Brouhaha in bottles of vintage wine
Two scandals could have far-reaching fallout for vinophiles
As the new year approaches, vinophiles look forward to choosing special wines for our holiday celebrations.
This is also a good time not only to remember great bottles enjoyed but to take note of events that might affect the taste of wine next year.
Here are a couple of stories that will probably reverberate in 2019 and beyond. The Court of Master Sommeliers lost some of its lustre with a major cheating scandal.
Over the past decade, the court enjoyed a wave of celebrity, typified by the movie Somm and its sequels. The movies lionized the court’s rigorous certification program and the three tests — theory, service and tasting — candidates must pass to earn the coveted red lapel pin of a master sommelier.
The court came to symbolize the rising professionalism of the sommelier trade at a time when restaurants were experiencing a renaissance and diners were becoming increasingly savvy about their vino.
In October, a few weeks after heralding its largest-ever class of new master sommeliers, the court announced that an exam proctor had revealed information on some of the wines in the tasting exam to an unknown number of the candidates.
The court’s board decided to strip all 24 of its new masters of their titles; the offending proctor was excommunicated.
Six of the defrocked somms passed the tasting test again in December and had their titles restored.
The court said its drastic response to the cheating was nec- essary to preserve the integrity of the certification process, but we may never learn how many of the candidates who took the test in September were privy to the leaked information about the wines in the blind tasting.
Ultimately, the sommelier scandal won’t directly affect our restaurant dining experiences.
But it could tarnish the lustre of the master sommelier title, with the professional and financial benefits it conveys.
Younger somms could be less inclined to pursue the title, or the profession itself. And that would be unfortunate.
Another controversy that stirred the lees of wine lovers this year brought attention to arcane labelling laws and the difficulty of knowing sometimes exactly where the wine in your bottle comes from.
The story features Joe Wagner, the California vintner who created the wildly successful Meiomi label of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, then sold it in 2015 to Constellation Brands for $315 million.
The deal shocked the wine world, especially since Wagner was just selling a brand, without vineyards or a winery.
Skip ahead to September, when Oregon vintners and state officials claimed that Wagner, through his current company, Copper Cane Wines and Provisions, was putting deceptive labels on two brands of his wine, called Elouan and Willametter Journal. The wines were made with Oregon grapes that were trucked to Wagner’s facility in California’s Napa Valley.
Federal law requires that such wines be labelled simply “Oregon,” without use of more specific and prestigious American Viticultural Areas such as Willamette Valley.
Wagner’s critics claimed he was pulling an end run around the regulations with the name Willametter Journal (an exclusive label for Total Wine & More stores) and its obvious reference to the Willamette Valley.
They also objected to references to the Willamette, Rogue and Umpqua valleys on labels and marketing materials for Wagner’s Elouan Pinot Noir.
Wagner dismissed the complaints as sour grapes over the market success of his brands.
In November, the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau sided with Oregon and revoked its prior approval for Wagner’s labels, ruling he could no longer refer to Oregon appellation names on his 2018 Oregon wines.
The brouhaha didn’t have the sensationalism or national cultural ramifications of the rosé scandal, in which French authorities last spring cited unscrupulous merchants for passing off cheap Spanish rosé as the real deal from France.
But it illustrates why we consumers should know the rules so we can be confident we are getting what we are paying for.
As the controversy raged, Wagner rejected $4 million worth of grapes he had contracted from vineyards in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, claiming the fruit was tainted by smoke from the region’s wildfires.
Wagner’s concern over smoke taint is shared by many growers in California, the Pacific Northwest and even Australia as wildfires become more prevalent.
And that leads to another story we will no doubt hear more about in 2019: The effects of climate change on wine.