who is better than the other, but just to show that the United States is making pretty amazing wine. She was determined to make this happen, brought the idea up to Steven Spurrier, who thought it was a great idea. So what does she do about it?

She went to California to visit her sister in San Diego and tacked on a few days in Northern California to see what was going on up there. At the time, in Napa, there was a very famous wine writer by the name of Robert Finnegan. He had a newsletter called Private Wine Guide. He was basically the guy before Robert Parker. She reached out to him. He recommended a bunch of wineries. She went to taste mostly in Napa. She really liked everything she tasted mostly, but two wineries really stood out to her. It was Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. She also enjoyed wine from Freemark Abbey, a very historic winery in California.

She goes back to Paris, talks to Steve about what she experienced, and Steve gets very excited about all this. So he and his wife Bella decide that they’re going to go to California and experience it for themselves. This is in 1976, which is months before this whole event is supposed to go down.

Joanne Dickinson DePuy had lived in Napa Valley since 1949. In 1973, she was getting a divorce. Her kids were grown, and she thought, “I never really held a full-time job. I’ve only had a part-time job at a travel agency. I have to figure out my life.” She’s quoted as saying that she was going to give herself six months to figure it out. She loved two things: tennis and wine.

Then, she decided to launch two businesses, a wine tour company, and a tennis tour company. Now, I don’t know what happened to the tennis tour company, but I do know about the wine tour company, which is pretty amazing. Her idea, which I think is pretty innovative in the 1970s for what she wanted to do, was she wanted to bridge Napa to other wine regions and vice versa — meaning she wanted to take winemakers from Napa to places in other countries to see how wine is made and how their cultures are. She wanted to take people from other countries, specifically France, from their countries to Napa and show them Napa. It’s a bridge to both, which is a pretty amazing idea.

It was going pretty well. She convinced the secretary of state of California to lead a tour to China. Her clout was rising. In 1976, when Steven and Bella Spurrier wanted to come to Northern California to see what was going on, she’s the person they called. Joanne DePuy takes the couple to Chateau Montelena, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Freemark Abbey, and other places. Actually, the Spurriers declined a visit to the Mondavi Estate because they wanted to find winemakers that were still under the radar. Yeah, Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars were under the radar. Woah.

The Spurriers bought a bunch of wine — 24 bottles from different wineries — and they were going to have these wines sent over to France for this little thing they were doing. Patricia was stoked. Now, for Joanne and her company, one of the bucket-list situations she wanted was to get André Tchelistcheff, the famous winemaker who was still around mentoring everybody — the big deal — to do one of these tours. It took some doing, but she finally convinced him to do a vintners-only tour to France.

Since André Tchelistcheff was leading this, it attracted some of the most well-known winemakers in Napa at the time. Two of those people were the owners of Chateau Montelena, Jim and Laura Barrett. They were there just because of André Tchelistcheff. It was just pure coincidence that their wine was being brought to France for a tasting. Right before Joanne was about to take these vintners on a tour, she gets a call from Steven Spurrier in France saying, “Oh, no, the wines are not going to clear customs. Would it be OK if you guys could each put a bottle or two in your luggage to bring it over to help us out?” Joanne said, “Yeah, we can do that.”

Now, it was a lot more difficult than that, but she was able to wrap all these wines up in boxes and convince the people at TWA to put these on the plane and really try to get them over there safely. One bottle ended up breaking. It was a Freemark Abbey Cabernet Sauvignon, but that’s OK because that wine was still tasted in the tasting.

I wonder what was going through Jim and Laura Barrett’s minds. One of their wines is now with them going on a plane to Paris, which they will eventually go off into France and just have a tour of French vineyards, mostly in Bordeaux, and their wines are going to stay in Paris. In Paris, I’m sure that Steven and Patricia are sighing with relief. Steven Spurrier is trying to find press that would cover this thing, because it’s a big deal. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was a big deal. Patricia thought it was a big deal to her. Her family was a colonial family in the United States, so it was a big deal.

They managed to get one person to attend the event from the media, a man by the name of George Taber with Time Magazine. Now, this is where things got a little weird, mainly for Patricia. I am not really sure how Steven Spurrier took it, but the panel of wine experts that were asked to be part of this tasting were some of the most popular and well-known wine critics in France. It was one of the reasons why Steven Spurrier was trying to get media attention for it, but they weren’t judges. They were just experts. This was supposed to be just a fun, comparative tasting that was hopefully going to get some media attention and would be really cool to show how American wines were faring these days.

It was to be a blind tasting. Whites being blinded against whites. Reds are being blinded against reds from each country. Of course, the American wines were from Napa, and the French wines were from Burgundy and Bordeaux, white and red. As this tasting progressed, George Taber, the media guy, saw something. He didn’t see these wine experts as experts doing a comparative fun educational tasting. He said, “Oh, my gosh, this is a blind tasting.”.

He saw it as a competition, and he saw these wine experts as judges. This guy would go on to write an article in Time Magazine about what he witnessed and then because of the impact of this particular event in American culture, he ended up writing a book and calling it “The Judgment of Paris.”

Even though it was an educational tasting, these wine experts were taking notes. They were actually taking scores, and this is what you do in tastings. You score wines, and it’s not necessarily a competition-based idea for scoring as it is for you to understand your own preferences. What got really crazy is when people started realizing that the American wines were being scored higher than the French wines.

In Taber’s book, he describes tension in the room, a little bit of frustration, murmuring, people wondering what was going on, not understanding what was happening. On a side table, scores were being tallied up. I don’t know that these scores were meant specifically for winners and losers, but George Taber saw it like that. He was noticing something pretty fascinating. He was looking at the top 10 whites and the top 10 reds, and he was losing his mind.

The No. 1 white wine in a blind comparative tasting between French Chardonnays and American Chardonnays, the 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay came in at No. 1. Chalone Vineyards 1974 Chardonnay comes in third. Spring Mountain Chardonnay 1973 comes in fourth. Freemark Abbey Chardonnay 1972 comes in sixth. Veedercrest Vineyards 1972 comes in ninth, and David Bruce Winery Chardonnay 1973 comes in 10th.

Then, over in the red, things really got crazy. The No. 1 red, according to the scores, was Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon. Number 5 was Ridge Vineyards 1971 Cabernet Sauvignon. Number 7 was Mayacamas Vineyard 1971. Number 8 is Clos du Val Winery 1972. Number 9 was Heitz Wine Cellars 1970, and Freemark Abbey 1969 was No. 10.

