Red wine in our country, and particularly in California, has had something of an outsized impact: both on the way that we drink wine here, as Americans, but also in the way red wine has shifted shape and style in winemaking regions around the world. In some ways unintentionally, our Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons, as well as our Pinot Noirs and Merlots from up and down the west coast, have made winemakers around the world consider: should we change our style, our grapes, our barrels, our marketing strategies to match the wildly successful American reds?

Napa Valley, William Marple

This impact is really only as recent as the 1980’s, when a rapid uptick in the knowledge of modern viticulture and winemaking took place, bringing many young and experienced people alike to places like Napa Valley, despite its only being a 30-mile span. This development was provoked not in small part because of a famous tasting in France, published by Time magazine in 1976, now called ‘The Judgment of Paris.’ There, a bunch of French wine experts were made to judge great wines from Bordeaux and elsewhere in France against American counterparts, without knowing which bottles were which. The results were inarguable—American wines won handily—setting off a Cabernet Sauvignon stampede, focused in Napa but rapidly spreading across the west coast. 

The 1976 wine showdown took place at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris. Courtesy of Bella Spurrier

Stylistically, the Cabs of the ‘80s and ‘90s became very polished, seeing lots of new oak, slightly heavier extractions, with power and richness the preferred profile. Those notes were repeated across the U.S. and many different grape varieties. Now, if you select an American red wine blindly, the majority are opulent, robust, and “smooth.” That style has been emulated in places as diverse as Argentina, Rioja, Bordeaux, Tuscany, Friuli, and the southern Rhône. 

Mayacamas IV, 4/10/63, Bismark Saddle, Bernice Bing, 1963

While we respect and admire the practices that have gotten American red wine to the international spotlight, we wanted to offer another side of the story, one that highlights the deeply diverse grape varieties planted in this country. And it’s not just the varieties themselves, of course, but the wine regions here represented: the Finger Lakes, with 11,000 acres of vineyards planted; the massive Columbia river valley in Washington (24,000 acres); redwood-covered Mendocino county (17,500 acres); and the wild and mountainous Sierra Foothills appellation of California (5,000 acres of vine)s. Each of these bottlings below represent either a more tender and fresh-faced, or a more rugged and pick-up truck style, of red wine in the United States. They’re proof that we run the gamut here: from rich and opulent, Francis Ford Coppola-style, to weathered and forested, fresh and meadowlike, with river runs and glacial lakes. Our red wines are as diverse and interesting, in fact, as Americans are general.

FEATURED PRODUCTS:

Rose Hill Farm 'Can You Hear Me Now?' 2022

Lady of the Sunshine 'Chene Vineyard' Pinot Noir Edna Valley 2023

Stagiaire 'Still Life with Hillside' Mendocino Zinfandel 2022 

Stagiaire is the négociant label of Brent Mayeaux, a talented natural winemaker based in San Francisco who actually lives on Treasure Island, which, if you know anything about SF, is a profoundly weird place. This is Brent's first Zinfandel he's bottled since around 2018, from a hillside vineyard site in Mendocino on that overlooks a Buddhist monastery (Cali weirds). Old vines, planted in the 1970's, dry-farmed. Brent did this wine with whole cluster fruit macerated in direct press juice, to express stems and ripeness and complexity, but also to retain the freshness of the direct juice. Aged in barrel, tastes like strawberry-watermelon candy with mulled wine spices. Medium-weight, a beautiful entry into the new world of what Cali Zinfandel can be.

Clos Saron Syrah 'Stone Soup' 2018

At about 2000 ft of altitude, the Sierra Foothills vineyard that goes into 'Stone Soup' renders a strongly individual, mountain Syrah: lighter than most in body and alcohol, it has very deep color, vibrant acidity, and fresh aromas. This two-acre site is a textbook Syrah vineyard: south-facing, steep, extremely rocky, granitic, well-drained. About ten percent of the vineyard is planted to Viognier, which has been co-fermented with the Syrah starting with the 2013 vintage, in an homage to the traditions to the northern Rhône. A lovely, deep red wine from natural wine icon Gideon Beinstock and his wife Saron Rice.

SHOP THE COLLECTION: American Reds