Had a sudden flashback today as we were tasting through a few wines. I tasted the latest Markham Chardonnay just now (the 2006) and I didn’t even recognize it. Joan Rivers, Kenny Rogers, Michael Jackson, Markham, all these have had some serious (read wrong) work done. Didn’t even recognize it. The Markham Chards from 1989, 1990 and a couple others were terrific wines. They were full of tasty green apple flavors, a minimum of oak, bright acidity, everything this wine wasn’t. Depressing.

But this is nothing new to the California wine biz. You can call me a “hater” if you’d like, but it is undeniable we are seeing a certain homogenization of wine right now. The effect is mostly with the whites, one cookie cutter Chardonnay after another from corporate concerns that have purchased smaller wineries and manufactured wines to suit “market analysis” instead of what the individual vineyard can produce. We’ve encountered one bastardized, flabby, over-oaked, under-fruited Cali Chard after another as of late and, while they make sense when duking it out for premium grocery store placements, somehow we just don’t see these wines working for us.

Frustrating. I mean, we don’t hate Chardonnay. Love Burgundy, love Chablis, love a lot of great Aussie examples (though the Aussies are not exempt on the cookie cutter front…), but most examples from Cali just aren’t cutting it. Could this be tracked to a general homogenization of products in general? The whole concept of “market research” or “brand analysis”, combined with the speed at which information flows nowadays, leads manufacturers of all products, be it clothing, cars, you name it, down this sameness path in an effort to capture market share. Those futuristic TV shows and movies where everyone drives the same car, wears the same outift, eats the same food (mmm….Taco Bell), all because they’re told to do so by some faceless entity that dictates what’s right or what’s cool may be closer than we think.

But we can fight it. And we are. Vintners all over the world are bucking trends and growing, aging and bottling their wines in a natural, traditional, holistic, organic way and making every attempt to let the vineyard shine through. Minimal toast on new barrels, aging in large oak casks, no fertilizers, pesiticides or chemicals in the vineyard, no fining or filtration, experiments with wild yeast ferments, many of these cats are indeed going back to their roots, so to speak. Of course, this is not to say that all these wines are a success. Some of these wines are true lab experiments at the present time as many wine growers are still trying to figure out how to do things naturally. But there are a slew of wines that are truly exciting. Character-filled wines that are not risky by any proposition, that have more fruit and complexity than their more processed neighbors. When they’re done right, they are the purest expression of place and time, which is all we can ask for.-K.M.