On the surface, wow, right? It was supposed to be just this fun, educational, momentous event with experts tasting wine from France and the United States and understanding the difference between the two to see where the United States is on the map right now. Since George Taber and Steven Spurrier were working together to make this into a media event, it started to look like a competition. To the point where one of the judges, Odette Khan, who was one of the most famous wine critics in France at the time, demanded her scores back because she was worried that this is going to be a competition and not an educated tasting. Then, she worried her results were going to be published and she was going to have to deal with the fallout of that.

According to Patricia, she was also very upset with this idea. She thought, “Wait, what’s happening?” She had conceived of this entire thing. This is her idea and it was being turned into a competition when she conceived of it as a fun, educational, comparative tasting. Alas, George Taber would write a very good piece about this event in Time Magazine, but he framed it as a competition of the Old World versus the New World. Thus, that massive statement made a huge impact on the American wine-drinking culture.

It didn’t really have a big impact on France because no one thought of it as a competition. What’s interesting is George Taber ran the call, the winemakers that had won. It just so happened that Laura and Jim Barrett, the owners of Chateau Montelena, were actually in Bordeaux at the time with André Tchelistcheff. They got a phone call at a restaurant they were at, and they thought something was wrong but turns out they found out they “won,” and they lost their minds. They thought it was really cool. I mean, you imagine being a winemaker in the United States, in Northern California. There are no wine regions, you are just making wine, and you try to make it the best you can. Then, all of a sudden there’s this event happening in Paris, and your wine is going to Paris, but you don’t really know what it means. You happen to be in France when you get a phone call saying the wine that you sent out to Paris actually became No. 1 in a comparative tasting that ended up being a competition? Yeah, I’d be pretty stoked.

What I find really wonderful about some of the “winners” of this Judgment of Paris, is those winemakers were the winemakers that were mentored by André Tchelistcheff. Full circle, people. Very cool.

That was in 1976. By 1980, Napa was the second AVA to be awarded in the United States, and that began the new era of wine in the United States, bringing us into the modern culture that we have now. Fun little side note here: Thirty years later, they opened up the same vintages again to see how they were aging. Again, the American wines came out on top.

This was a big moment for us in the history of American wine. This is huge! The fact that it happened and palates thought that these wines were superior or just beautiful in general is such a big deal. If it wasn’t for Patricia Gastaud-Gallagher and Steven Spurrier working together with this awesome idea that she conceived of, and if it wasn’t for Joanne DePuy of the international wine tours in California, this would never have happened. The wines that were on this list, that were in this tasting, are today some of the most famous wineries in the United States.

These winemakers would go on to mentor other people, and this is how we grew as an American wine culture and how we’re still growing today. The history of wine in America is such a fascinating story. This is just one little gold nugget of awesomeness that helped us on our journey.

I want to give a big shout-out to my father-in-law. He and my mother-in-law live in Petaluma, and he sends me wine information all the time that he reads in the newspapers. In 2018, he sent me an article by Esther Mobley in the San Francisco Chronicle about Patricia and Joanne. It’s because of that article that this episode happened and the way the story has been told. Thank you, Dean Dizikes. Keep sending those communiqués.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now for some totally awesome credits.

“Wine 101” was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shout-out to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darbi Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The Judgment of Paris — 45th Anniversary appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-judgement-of-paris/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-the-judgment-of-paris-45th-anniversary

[furfaceboyblog-blog]

SAN DIEGO

Over this past weekend I headed out to San Diego for the Agenda Trade Show. I wasn't an exhibitor or a buyer but I wanted to go to take in the experience of a trade show. That way, I could prepare myself for the future, if you know what I'm saying...wink, wink.

At Agenda, I met some FANTASTIC people! I was straight up with them and told them that I wasn't an exhibitor nor a buyer and that I was there to just get some insight and pointers on how to start my own brand. Things like what inspired / motivated  them to do what they're doing, how to market myself better, what and how to do things and what pitfalls to avoid. As an appreciation of taking the time and inspiring me, I presented them with a FREE FIRST EVER PRINTING Fur Face Boy shirt! WooOooOoo! The guy below is Mikey Carbonneau. He's with DCMA Collective and was the first guy I talked to. I felt like such an idiot at first stating what I was doing, but after realizing how cool everyone was, it became a piece-o-cake!

Well, well...who do we have here? To tell you the truth...I have no idea! I guess I became so trigger happy passing out shirts and taking photos in the beginning that I forgot who I gave this shirt to. Either way, I'm glad he's proudly representing his brand new Fur Face Boy shirt! Thanks, mystery man!

These two wild and crazy guys are from Ludwig. They have a fantastic brand and I love their stuff!

Quick! Everyone look busy! It's Malcolm Phipps, President of Double Helix NYC! Malcom wasn't shy at all about giving me insight to his brand. I swear it seemed like he talked to me for like a whole hour. He had a real passion for his brand, something everyone MUST HAVE when starting out. Anyways, Malcom's a real great guy and a real class act! 

Look into these eyes. Do you see that intenseness, that determination and that drive? That's that passion I was talking about earlier and Dennis Yu of the Natural Selection Agency (Mishka, Edwin, Free Gold Watch, etc.) has it! Dennis was one of, if not THE most helpful people at the trade show. Very cool, very laid back and at the same time knew how to handle his business. He let me know that anytime I needed some help to just give him a holler and I think that that's absolutely totally awesome. BIG PROPS to you, Dennis Yu. The man. The legend.

Fur Face Boy's can be Fur Face Gal's too! And this cool gal is Catherine from Claw Money. She was constantly folding and rearranging shirts, while passing out her business card / sticker to buyers all at the same time while telling me some insight to what Claw Money was all about.  Multi-tasking...so awesome!

Hey, hey...who's that you see? It's Eric Crandel and Brandon Crawford from 101 Apparel! These two guys were very cool and were  absolute riots! Not only did they give me their story on how they got started, but they also hooked me up with some pretty cool mix albums. After listening to these mix albums, I thought to myself..."Hmmm...maybe I should get into the music scene?" Then I instantly thought..."Neh."

Oh hey...didn't see you there. Anyways, these two gals are Chelsea and Lindsay from Maple and Erhart. They were the last two to receive a Fur Face Boy shirt. As I walked around Agenda trying to find someone else to talk to, these two found me instead! As I was walking by their booth they approached me and said..."Do you want a cookie?" I immediately respond back with..."Do you want some Fur Face Boy?" And the rest is history.

Here's a few more Agenda pics. These DJ gals were great! The whole Agenda experience was great! I'm guaranteeing you that I'll be back. If not at Agenda then at another trade show. I hope to see you there. If you do make it out, don't be shy to swing by and ask me how I got there.

