California Wine

By Marcus Peterson

In the United States, California accounts for the largest share of wine producers, including Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, Monterey, Paso Robles, and Santa Ynez. Of these, Napa Valley is the most popular wine region.

California's coastal winemaking regions are blessed with generally pleasant weather, fewer tourists than in summer, and subtle shades of gold and orange creeping over the vineyards as vines go dormant for the winter.

Among the wines produced under the California wine Label are Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, assorted reds and Cabernet Sauvignon. California wine is often pitted against its French counterparts.

Wine Cultivation has grown in the U.S. during the last sixty years. In the 1850s, the production amounted to a little more than a million in gallon. At present, the production will not fall short of fifty million gallons. But this does not mean that European wines will be displaced very soon, since the characteristics of delicacy and breed they have in their reputation cannot be simply replaced. California wines have introduced the latest scientific methods in vine and wine making,

High temperatures that prevail in some parts of California were equalized with a cooling system that was first employed in Algeria. The cooling system is basically

a series of pipes that circulates iced water through the vines. Pure culture yeast that is derived from many of the European vineyards has also contributed to improving the quality of California wine.

The shift in Chardonnay styles that began a couple of years ago is accelerating, and more and more wineries are choosing to make tighter, livelier wines whose brisk acids separate them from the fuller, fleshier style that has ruled for some years now. Not to worry though, California will always make deep Chardonnays because that is what the grapes give the wineries.

In the U.S. and abroad, California winery sales totaled about 437 million gallons in 1998, up three percent over 1997. Consumers in the U.S. purchased most of this volume as California wineries shipped 388 million gallons nationwide for a seventy-three percent share of the U.S. wine market, or roughly three out of every four bottles consumed in America. The estimated retail value of the state's winery shipments to the U.S. was $12 billion, up five percent from the previous year.

Serge Renaud set off a California wine boom in 1991, when he outlined his French-paradox theory in an interview on CBS' 60 Minutes.

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