US: Thoughts on the proposed new Eagle Peak appellation

(SteveHeimoff) - I always have mixed feelings about AVAs. Are they helpful or hurtful? To what? You ask. To our understanding of terroir, of the sense of place they purport to convey.

Of course, an AVA does nothing of the sort. Its appearance on the label guarantees only the geographic origin of the grapes (and not even 100% of them), with certain descriptions of soils, climate and other geological and physical features that tell us little or nothing of what the resulting wines will be like.

So in a sense, few of us should care; and in the case of monstrosity AVAs, like Sonoma Coast, Central Coast, San Francisco Bay Area and even to some extent more compact ones such as Paso Robles, the formal existence of the AVA is almost irrelevant. Other AVAs (Chalone and Mount Harlan come to mind) strongly suggest a direct influence of place on wine. Oakville, too, might qualify; so, too, are Arroyo Seco, Rockpile, Spring Mountain and Carmel Valley examples of coherence. But one cannot say this about many other AVAs.

Now the federal government has opened the comment period for a proposed Eagle Peak AVA to be scrutinized by the public. I was first made aware of this pending decision some time ago by Jake Fetzer, who runs Masut, and is one of the guiding powers behind it. The region encompasses 26,000 acres (according to the TTB public notice) in east-north central Mendocino County, in what looks like (from a topo map) a very rugged, mountainous landscape.

Twenty-six thousand acres is middling for an AVA. That is roughly the size of the San Bernabe Vineyard, in southern Salinas Valley (said to be the largest contiguous vineyard in the world), midway in size between Chalk Hill, which is slightly smaller, and the somewhat larger Santa Rita Hills.