That guy in the middle is Jim Mahfood of 40 Oz. Comics. I used the read the crap out of his Generation X Underground Special. Damn, I wished I had an extra Fur Face Boy shirt to give to him. Oh well.

This mural was all done with 99.5% type! Can you say...unbelievably, crazy, insane GREATNESS?

Aside from all of the Agenda madness I got to hang out and take in not only San Diego but Los Angeles too! And I'm glad I did it with these guys below. They're the Shogun crew! From left to right: Shogun Viet, Shogun Kieth, Shogun San (Great Gazoo variant) and Shogun John. Shogun is about to open up and the set up is totally mind blowing! Be sure to check out their blog and if you're ever in the Dallas/Fort Worth area to definitely swing by, say hello and grab yourself some heat!

And the last posting of the day is a dedicated to my mom! Before I headed off to the Agenda Trade Show, she stayed up all night for me to sew on my labels! Earlier she made me dinner and after the sewing she made me some special tea to soothe my sore throat! Here's to you mom! Master seamstress, super cook, doctor and Fur Face Boy's first ever fan! I hope everyone who read these postings will come back every now and then and grow along with Fur Face Boy. Soon I'll have all these links working and announce a bunch of other cool stuff. So stay tuned! In the meantime, if you ever have any questions or would like to share some random thoughts you can personally email me at ha@furfaceboy.com. I hope to hear from all of you guys!

- Fur Face Boy

[wanderingwanderlustqueer]

Wrapping the playlists...

I was driving on the 1/101 today and a song came on shuffle that I was not prepared for. And honestly, not prepared for the person who placed it. 

Heads, Carolina Tails, California. Somewhere greener, somewhere warmer. Up in the mountains, down by the ocean. Where? It don't matter, as long as we're goin' Somewhere together. I've got a quarter. Heads, Carolina Tails, California.

I had never heard this song before, so I was taken back a bit. First of all, I didn’t think Nicole was such a country music fan (only to wrap the playlist up with Ludacris and rap). Secondly, it was strange listening to the music and being locked in my own head. I’ve been to California many times in my life and I grew up in North Carolina. I know both their values. Both states boast being extremely educated as well as having the full set of geographic features: mountains, hills, and beach.  It was interesting thinking about comparisons. San Fran is our Durham. Charlotte is their Sacramento. Raleigh is... nothing really. Wilmington can take San Diego aquarium for aquarium. 

----

Anyways, that wasn’t the only auditory shock. I quickly realized that John Adams is probably the coolest dad in the fucking world. My Dad listened to Back Porch Music on NPR, and that was the edgiest piece of him... this Dad is blasting M83 and every fucking EDM remix imaginable. Happy Father’s Day, hipster dad. <3

And on that note, Powell’s July playlist had been clutch in the mornings to pump my life UP. Switch and Swish Swish... yas.

----

NPR did a great playlist, and Spotify’s list was... interesting. The similarities are that everyone picks the same 8 songs to put on a cross country playlist... and I swear to God if I hear Wagon Wheel one more time, I will burn this place to the ground.

---

I think the heaviest playlist came from an old ex, an old friend. What makes it special is that he’s the only one I ever really talk to, and only 1 of 2 that I would ever entertain a friendship with. Innocuous on its face, I have to admit I know Josh pretty well. Neither of us really opened up completely, so my assumptions are mine alone. The kickoff song partially reminded me of how my dad may be shining down one me, but also of how we battled back and forth on pithy topics. I’m always down for a good Avett Brothers song, and the covers of songs that were pervasive on other road trip playlists did the trick. If you’re reading this Josh, NEVER PUT GLEN HANSARD AND DAMIEN RICE ON THE SAME PLAYLIST. ESPECIALLY IF ONE IS INSTRUMENTAL. Volcano drove me insane without the words, but that’s you’re life, isn’t it?

I guess the strongest of feels came from the fact that so many of my friends around the country made playlists for me, and somewhere in the middle, I basically just got a clean blade to the side with the Fiona Apple song.

You'll say you understand, you'll never understand I'll say I'll never wake up knowing how or why I don't know what to believe in, you don't know who I am You'll say I need appeasing when I start to cry But "never" is a promise and I'll never need a lie

But the funny thing is that I understand. And I’ve understood for years. But I also know what my dark can do to a person. And what I’ve learned over the years is that no one deserves to feel the weight I carry on a daily basis, especially someone who has so much more to give in other sectors. 

Or do I divide and pull apart Cause my bright is too slight to hold back all my dark This ship went down in sight of land And at the gates does Thomas ask to see my hands?

So without going too deep, I hope people understand my openness and vulnerability should not be taken as a weakness, but as a signal of what my potential really is. And since I lost the one person that could contain the shadows, I have to rely on my own devices... which are destructive at best.

[a-h-arts]

Good for your humanities class I am having to use this for my HUM 101 class. I will start with the positives. The chapters actually are quick reading compared to other textbooks I have read and there are plenty of pictures in there that the book analyzes. I was also glad to rent this through Amazon because I only had to pay $40, while my campus bookstore was selling it for $100. Now here are the negatives, part of it may not affect you like it did me. I am not artistic, I am very concrete, so I am bad at analyzing art. When the book explains the details of paintings or architecture and states what they mean, I have no idea how they interpreted it that way. In fact, it is hard for me to understand the importance of what they point out. I am the type of person who will look at paintings quickly in a museum. The other negative is that the book will mention other details about a piece of art but not show it visually. My humanities professor has complained that they don't show the interior of architecture, which is just as important as the exterior. But overall, this textbook serves its purpose for a humanities class and still helps to a certain point. Probably my favorite part of the textbook is that they acknowledge that you may not agree with them on some observations and that interpretation of art is not black and white. Go to Amazon

Jump to Chapter 4 Once you get past the insanely dull first couple of chapters, this resource is adequate as a very basic introduction to the arts. The first couple of chapters entitled "What is a Work of Art?" and "Being a Critic of the Arts" contain exactly the pretentious ilk that drives many away from the arts. Get past these chapters, and you'll discover insight into many arts genres. Go to Amazon

Met expectations Shipped on time. And fits the purpose I needed it for. The book is slightly bent up, but I am only renting it so no real complaints. Go to Amazon

Thank You Had a Great class using this book, but also due to the intructor at cuyamaca college out here in San Diego, CA. Go to Amazon

I am enjoying my book and thanks for making it ... I am enjoying my book and thanks for making it affordable for me. Without this price l wouldn't been blue to finish my education. Go to Amazon

Five Stars A+ Go to Amazon

Four Stars Lots of information, however don't know how to justify the cost. Go to Amazon

Five Stars I like amazon, very convenient and books are cheap. Go to Amazon

Four Stars great, and very happy. Received in bad condition. Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars Five Stars school book

[wineanddinosaur]

Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know

Inspired by one of VinePair’s most popular site sections, the Wine 101 Podcast takes an educational, easy-to-digest look into the world of wine. This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Columbia Winery. As Washington’s original premium winery, Columbia Winery proudly carries a long legacy of discovering and celebrating exceptional Washington wine. Our rich history, as well as the distinct terroir of the great Columbia Valley, allows us to craft wines that embody Washington’s unique spirit and curious nature. Columbia Winery offers a collection of rich and deliciously enjoyable wines inspired by the diversity of Washington’s best growing regions. Created through visionary wine-making, and unrelenting curiosity: Columbia Winery.

