Can America Save the Wine World?

(PalatePress) - Picture a public tasting, an important one, held in Montpellier, France. People are tasting American wines. And grimacing.

The wines are too sweet. Too primitive. And too funky.

People want to like them, really they do, but these American wines just don’t seem good enough to save the wine world, and the wine world needs saving.

This tasting was held in 1874, as phylloxera marched across Europe, and French people confronted the possibility of a future in which American wine was all there would be to drink. The US, which had given the world phylloxera, also offered salvation with its native grapevines.

Now, 140 years later, the US once again offers salvation for the wine world.

The consumer first

This time, it’s with something else entirely: knowledgeable, enthusiastic consumers.

Not that US wines are shabby. UK critic Jancis Robinson rated US red wines, on average, as second-best in the world over the last 13 years, behind only Portugal. (Method: She simply averaged every wine that she rated from each country.) That’s a little surprising at first, but makes sense when you think deeply: how often do you have a flawed wine from the US? We are now the source of grins, not grimaces.

But it’s not our sophisticated and subtle winemakers who will save the wine world. It’s our ordinary consumers, also more sophisticated and subtle than they get credit for. And generous, and as far from homogeneous as wine consumers get.

It’s that last point that matters.

That the US is now the world’s largest wine market is not news. Some of that is simply that we have a bigger population than any European country. Amazing to Europeans, 1/3 of American adults report not drinking alcohol of any kind.

But the wine drinkers we do have are special, unlike any in continental Europe.

We’ll try wines from anywhere, and we’ll pay for excellence and uniqueness. You hear this story over and over from European producers. Joep Bakx makes a wine in the unacclaimed Bordeaux Supérieur region that he sells for $32 in the US. He puts extra effort into working his vineyard, and it shows in the wine. But he couldn’t sell a Bordeaux Supérieur for 23 Euros in Europe. He could, however, sell it to sommeliers and wine buyers in New York.

Where do producers of fine wines in Portugal, Turkey, Israel, Uruguay most want to sell their products? The US, because we’ll pay fairly and our thirst is always growing.