Nobody knows exactly why, but in the last couple of decades, Chardonnay has become practically synonymous with white wine in America. More than 500 Chardon-nays are produced in California alone, and sales are up by 27 percent in the last year. “One reason Americans took to it early on was that they could pronounce it easily,” says Leslie Brenner, whose smart, irreverent manual, “Fear of Wine,” will be published later this month. “It’s also more expensive than some other wines, so people think that means it’s better.”
Chardonnay, which is made from a grapenative to Franco’s Burgundy region, can be wonderful, but the American version is often different from the French, which is known as white Burgundy. Most of California is warmer than Burgundy, so the grapes ripen more quickly, which can help make the wine heavier and sweeter, sometimes unpleasantly so. “It’s much too rich and fruity for the lighter food people are eating now,” says Brenner. Grahm and his colleagues believe that much of the state’s climate is better suited to growing grapes from the Mediterranean region, including France’s Rhone Valley. (Hence the gang’s nickname: the Rhone Rangers.) Most of their vineyards are not in Napa, California’s most famous wine-producing region, where land is expensive and yields must be high. Instead these vintners tend to settle in Santa Barbara County, Mendocino or Monterey, where they work with small batches of such grapes as syrah, marsanne, viognier, sangiovese and mourvedre. “In this generation of wine makers, farming for production levels has given way to farming for taste,” says Stephen Singer, who buys wines for Berkeley’s Chez Panisse restaurant.
Some of the wines emerging from their experiments have met an enthusiastic welcome from the Chardonnay-weary. Richard Sander, co-owner of San Francisco’s Hayes Street Grill, says his customers are discovering that the new wines go very well with Asian flavors and spicier foods. Among the up-and-coming whites he praises are Bonny Doon’s Le Sophiste and Malvasia Bianca, and the viogniers made by Arrowood, Rabbit Ridge and Joseph Phelps; the reds include sangioveses from Atlas Peak and Swanson Vineyards.
The white that has caught the most attention recently is viognier, a Rhone wine that has been gaining popularity so quickly some are predicting it will be the longed-for next Chardonnay. “Viognier is more delicate than Chardonnay, not as flabby, and the fruit doesn’t dominate,” says Rory Callahan, president of Wine and Food Associates, a consulting and market-development firm. “But there’s not very much of it out there. Chardonnay yields more than twice as much per acre.” And viognier is expensive– up to $30 a bottle. Daniel Johnnes, wine director at New York’s Montrachet restaurant, sees vio-gnier as a trend but not a real challenge to Chardonnay. “Growers in California may plant it as an alternative, but they’ll see very quickly they can’t survive on vioguier alone,” he says. He likes Rieslings and pinot blanes and even tries to get Montrachet customers to drink a dry rose once in a while. As far as most diners are concerned, he might as well offer to uncork a 1995 Kool-Aid. “It’s too bad,” he says. “The dry roses can be delicious, and they go very well with food.”
The new wines are still scarce–only 387 tons of vio-gnier grapes were harvested last year, compared with more than 300,000 tons of Chardonnay grapes- but traditional growers are beginning to catch on. Mondavi, one of Napa’s best-known wineries, released 2,000 eases of new Mediterranean varietals last spring. “We were the first to take the gamble, and now people are jumping on the bandwagon,” says wine maker John Falcone of Atlas Peak. That’s what happens in a revolution. But the more quickly this one expands, the sooner Americans will be drinking scrumptious wine of a character and flavor they never knew California could produce.