In this episode of Wine 101, VinePair Tastings Director Keith Beavers steps outside of California to talk about what winemaking looks like around the country. He traces back to early vine planting, and the factors that led Americans to eventually move away from European grapes to their own hybrids and native species. One such factor was a pesky louse called phylloxera, which wiped out 85 percent of European species, but was eventually resolved by a team of French and American scientists.

Unfortunately, shortly after finding a way to deter the louse, Prohibition came into effect. It was difficult for Americans to regain momentum after the ban was lifted, but winemakers and wine lovers alike reemerged with a new palette for sweet, high-alcohol wines. This shaped winemaking for decades to come, until The 1976 Judgement of Paris crowned a California wine and reinstalled American fine wine values.

This excited American vintners around the country, and after the creation of American Viticultural Areas in the 1980s, U.S. winemaking began to look different. Today, the country’s producers are celebrated for the attention they pay to climate, soil, and a diversity of niche and native grapes. Consequently, there are new and exciting wines popping up everywhere from Long Island to Texas.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

Or Check Out the Conversation Here

My name is Keith Beavers. And just thinking like, wow, Disney bought Star Wars. And I get to watch Star Wars…

What’s going on wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 27 Of VinePair’s Wine 101 Podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. I am the tastings director of VinePair. Hello, how are you? I’m fine. I mean, we’re not going to talk about all of the wine stuff happening in all the places outside of California, but there’s some places you have to understand that are really cool you probably already know about. But also let’s have a discussion about what’s going on in the future of American wine. Why not?

This title is a little insane, right? Outside of California, what do you need to know about wine in the United States? And we still haven’t talked about all of California, but this is going to lead into a very interesting conversation I want to have with you wine lovers out there. We’ve talked about Sonoma. We’ve talked about Napa. We’ve talked about the Central Coast. We did not talk about the Southern part of California. We did not talk about the Northern part of California. There are other wine growing and producing regions in California that are stunning. Stunning wine like the North coast, Mendocino, Clarksburg. And in the South, there’s Temecula, which is an emerging wine growing region.

But in this episode I think we should talk about what’s going on outside of California because the United States is a wine drinking, wine growing, wine producing, vine growing, viticultural, vinicultural country. The thing that Thomas Jefferson aspired to back in the day with a bunch of hit or miss, because of the lack of knowledge with plant morphology and science and botany and all the stuff that we have now that we didn’t have then. I mean, really it all began because we had people coming from Europe to this country, and it was just part of their lifestyle to have wine. It was part of their food, was part of their dinner, it was part of their meals. So planting vines and making wine from those grapes was a natural thing to do.

And the fact was that in the colonies and the Eastern Coast, there were a lot of problems with climate and pests and all this stuff. It didn’t really work that well, but while that was happening, we were still forcing it to happen, if you will. Before the Civil War, we had vines growing in the Ohio Valley. We had vines growing in Erie, on Lake Erie, which we still do now today. We had vines growing in Missouri, we had vines growing in Texas. We absolutely had vines growing in Southern California. That’s where California wine kind of began with the missions of the Franciscan monks over there in the West Coast.

And what we were doing on the East Coast, back in the day, we had no idea what the West Coast was doing. It was just kind of all over the place. I mean, I’m sure people knew what other people were doing, but there wasn’t email. It was hard to get information from one coast to the next coast and from one part of the country. From the Midwest even to the East Coast.

And it was a rough go for a while there. I mean, we were Europeans planting European vines in this new soil and this new land with tons of climatic and natural challenges, and it didn’t really work that well. But then we found, “Hey, there’s actually these native grapes here in the United States or the colonies or whatever. Let’s plant these.” And the result was wine, but not the kind of wine that we were used to in Europe. So we were like, nah, let’s try and make this vitis vinifera thing works. So we keep on trying to make that work and in doing so, it just so happens that every once in a while, a natural crossing of a European variety and an American variety would come about. It’s called a hybrid.

And this hybrid would have some aspects of the European variety, but it would have the hardiness and ability to survive in the climates in this new land. The only problem was: Wines made from American vitis labrusca or whatever they’re called now, and these hybrids, would often have this really odd distinct, musky, animal smell to them that they called “Foxy”. I mean, we knew now that it’s a compound called methyl anthranilate, and it’s very unique to these American varieties and hybrids. And we also know now the best way to get rid of these is to pick early, harvest early, or age for a long time in cask, or just rack the hell out of it until it’s gone.

And there were a lot of them that had this sort of unfortunate aroma to them, but there were also some that didn’t, there were some successes. And to this day they’re still being used. Hybrids with names like Catawba, Delaware, Isabella, and the really most famous one was Norton. There’s also ones called Seyval, Seyval Blanc, Vidal all these different names. A lot of them are white. Not all of them are red. Norton is one of the most successful red ones. We have another one called Baco Noir. And if we weren’t forcing Merlot and Cab and Chardonnay into these soils, we were just using these hybrids and we were trying to develop our wine culture through these hybrids.

That’s why California is so important. Because in California, these European varieties tended to do well. The mission grape, which is the grape that kind of started the wine thing in California, was brought to California by Franciscan monks. That grape is actually a native Spanish grape, and it traveled all the way around the world, and it finally made it to California. They call it the mission grape because it was planted in the missions going all the way up from San Diego to Sonoma. So that’s a vitis vinifera variety, and it did just fine. So when Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cab Franc all these varieties start doing well, then we start focusing on them.

