Word: wined
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...besides some patriotic call of duty, I think I wanted to try a wine from each state to see if, as I increasingly suspected, good wine can be made anywhere. Great wine keeps coming from surprising new places--New Zealand, Lebanon, Slovenia--so why not Nebraska? In 1976, as recounted in the new indie flick Bottle Shock, experts at a blind tasting in Paris were astonished to find they preferred California wines to Bordeaux. Would my experiment rearrange the wine world and create legions of devotees of Montanan merlot? And if so, would John Cusack play me in the movie...
...reason some regions have trouble building up their wine cred is that Europeans, and now Californians, contend that the specific soil their vineyards sit on makes their wine good, that the flinty rock or dusty earth imparts a distinctive flavor. But Fred Franzia, maker of the popular $2-a-bottle Charles Shaw, told me that terroir--a French term embracing all things regional, from soil to climate to topography--is a concept winemakers use to overcharge. "Anything will grow with sun and water. We can grow on asphalt," he said. "Terroir don't mean...
...attempt to debunk terroir was more difficult than I had anticipated. Though all 50 states make wine (ever since North Dakota joined the pack in 2002), it's not so easy to get a bottle from each state. Most wines are sold only locally, and Alaska won't even ship its product, which is made from grapes from other states. So if you try to duplicate this project, know that it's best undertaken slowly while traveling around the country--or during the summer, when you have a lot of interns...
...also learned that you can make and apparently sell some truly disgusting wine: six of the bottles I tried with a dozen friends were unanimously deemed "undrinkable." But 11 of them were quite good, and while all the expected states made this list (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Michigan and Texas), so did a pinot grigio from Delaware, a white from Kentucky, a muscat from New Hampshire, a cabernet from Colorado and a chardonnay from North Carolina. Of the remaining wines, 21 were pretty decent and 12 were bad. In general, the wines were better than I predicted, given...
Sure, most of these wines were overly simple, and I could get a much better bottle for the money from Spain or Portugal, but I got to try several grapes I'd never heard of. Chambourcin is being used on the East Coast to make weird, interesting reds. And I loved the Midwest's big, tannic Norton grape. I had a dark red grape called Marechal Foch from Pennsylvania that was really different. After all this, though, I still don't know if terroir matters. It could be that the South's muscadine grape is inherently horrifying or just that...