Every now and then you can be forgiven for getting carried away with the excitement surrounding the quality and growth of Australian wine. After a glass of ripe, succulent Australian shiraz we confidently assert we make the stuff well. After a bottle, we know we’re on a winner. After a flagon, we’re ready to let the rest of the world know how good we are and how we do it… Then we pick up a book like California Wine by one of The Wine Spectator’s top writers and Senior Editors, James Laube, and we fall silent. With awe. With not inconsiderable astonishment we learn that Mr Laube’s tome, referred to in the jacket as his magnum opus, covers nearly 700 wineries and contains 7,000 tasting notes. Just for California alone, by no means today the only wine producing member of the United States. There are over 800 wineries in California (about the same number as Australia), releasing around what James Laube estimates as 4,000 wines each year. He tasted over 30,000 wines for this book, prior to the even more harrowing experience of deciding which 23,000 to leave out… Should be some Internet site, if ever he decides to! California Wine is a sumptuous hard-covered table-top guide to just about everything you could ever need to know about Californian wine. It’s not a book of pictures and colour plates, although the complex system of regional delineation is adequately presented in map form; nor is it the sort of book you could lug about on your travels up and down the Pacific coast. Instead, it’s a precisely written reference, the majority of which is taken up with easy-to-find listings of wineries, wines and tasting notes, complete with ratings on the typical American 100-point scale and James Laube’s star system, for wineries as well as wines. Each winery is introduced with pertinent details concerning size, ownership and history and Laube deftly touches on the business relationships, past and present, between the personalities involved. Being a historian himself, Laube could hardly fail to produce a tight, lively history of wine in California. He introduces the wine varieties from the local perspective and makes some sense out of the appellation system. California Wine also includes a summary of the last 60 vintages in the state, hints for wine collectors and a description of wine making. Most importantly as far as I am concerned, it’s fascinating to possess a Made in America guide to American wine. There’s undoubtedly something different when a wine critic writes objectively about the wines of his or her own country. You get a very different perspective when a foreign writer attempts something similar. I reckon that James Laube has produced the perfect foil for James Halliday’s excellent Wine Atlas of California (Angus & Robertson). Laube has watched Californian wine mature over the last two decades. He has witnessed and tasted as it fought initially to create its own identity before the explosion of interest in the mid 1970s, perhaps then to lose its way before later emerging as a more assertive and confident industry, capable of great innovation and exciting interpretations of classical wine themes. He has clearly shared in Californian vignerons’ aspirations, their disappointments and their successes. Laube’s style is relaxed, honest and easy to read. He’s clearly not interested in intimidating the reader with his knowledge, but ekes it out, a bit at a time. His new book is utterly comprehensive and carries a well-presented air of authority which its copy easily measures up to. There is not enough good Californian wine sold in Australia, but there are encouraging signs that this deficit in our wine consumption is shortly to be addressed. It makes sense for Australians to try Californian wine, which is a lot more complex and sophisticated than the old-fashioned portiness of the zinfandels of yesteryear. From the brilliant cool climate chardonnays and pinot noirs of Carneros, the Russian River and the Central Coast, to the brilliant new generation of cabernets from the Napa and Alexander Valleys to the wonderful old-vine zinfandels pioneered by the likes of Paul Draper, Californian wine is worth exploring. This book should be your companion as you do. California Wine is available from The Wine Spectator, fax (212) 684 5424.