Of course, the mission grape is always around, but it’s a vitis vinifera, so this is how it starts working in California. It’s why all eyes were on California, but of course so was the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush happened in California. So there’s all this attention on this state. And it just so happens it was a great place to grow certain vines. But while all that was happening, wine was being grown in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, the Ohio Valley, Lake Erie, Missouri. Even though it wasn’t really working that well, we were doing it. We had these hybrids. And then what happened is this louse called phylloxera starts attacking all the vines in Europe and in the United States, kills 85 percent of European vines. It goes crazy in the United States as well, starts depleting our vines all over the place. It took us a while, I think it was four or five years to figure it out. We figured out through a collaboration between the Americans and the French. We figured it out. We never killed phylloxera. It’s still around, but we figured out how to combat it by using American rootstock, because phylloxera is an American louse, and putting American rootstock on European vines.

Therefore, the phylloxera is like, “Oh I don’t know what that is, I don’t want to. I guess I’m not hungry. I thought I was hungry, but I’m not hungry.” And this whole thing led to us actually making hybrid vines proactively, instead of like, “Oh look, a new grape popped up because of nature.” No, we actually started making them, thousands and thousands of different hybrids to put out there. Not all of them made good wine or made wine at all, or could make anything that was remotely like wine. But a lot of them did. Hundreds of them did. We made thousands of them, and hundreds of them could make wine. And a lot of places in the United States held onto this for a while, because it was the one way the wine could be made. And we got out of this whole phylloxera thing. California had the eyes of the world on it after the Gold Rush. Things were happening, which we’ve talked about in previous episodes.

And then in 1919, we decided to make it illegal to drink alcohol. And that basically ruined all the progress we had made up until that point. And then in 1933, it decimated pretty much the entire alcohol industry. We emerged out of that, but we emerged out of that with a sweet tooth. The wine we were drinking in Prohibition wasn’t dry red wine or complex white wine. It was really sweet, high-alcohol hooch. That’s what it was. And that’s what we were used to. So coming out of Prohibition, it was very hard for us to figure out what fine wine or what good, fine dry red or white wine was. And it wasn’t until the 1960s that we kind of figured it out. People like Robert Mondavi were inspired by the winemakers that kept the thing going in Napa after Prohibition. And it was in California that we started seeing really nice, fine red wines and that kind of inspired other wine makers.

And there’s a lot of activity going on in California. Then in 1976, The Judgment of Paris showed that the wine from California was winning awards that would beat out French wine. And that was our watershed moment. And we became the winemaking country that Thomas Jefferson had always wanted. But before that, things were even happening North of California in Oregon in the 1960s. There were winemakers up there that had left California to go make wine there because they wanted to make Pinot Noir. They wanted to plant it and vitis vinifera wines in the Hills of the Dundee Hills, around Portland. And people were like, “Nah, that’s not going to work.” So they went and did it because someone told them they couldn’t do it. And in doing so, created what is now the Willamette Valley and one of the most sought after places for Pinot Noir in the country, and in the world. And that was all happening before we had these things called AVAs and North of Oregon, you have Washington state, which just even a little bit later than that started saying, you know what? We can do wine as well, and that’s where the Columbia Valley started coming into play.

While all that was happening, wine was still being made in New York. Actually the Finger Lakes had a huge industry of wine being made. It was still kind of hybrid-y, and there was a Concord grape, and they were trying Riesling at this point, and all the different kinds of cold, like winter-hardy vines. And then in 1976, The Farmer’s Winery Act was passed in New York. And then you have these winemakers out in Long Island buying up potato fields and turning them into wineries. And then from 1978 to 1980, we created what’s called the American Viticultural Area, which is our way of having an Appalachian system in the United States. It is nothing like the Old World in Europe. It is a very loose, very lenient system. It’s basically used to demarcate an area if you can prove it has a certain kind of unique soil type and unique climate, but it can also be political — it’s America. It’s just what we do. But when we created that, the first one was awarded to Augusta, Missouri, which is old school, they’re still making wine there. Even after Prohibition and through all this time with The Judgment of Paris, Missouri was still making wine, and they were the first ones to apply, they got an AVA. Then after that, the second one was Napa Valley. And then from the 1980s, until literally last week, we have been adding AVAs to our land. A lot of the AVAs we had rushed in between the eighties and the nineties. But I was told by one of the hosts of the VinePair Podcast last week that there was an AVA that was being awarded to Hawaii.

I was talking to a winemaker in Washington state that said about two weeks ago, since the recording of this podcast, there’s two new AVAs in Washington state. And I guess you could say for a long time, we didn’t think about any of this stuff, right? I mean so what? It’s California! That’s what’s important.

It’s New York. It’s Washington. It’s Oregon. Those are important places because of the track record. But there’s other places that work in the United States that make great wine. The thing is, we’re a big country. And it’s not going to work in every place, but if we’re smart — we’re getting smarter and smarter, the people making wine in this country, the things that they’re coming up with is incredible. They’re thinking about the soil, not the vine, they’re thinking about the climate, not the vine. And then once they get the climate and they get the soil, then they find the vine that works in that soil. We’re finally at a place in our history in America where we’re willing to try whatever does well in whatever soil.

There’s an Austrian grape called Grüner Veltliner. It is awesome from Long Island. It is delicious, but the thing is no one knows what Grüner Veltliner is, so it doesn’t do as well, but in the future, it could. ‘Cause once it catches on, people will know that variety as well there.

And maybe Long Island Grüner Veltliner will be a thing. And it could be. We’re only 240 something years old. We had 10 years of Prohibition, and we had to come back as a country from that. Our drinking culture is still kind of young. We actually had a stunted growth, if you will. So the thing is, what you should know is that yeah, Oregon makes amazing Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley and all of its sub regions, but Oregon also makes amazing Cab Franc, amazing Pinot Gris, amazing Riesling, amazing Müller-Thurgau. And there are other wine regions in Oregon in the South like Rogue Valley that are doing great things.

You should know that in Washington state, they were once really well-known for the Riesling, but now they’re really more known for their Merlot. And now they’re also really known for their Cab, but they really should be known for their Syrah, but not enough people are making Syrah in Washington state because it seems like it’s just Cab and Merlot and Riesling are more popular, but if you’ve ever had a Syrah from Washington state — Columbia Valley, Rattlesnake Hills — they’re beautiful. They’re peppery and dark and wonderful. You should know that in New York state, they make absolutely stunning, amazing Riesling, and now they’re known for it. But there’s also a great Cab Franc coming out of the Finger Lakes.

There’s also a great Merlot coming out of Long Island. The Grüner Veltliners coming out of Long Island. There’s a lot happening. In that area now it’s getting more and more popular and more people are understanding the soils. You should also know that Virginia is making absolutely stunning wines right now that sets it apart from every other wine region in the country. They’re making amazing wine from a grape called Petit Manseng, which is a blending variety from Bordeaux. They’re making amazing Viognier, Pinot Noir, Cab Franc, Merlot, Chardonnay. And the beauty of Virginia is all these wines are elegant. There’s more acidity in the wines in Virginia than anywhere else in any other region in the country.

