Trips to wine country are perhaps a rite of passage for the American bourgeoisie. Affluence, after all, brings with it certain responsibilities, and traditionally that has been a greater appreciation for the arts, for fine dining and intelligent conversation, and of course for wine. All of America caught the bug more than a decade ago, and the explosion of wine culture followed.
It really was wine culture that exploded. It was not just that people drank more wine--although they did. But it was much more. Suddenly people expressed interest in grapes and clones and terroir and vintages. The shopping market wall full of labels both graphically funny and austerely intimidating became an object of curiosity and exploration. And most promisingly, strange and arbitrary rules were probed and questioned. My favorite was the old saw "whites with fish and foul, reds with meat" was abruptly disproved one day more than a decade and a half ago when my then-girlfriend announced that it no longer applied. "They don't say that anymore," she informed me. "They say to drink what you like with what you like." I never asked her who the "they" were. I didn't drink wine at the time. But in retrospect, that was an amazing moment. Somebody, somewhere, was telling the consuming public that they needed to develop their own palates and their own ideas.
And develop them we did. About the time that the movie Sideways appeared, wine was everywhere. Tastings were commonplace. To be able to talk about wine in a sophisticated way--to understand the difference between a Rioja and a Rhone, or why the Languedoc-Roussillon was France's most exciting wine region--was, well, cool. No longer the province of just the snobs, wine culture became about craft and style. One could enjoy it, marvel about its subtleties, and never stop learning about it. And it helped usher in interest in craft beers and craft cocktails. Perhaps even the slow food movement. I'm a little sketchy on the timeline, but the case can be made for wine driving interest in food. Why not?
Yet it took me nearly ten years after my first interest in wine developed to make my own pilgrimage to wine country. Forsaking a year's of savings, my intrepid wife and I cast out into the perilous wilds of Napa and Sonoma counties to see what all the fuss was about.
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