For July Fourth, drink American
No matter where you are, or what the weather is like in that place, there are scores of high-quality American wines out there for you.
I’m thinking of a small city in the South of France right now, as we work our way toward the Fourth of July to mark the 242nd birthday of our country. The town is called Nimes, and a very casual pronunciation of it would land somewhere close to “neem.” While Nimes sits solidly in the Languedoc-Roussillon wine region, it’s not necessarily wine that is on my mind — it’s pants.
A fairly widely accepted theory out there says that the fine folks of Nimes were the first to produce the fabric that subsequently, inadvertently, became a symbol of the United States. They called the fabric “serge de Nimes” (serge being a type of twill) and, as the story goes, “de Nimes” became “denim,” and blue jeans walked their way right into American iconography. Today, they stand alongside baseball (derived from English games), hot dogs (Germany) and the cowboy (Spain, by way of Mexico) as one of our most clear and ubiquitous symbols, if not identifiers. Want to spot an American in a foreign country? Look for the jeans.
Maybe there’s more behind that birth-of-denim concept, or the way the fabric came to be called “denim.” But this is all beside the point. So with that in mind, trouser historians — please stand down. The point is, lots of our stuff came from somewhere else, and clearly we have been able to improve on much of it. Forget about the stuff we came up with — the chocolate chip cookie, the zipper and the internet — and think about what we borrowed and made our own. Wine is somewhere on that continuum, somewhere between first being borrowed and then being fully assimilated into our culture.
This Fourth of July provides yet another opportunity for you to up your wine game, to make wine more a part of your daily life. This is a holiday — so no, it is not daily life — but we all have our defaults, our reflexes, our routines and ruts. If you are a person who does not think to pour wine on Independence Day, I am urging you to change your ways. No matter where you are, or what the weather is like in that place, there are scores of high-quality American wines out there for you. Crisp whites and sparkling wines on the drier end of the spectrum can surely replace the myriad booze offerings that are best served ice cold and gulpable.
Grills and the Fourth of July go together like parades and Uncle Sam stiltwalkers, and what is one of the most common things coming off of those grills on this holiday? It’s that other quintessentially American food item that we borrowed from Germany — the beloved hamburger. Make those burgers even tastier with light reds like pinot noir or grenache, or with fullerbodied reds such as zinfandel, malbec or syrah. Don’t tell me it’s too hot for wine — it’s not too hot for a flaming, char-grilled burger, is it? Give your red wine a little chill — that’s how you should be serving it anyway — and don’t fuss too much over exact temperatures. It’s a picnic. If your wine is too warm, plop the bottle into an ice bath, and try again.
Dispense also with the following phrase: “Oh, and there’s wine over there, too, in case anybody wants that.” Replace that invitation with: “The wine is over there” or “The wine is right here.” Don’t apologize for wine; start to create the expectation that it will always be there. Actually, it always has been here.
Word is, the first settlers in Jamestown planted vineyards soon after they arrived in 1607. OK, that wasn’t us — that was them. But still, it was here. Thomas Jefferson had a vineyard at his home in Virginia, and just a few years after he helped found the United States, land that is now part of California saw the establishment of its first vineyard. There’s a lot of vineyard space between Virginia and California, and thankfully some of it has been filled in since the early days of the republic. For more than a decade now, there has been at least one commercial winery in every state.
You probably know about the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976, when two California wines beat out some of the best of France’s offerings on their home turf. Even back in the 19th century, though, American wines were winning prestigious awards over wines of the Old World, both at home and abroad. But wine is slow, and as a nation, our viable, modern wine industry is still very young. Naturally our wine culture is young and constantly developing too.
The way I see it, we have gone through a sort of chicken-and-egg, selfperpetuating cyclone over the past 25 years, in which people got more interested in wine, and wine got better and more available — and when wine got better and more available, people got more interested in it. And so on. Good wines got better, great wines got even greater, and consumers expected more in every way — more quality, more options, more enjoyment, more inclusion. As this cycle continues, wine will likely become even more a part of life in the USA.
If we continue to mindfully bring wine into our experiences, especially those we have not traditionally associated with wine, someday wine might just be there — everywhere — not only in the tangible world but somewhere deep in our thoughts, in the spot where we store our defaults, like movies and popcorn. Like the Fourth of July and American flags. Or like that other Independence Day tradition that we have come to expect as much as any other: fireworks. Which, of course, we borrowed from China.