You should also know that there’s wine being made in Arizona. Actually I had some great red wine in Arizona. I had one of my favorite white wines ever. A white wine from the grape Malvasia from Arizona that was absolutely delicious. You should also know that there is wine being made in New Mexico. Some of the best sparkling wine in America is being made in New Mexico. You should also know that Texas is doing something really special. The thing about Texas, fun fact is that’s the home of T.V. Munson. That’s the guy who worked with the French to figure out that American rootstock on European vines helped stem the tide of phylloxera. So that’s pretty cool. So he was also a hybrid guy, so he created hundreds and hundreds of hybrids. So Texas has always been kind of a hybrid winemaking place. And the few AVAs that are emerging out of Texas, like the Texas High Plains up in the Northwestern part of the state or the Texas Hill Country, which is right smack dab in the middle of the state. There are things happening here, where vitis vinifera vines are being grown and they’re successfully being grown. Like Merlot, Tempranillo, Syrah, and some of them are being blended with hybrid grapes. And the success rate is stupendous. I recently had a Texas red: It was Merlot, Tempranillo, and a hybrid called Ruby Cabernet. The wine was awesome. And for me, it was like, this is an American wine. It is absolutely an American wine because of the blend.

And they’re still making wine in Augusta, Missouri. It’s the first AVA in America. I recently had a red wine from the Norton variety from Missouri, and it was awesome. It was meaty, juicy, and soft, and great. But when it comes to vitis vinifera, the thing is, we are still working on it in the United States. We still have a long way to go. And the best way that we can help this along, is we have to understand that we’re not always going to be a place that makes a lot of wine to get all over the place. We also have really weird laws. Post-Prohibition laws gave every state its own, “Go ahead and create your own law.” So every state is its own country of wine and liquor laws.

But the way we can do this is we have to visit these places. We have to go to Virginia, go to Texas, go to New Mexico, go to Arizona. Go to New York, go to Oregon, go to Washington. Of course, go to California. I mean, the places that you can get wine all over the place is one thing. But go to places that don’t do the production to get across the country. And it’s not because they don’t make good wine, it’s because they’re making good wine, but in smaller amounts, because they’re concentrating on quality not quantity. And that’s where America’s going. And I think that’s what’s exciting about American wine.

I want to thank Sean Hails, winemaker at Columbia winery in Washington for some great info on this episode.

If you’re digging what I’m doing, picking up what I’m putting down, go ahead and give me a rating on iTunes or tell your friends to subscribe. You can subscribe. If you like to type, go ahead and send a review or something like that, but let’s get this wine podcast out so that everybody can learn about wine.

Check me out on Instagram. It’s @vinepairkeith. I do all my stuff in stories. And also, you got to follow VinePair on Instagram, which is @vinepair. And don’t forget to listen to the VinePair Podcast, which is hosted by Adam and Zach. It’s a great deep dive into drinks culture every week.

Now, for some credits. How about that? Wine 101 is recorded and produced by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin. I also want to thank Danielle Grinberg for making the most legit Wine 101 logo. And I got to thank Darby Cicci for making this amazing song: Listen to this epic stuff. And finally, I want to thank the VinePair staff for helping me learn more every day. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-regions-outside-california/

[johnboothus]

Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know

Inspired by one of VinePair’s most popular site sections, the Wine 101 Podcast takes an educational, easy-to-digest look into the world of wine. This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Columbia Winery. As Washington’s original premium winery, Columbia Winery proudly carries a long legacy of discovering and celebrating exceptional Washington wine. Our rich history, as well as the distinct terroir of the great Columbia Valley, allows us to craft wines that embody Washington’s unique spirit and curious nature. Columbia Winery offers a collection of rich and deliciously enjoyable wines inspired by the diversity of Washington’s best growing regions. Created through visionary wine-making, and unrelenting curiosity: Columbia Winery.

In this episode of Wine 101, VinePair Tastings Director Keith Beavers steps outside of California to talk about what winemaking looks like around the country. He traces back to early vine planting, and the factors that led Americans to eventually move away from European grapes to their own hybrids and native species. One such factor was a pesky louse called phylloxera, which wiped out 85 percent of European species, but was eventually resolved by a team of French and American scientists.

Unfortunately, shortly after finding a way to deter the louse, Prohibition came into effect. It was difficult for Americans to regain momentum after the ban was lifted, but winemakers and wine lovers alike reemerged with a new palette for sweet, high-alcohol wines. This shaped winemaking for decades to come, until The 1976 Judgement of Paris crowned a California wine and reinstalled American fine wine values.

This excited American vintners around the country, and after the creation of American Viticultural Areas in the 1980s, U.S. winemaking began to look different. Today, the country’s producers are celebrated for the attention they pay to climate, soil, and a diversity of niche and native grapes. Consequently, there are new and exciting wines popping up everywhere from Long Island to Texas.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify

Or Check Out the Conversation Here

My name is Keith Beavers. And just thinking like, wow, Disney bought Star Wars. And I get to watch Star Wars…

What’s going on wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 27 Of VinePair’s Wine 101 Podcast. My name is Keith Beavers. I am the tastings director of VinePair. Hello, how are you? I’m fine. I mean, we’re not going to talk about all of the wine stuff happening in all the places outside of California, but there’s some places you have to understand that are really cool you probably already know about. But also let’s have a discussion about what’s going on in the future of American wine. Why not?

This title is a little insane, right? Outside of California, what do you need to know about wine in the United States? And we still haven’t talked about all of California, but this is going to lead into a very interesting conversation I want to have with you wine lovers out there. We’ve talked about Sonoma. We’ve talked about Napa. We’ve talked about the Central Coast. We did not talk about the Southern part of California. We did not talk about the Northern part of California. There are other wine growing and producing regions in California that are stunning. Stunning wine like the North coast, Mendocino, Clarksburg. And in the South, there’s Temecula, which is an emerging wine growing region.

But in this episode I think we should talk about what’s going on outside of California because the United States is a wine drinking, wine growing, wine producing, vine growing, viticultural, vinicultural country. The thing that Thomas Jefferson aspired to back in the day with a bunch of hit or miss, because of the lack of knowledge with plant morphology and science and botany and all the stuff that we have now that we didn’t have then. I mean, really it all began because we had people coming from Europe to this country, and it was just part of their lifestyle to have wine. It was part of their food, was part of their dinner, it was part of their meals. So planting vines and making wine from those grapes was a natural thing to do.

