In our recent exploration of crowd-pleasing American red wines, I tried to sharpen the contrast between processed, mass-produced bottles, like the three we tried, and the simpler agricultural wines that are our usual focus.
The experience raised a natural question: Are big-production wines necessarily mediocre at best? The answer is, of course not.
I pointed out some obvious examples: Château Lafite-Rothschild, the historic Pauillac, which is produced by the hundreds of thousands of bottles a year, and Dom Pérignon, the great Champagne, which is more in the realm of a couple of million bottles a year. Those, admittedly, are exorbitantly expensive examples.
But what about more moderately priced wines? Is it possible to make sizable amounts of wine, say an annual output of around 200,000 bottles or more, while staying true to relatively simple methods of production?
Absolutely. Many mainstream wines are produced without having to resort to the manipulative production techniques that gave those crowd-pleasers we recently tasted such an aura of artificiality.
This month we will test the hypothesis by trying moderately priced American red wines that, if they don’t roll off the assembly line by the million like those crowd-pleasers, still are readily available. Here are my three suggestions:
Marietta Cellars California Old Vine Red Lot Number 67 $15
Montinore Estate Willamette Valley Pinot Noir 2016 $19
Ridge Sonoma County Three Valleys 2016 $30
These three bottles are analogous to the previous set of American reds in that the Marietta and the Ridge are both blends of several different grapes and the Montinore Estate is a pinot noir. The Marietta is not only a blend of grape varieties, it’s a blend of vintages, hence its chronological identifier is “Lot Number 67” rather than a vintage year.
Unlike those processed wines we already tasted, the two red blends I am proposing might be said to adhere to a more ancient form of manipulation. Balance is achieved largely by blending grapes with different qualities rather than adding substances: zinfandel as a base, say, with carignan added to increase acidity and brightness, and petite sirah for tannins and color.
Even so, Ridge does add some tartaric acid to its wine. How do I know this? Ridge is one of the very few wineries that includes an ingredients list on its label, an admirable act of transparency. Adding acid is a routine practice with many California producers. Not all of them are as honest.
