It’s often said that imitation is flattery in its most sincere form.

Imitation is also a way of making a quick buck, and in the case of wine has sometimes been used to dupe even the world’s most influential palates and wine writers.

Counterfeiting, in the U.S. alone, is about a $200 billion a year business, and it’s been estimated by Wine Spectator (yeah, yeah, I know…) that 5% of old/rare wine sold on the “secondary market” is fake.  Faking a wine isn’t necessarily easy, but somewhat ironically the job gets a bit easier for those trying to fake rare, older wines – simply because most people haven’t had them, so there are few barometers to judge how they should or shouldn’t taste.  In some cases, as detailed in Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar, the rock stars of the wine tasting world may in fact have based their tasting notes of older, rarer wines on fakes.  Examining a bottle to determine if it’s a fake can be a time-consuming and difficult process.

The reason I’m telling you all of this?

I think I recently just may have had my first faked wine…

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Joe "interviews" some of the way-cool bloggers attending the 2009 Wine Bloggers Conference in Napa & Sonoma.  We learn about wine battling monsters, smoking the hookah, and inappropriate cleavage shots.  Oh, yeah, and wine.

Cheers!

Joe "interviews" some of the winemaking peeps that took part in the 2009 Wine Bloggers Conference, including Quintessa, Ladera, and John Tyler Wines.

Chaos ensues, as does the Macarena.  It’s better if you’re drunk.  I promise…

Cheers!

If you want to understand the changing palates of the California wine consumer (that’s consumers of CA wine, not wine consumers from CA… although those two populations can certainly overlap… ok, whatever), you need to understand peaches.

That’s right.  Peaches.

Jill & Steve, the owners and winemakers at Matthiasson in Napa, are also growers and sellers of peaches.  And they can explain how tastes have changed by observing the people that buy different varieties of their peaches.

“It seems to be generational,” noted Steve when I visited the Matthiasson farm in Napa last week. “Older consumers prefer a more mild, balanced, pure peach flavor. You can eat those peaches all day long and feel refreshed every time. Younger people buy peaches that are like an explosion of fruit.  They’re high in flavor, high in acid, high in sugar, high everything – it’s tough to eat more than one of those.”

I’d argue that the same thing could be said of Napa, CA Sauvignon Blanc wines – and I basically have said that, on numerous occasions.   The majority of SB wines (in my experience, that is) being produced out of Napa are too big, too oaky, to overblown, and lack the pure SB characteristics that are the hallmark of SB fruit (grass, citrus, high acidity, minerals…).

What I learned last week in Napa was that not all Napa SB is trying to be Chardonnay in disguise.  There is some SB being produced that is excellent, well-balanced, and surprisingly refreshing.  It just happens to be a big pain in the ass to make it that way, because according to the Napa winemakers that seem to be getting SB right, by and large Napa growers are habitually picking SB way too late…

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