And the fact was that in the colonies and the Eastern Coast, there were a lot of problems with climate and pests and all this stuff. It didn’t really work that well, but while that was happening, we were still forcing it to happen, if you will. Before the Civil War, we had vines growing in the Ohio Valley. We had vines growing in Erie, on Lake Erie, which we still do now today. We had vines growing in Missouri, we had vines growing in Texas. We absolutely had vines growing in Southern California. That’s where California wine kind of began with the missions of the Franciscan monks over there in the West Coast.

And what we were doing on the East Coast, back in the day, we had no idea what the West Coast was doing. It was just kind of all over the place. I mean, I’m sure people knew what other people were doing, but there wasn’t email. It was hard to get information from one coast to the next coast and from one part of the country. From the Midwest even to the East Coast.

And it was a rough go for a while there. I mean, we were Europeans planting European vines in this new soil and this new land with tons of climatic and natural challenges, and it didn’t really work that well. But then we found, “Hey, there’s actually these native grapes here in the United States or the colonies or whatever. Let’s plant these.” And the result was wine, but not the kind of wine that we were used to in Europe. So we were like, nah, let’s try and make this vitis vinifera thing works. So we keep on trying to make that work and in doing so, it just so happens that every once in a while, a natural crossing of a European variety and an American variety would come about. It’s called a hybrid.

And this hybrid would have some aspects of the European variety, but it would have the hardiness and ability to survive in the climates in this new land. The only problem was: Wines made from American vitis labrusca or whatever they’re called now, and these hybrids, would often have this really odd distinct, musky, animal smell to them that they called “Foxy”. I mean, we knew now that it’s a compound called methyl anthranilate, and it’s very unique to these American varieties and hybrids. And we also know now the best way to get rid of these is to pick early, harvest early, or age for a long time in cask, or just rack the hell out of it until it’s gone.

And there were a lot of them that had this sort of unfortunate aroma to them, but there were also some that didn’t, there were some successes. And to this day they’re still being used. Hybrids with names like Catawba, Delaware, Isabella, and the really most famous one was Norton. There’s also ones called Seyval, Seyval Blanc, Vidal all these different names. A lot of them are white. Not all of them are red. Norton is one of the most successful red ones. We have another one called Baco Noir. And if we weren’t forcing Merlot and Cab and Chardonnay into these soils, we were just using these hybrids and we were trying to develop our wine culture through these hybrids.

That’s why California is so important. Because in California, these European varieties tended to do well. The mission grape, which is the grape that kind of started the wine thing in California, was brought to California by Franciscan monks. That grape is actually a native Spanish grape, and it traveled all the way around the world, and it finally made it to California. They call it the mission grape because it was planted in the missions going all the way up from San Diego to Sonoma. So that’s a vitis vinifera variety, and it did just fine. So when Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cab Franc all these varieties start doing well, then we start focusing on them.

Of course, the mission grape is always around, but it’s a vitis vinifera, so this is how it starts working in California. It’s why all eyes were on California, but of course so was the Gold Rush. The Gold Rush happened in California. So there’s all this attention on this state. And it just so happens it was a great place to grow certain vines. But while all that was happening, wine was being grown in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, the Ohio Valley, Lake Erie, Missouri. Even though it wasn’t really working that well, we were doing it. We had these hybrids. And then what happened is this louse called phylloxera starts attacking all the vines in Europe and in the United States, kills 85 percent of European vines. It goes crazy in the United States as well, starts depleting our vines all over the place. It took us a while, I think it was four or five years to figure it out. We figured out through a collaboration between the Americans and the French. We figured it out. We never killed phylloxera. It’s still around, but we figured out how to combat it by using American rootstock, because phylloxera is an American louse, and putting American rootstock on European vines.

Therefore, the phylloxera is like, “Oh I don’t know what that is, I don’t want to. I guess I’m not hungry. I thought I was hungry, but I’m not hungry.” And this whole thing led to us actually making hybrid vines proactively, instead of like, “Oh look, a new grape popped up because of nature.” No, we actually started making them, thousands and thousands of different hybrids to put out there. Not all of them made good wine or made wine at all, or could make anything that was remotely like wine. But a lot of them did. Hundreds of them did. We made thousands of them, and hundreds of them could make wine. And a lot of places in the United States held onto this for a while, because it was the one way the wine could be made. And we got out of this whole phylloxera thing. California had the eyes of the world on it after the Gold Rush. Things were happening, which we’ve talked about in previous episodes.

And then in 1919, we decided to make it illegal to drink alcohol. And that basically ruined all the progress we had made up until that point. And then in 1933, it decimated pretty much the entire alcohol industry. We emerged out of that, but we emerged out of that with a sweet tooth. The wine we were drinking in Prohibition wasn’t dry red wine or complex white wine. It was really sweet, high-alcohol hooch. That’s what it was. And that’s what we were used to. So coming out of Prohibition, it was very hard for us to figure out what fine wine or what good, fine dry red or white wine was. And it wasn’t until the 1960s that we kind of figured it out. People like Robert Mondavi were inspired by the winemakers that kept the thing going in Napa after Prohibition. And it was in California that we started seeing really nice, fine red wines and that kind of inspired other wine makers.

And there’s a lot of activity going on in California. Then in 1976, The Judgment of Paris showed that the wine from California was winning awards that would beat out French wine. And that was our watershed moment. And we became the winemaking country that Thomas Jefferson had always wanted. But before that, things were even happening North of California in Oregon in the 1960s. There were winemakers up there that had left California to go make wine there because they wanted to make Pinot Noir. They wanted to plant it and vitis vinifera wines in the Hills of the Dundee Hills, around Portland. And people were like, “Nah, that’s not going to work.” So they went and did it because someone told them they couldn’t do it. And in doing so, created what is now the Willamette Valley and one of the most sought after places for Pinot Noir in the country, and in the world. And that was all happening before we had these things called AVAs and North of Oregon, you have Washington state, which just even a little bit later than that started saying, you know what? We can do wine as well, and that’s where the Columbia Valley started coming into play.

While all that was happening, wine was still being made in New York. Actually the Finger Lakes had a huge industry of wine being made. It was still kind of hybrid-y, and there was a Concord grape, and they were trying Riesling at this point, and all the different kinds of cold, like winter-hardy vines. And then in 1976, The Farmer’s Winery Act was passed in New York. And then you have these winemakers out in Long Island buying up potato fields and turning them into wineries. And then from 1978 to 1980, we created what’s called the American Viticultural Area, which is our way of having an Appalachian system in the United States. It is nothing like the Old World in Europe. It is a very loose, very lenient system. It’s basically used to demarcate an area if you can prove it has a certain kind of unique soil type and unique climate, but it can also be political — it’s America. It’s just what we do. But when we created that, the first one was awarded to Augusta, Missouri, which is old school, they’re still making wine there. Even after Prohibition and through all this time with The Judgment of Paris, Missouri was still making wine, and they were the first ones to apply, they got an AVA. Then after that, the second one was Napa Valley. And then from the 1980s, until literally last week, we have been adding AVAs to our land. A lot of the AVAs we had rushed in between the eighties and the nineties. But I was told by one of the hosts of the VinePair Podcast last week that there was an AVA that was being awarded to Hawaii.

