rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (01/22/86)
> >What do you guys drink that makes CA wine such an excruciating experience ? > > What we drink is the few dregs that are available. The two or three cases > of Stag's Leap that make it to Vegas (and most other places) don't go very > far in a city of 650,000 thirsty people... I don't think that the problem is how far you are from California; it's whether there's a large enough collection of people who care about good wine. Boulder, CO is about 100,000 population, pretty much out in a vast redneck-and-lyte-beer desert, but we can get a good assortment of CA wines from perhaps 75 CA wineries (rough guess). OK, so toss a dozen of the biggies (Gallo, ISC, Masson, etc.) out of that; you've still got an interesting selection. You may not be able to find everything you might want. If you ask me to go get a Jordan Cab, you're probably not going to get to pick among 77, 78, and 79. Still, that's true of the selections even in very good wine stores in CA. I think it would be interesting to know what CA wineries actually make it into some reasonable number of CA stores--this would give us outlanders a basis for comparison about what gets outside. [Somebody want to convince Brian Reid to wander over to Beltramo's and see if they can give him a machine-readable list of wineries that he can post?:-] As far as encour- aging net-wide tastings, if we could work out what's generally available it would help the people who want to organize tastings. It would also be interesting to know which of the CA wineries are worth a visit in person--those which aren't into the stores yet but are big enough and stable enough to produce reasonable quantities and predictable quality. (Example: Mill Creek was in that category when we were out a few years back, tho they were riding high on local awards at the time. They certainly haven't made it out to CO--but how are they doing in CA?) >...My view from the desert is that > the remarkable progress of CA viticulture won't count for much until the > output of the best labels exceeds the demand from within CA itself. I think it's much more a problem of finding someone who will bring the wine INTO your area. Enough gets out this far that I'm convinced it's possible to get it out of CA. I suppose that having a large yuppie population helps. (No :-) here; that's completely serious--it just happens that there's a useful overlap between prestige labels and good labels.) -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.