I was talking to a winemaker in Washington state that said about two weeks ago, since the recording of this podcast, there’s two new AVAs in Washington state. And I guess you could say for a long time, we didn’t think about any of this stuff, right? I mean so what? It’s California! That’s what’s important.

It’s New York. It’s Washington. It’s Oregon. Those are important places because of the track record. But there’s other places that work in the United States that make great wine. The thing is, we’re a big country. And it’s not going to work in every place, but if we’re smart — we’re getting smarter and smarter, the people making wine in this country, the things that they’re coming up with is incredible. They’re thinking about the soil, not the vine, they’re thinking about the climate, not the vine. And then once they get the climate and they get the soil, then they find the vine that works in that soil. We’re finally at a place in our history in America where we’re willing to try whatever does well in whatever soil.

There’s an Austrian grape called Grüner Veltliner. It is awesome from Long Island. It is delicious, but the thing is no one knows what Grüner Veltliner is, so it doesn’t do as well, but in the future, it could. ‘Cause once it catches on, people will know that variety as well there.

And maybe Long Island Grüner Veltliner will be a thing. And it could be. We’re only 240 something years old. We had 10 years of Prohibition, and we had to come back as a country from that. Our drinking culture is still kind of young. We actually had a stunted growth, if you will. So the thing is, what you should know is that yeah, Oregon makes amazing Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley and all of its sub regions, but Oregon also makes amazing Cab Franc, amazing Pinot Gris, amazing Riesling, amazing Müller-Thurgau. And there are other wine regions in Oregon in the South like Rogue Valley that are doing great things.

You should know that in Washington state, they were once really well-known for the Riesling, but now they’re really more known for their Merlot. And now they’re also really known for their Cab, but they really should be known for their Syrah, but not enough people are making Syrah in Washington state because it seems like it’s just Cab and Merlot and Riesling are more popular, but if you’ve ever had a Syrah from Washington state — Columbia Valley, Rattlesnake Hills — they’re beautiful. They’re peppery and dark and wonderful. You should know that in New York state, they make absolutely stunning, amazing Riesling, and now they’re known for it. But there’s also a great Cab Franc coming out of the Finger Lakes.

There’s also a great Merlot coming out of Long Island. The Grüner Veltliners coming out of Long Island. There’s a lot happening. In that area now it’s getting more and more popular and more people are understanding the soils. You should also know that Virginia is making absolutely stunning wines right now that sets it apart from every other wine region in the country. They’re making amazing wine from a grape called Petit Manseng, which is a blending variety from Bordeaux. They’re making amazing Viognier, Pinot Noir, Cab Franc, Merlot, Chardonnay. And the beauty of Virginia is all these wines are elegant. There’s more acidity in the wines in Virginia than anywhere else in any other region in the country.

You should also know that there’s wine being made in Arizona. Actually I had some great red wine in Arizona. I had one of my favorite white wines ever. A white wine from the grape Malvasia from Arizona that was absolutely delicious. You should also know that there is wine being made in New Mexico. Some of the best sparkling wine in America is being made in New Mexico. You should also know that Texas is doing something really special. The thing about Texas, fun fact is that’s the home of T.V. Munson. That’s the guy who worked with the French to figure out that American rootstock on European vines helped stem the tide of phylloxera. So that’s pretty cool. So he was also a hybrid guy, so he created hundreds and hundreds of hybrids. So Texas has always been kind of a hybrid winemaking place. And the few AVAs that are emerging out of Texas, like the Texas High Plains up in the Northwestern part of the state or the Texas Hill Country, which is right smack dab in the middle of the state. There are things happening here, where vitis vinifera vines are being grown and they’re successfully being grown. Like Merlot, Tempranillo, Syrah, and some of them are being blended with hybrid grapes. And the success rate is stupendous. I recently had a Texas red: It was Merlot, Tempranillo, and a hybrid called Ruby Cabernet. The wine was awesome. And for me, it was like, this is an American wine. It is absolutely an American wine because of the blend.

And they’re still making wine in Augusta, Missouri. It’s the first AVA in America. I recently had a red wine from the Norton variety from Missouri, and it was awesome. It was meaty, juicy, and soft, and great. But when it comes to vitis vinifera, the thing is, we are still working on it in the United States. We still have a long way to go. And the best way that we can help this along, is we have to understand that we’re not always going to be a place that makes a lot of wine to get all over the place. We also have really weird laws. Post-Prohibition laws gave every state its own, “Go ahead and create your own law.” So every state is its own country of wine and liquor laws.

But the way we can do this is we have to visit these places. We have to go to Virginia, go to Texas, go to New Mexico, go to Arizona. Go to New York, go to Oregon, go to Washington. Of course, go to California. I mean, the places that you can get wine all over the place is one thing. But go to places that don’t do the production to get across the country. And it’s not because they don’t make good wine, it’s because they’re making good wine, but in smaller amounts, because they’re concentrating on quality not quantity. And that’s where America’s going. And I think that’s what’s exciting about American wine.

I want to thank Sean Hails, winemaker at Columbia winery in Washington for some great info on this episode.

If you’re digging what I’m doing, picking up what I’m putting down, go ahead and give me a rating on iTunes or tell your friends to subscribe. You can subscribe. If you like to type, go ahead and send a review or something like that, but let’s get this wine podcast out so that everybody can learn about wine.

Check me out on Instagram. It’s @vinepairkeith. I do all my stuff in stories. And also, you got to follow VinePair on Instagram, which is @vinepair. And don’t forget to listen to the VinePair Podcast, which is hosted by Adam and Zach. It’s a great deep dive into drinks culture every week.

Now, for some credits. How about that? Wine 101 is recorded and produced by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin. I also want to thank Danielle Grinberg for making the most legit Wine 101 logo. And I got to thank Darby Cicci for making this amazing song: Listen to this epic stuff. And finally, I want to thank the VinePair staff for helping me learn more every day. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: The U.S. Regions Outside of California You Need To Know appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-regions-outside-california/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-the-us-regions-outside-of-california-you-need-to-know