The Great Wines of America: The Top Forty Vintners, Vineyards, and Vintages at Chef2Chef

After writing an able narrative history of American wine called American Vintage, the Washington Times and Washingtonian wine columnist Paul Lukacs now purports to choose America's 40 best wines. I say "purports" because the choices he makes really don't matter. (Indeed, if Lukacs truly would rather drink American curiosities such as a varietal Norton from Missouri's Stone Hill than, say, a lush cabernet sauvignon from Napa cult producer Bryant Family Vineyards, I have bottles in my cellar I'd love to swap him.) He works to convince us of the importance of the wines he has chosen, but not too hard. "Other American wineries now make Sauvignon Blanc in this style, but Dry Creek Vineyard came first," he writes, in half-hearted praise, "and today's DCV-3 tastes as good as any."

The anointed 40 wines are really an excuse to get at American wine history from a different angle. Rather than proceed chronologically, Lukacs uses each of the short chapters -- arranged alphabetically by the vintner's name -- to frame discussions on various aspects of the evolution of the wine industry in the United States. Sometimes the relevant topic is geographic, as when he devotes part of the chapter on Quilceda Creek Vintners' cabernet sauvignon to Washington state's wine history. Sometimes it centers on a grape variety, fashionable or unfashionable, such as the syrah of vintner John Alban or the dry chenin blanc of Chappellet. Sometimes the concepts are more complicated, such as the mixed blessing of corporate ownership or the counterintuitive principle of coaxing vineyards into producing fewer grapes.

It's a noble approach, if something of a bait-and-switch for the reader expecting an American Top 40 countdown of greatest hits. The problem is, Lukacs's stories aren't all that interesting. Each is informational enough, and some -- such as the discussion of small-volume, single-vineyard wines in the chapter on the Santa Barbara winery Au Bon Climat, or the portrait of California wine pioneer Martin Ray -- will provide insight for not only the casual wine drinker but also the dedicated collector. But taken together, these stories add up to less than the sum of their parts, like a Bordeaux blend that isn't nearly as pleasurable as its varietal components.

Part of the problem is repetition. Lukacs is a big believer in the influence of a particular site on a wine, and so are the subjects of his interviews. When asked to explain their success, many of them pay homage to that nebulous sense-of-place concept the French have named terroir. This may be a terrific winemaking philosophy, but it makes for awfully dull reading. We get Gary Figgins of Leonetti Cellar saying, "I've come to believe that the soils and climate of Walla Walla make this one of the best places on earth to grow red wine grapes," and Virginia's Dennis Horton asserting that the style of Viognier in Virginia "is our own," and Mount Eden Vineyards' Jeffrey Patterson vowing to "capture the flavors that this place produces," and Monterey's Robb Talbott boasting that "this place really is special," and on and on. Eventually, I yearned for just one winemaker to profess that the secret to his wines' success is his innate genius, not merely weather patterns and the composition of the local soil.

And, make no mistake, these are interviews Lukacs is conducting. There's no scene-painting involved, no activity -- just static verbiage, like the narration of a slide show. Nobody ever crosses a room. These seem to be compelling personalities; wine is, after all, a business full of windmill-tilting individuals who often manage to be farmers, artists and marketing mavens all at once. But Lukacs makes precious few come alive.

Finally, The Great Wines of America is burdened with a declarative writing style that is so unadorned as to seem almost generic. In particular, Lukacs loves to begin his chapters by stating a single, direct opinion, reminiscent of the young Hemingway's dedication to finding a true sentence he can safely write. Thus we learn that "Grgich Hills Chardonnay is an anomaly," "Larry Mawby is a man on a mission," "The theme of the Calera story is fixation" and more than a half dozen others. While the clarity is admirable and the sentiments perhaps unassailable, I couldn't help hoping for more complexity, more layering, more nuance. Those are the hallmarks of great storytelling and also -- it so happens -- of a great bottle of wine.

Reviewed by Bruce Schoenfeld
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist
Determining the best of anything is generally an exercise in subjectivity, but here Lukacs makes the field broad enough and defends his choices well enough to lend his selection an air of authority. Lukacs aims not just to pick 40 great wines but also to tell the stories of how these wines arose from the creativity, inspiration, and hard work of vintners who have carefully chosen which varieties of grapes thrive best in their vineyards and which techniques yield the finest products from America's unique soils. Most of these vintages come from California, Oregon, and Washington, but a few hail from the East Coast states. Even the Midwest contributes a red wine from Missouri and a champagne from Michigan. Although these wines are not cheap (one rare artisanal red selling for more than $200 per bottle), there are several for less than $20. But the tales Lukacs tells of the men and women who have dedicated their lives to making great wines in America give the book its real substance. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Great Wines of America: The Top Forty Vintners, Vineyards, and Vintages (Hardcover) Paul Lukacs' lusciously readable volume is a tribute to American wine, and its very existence is a tribute to American wine drinkers. As he observes, it's a book that "[o]nly a generation ago...would have been regarded as a joke." [p.13} Of course, a generation ago was the ego-mad, lightly-smoked seventies when anything seemed posssible. In that generation, a few hundred Americans invested their time and their money in making wines and some of those wines ended up among the world's best. Lukacs' book consists of forty portraits that are more about winemakers and winegrowers than about the wines themselves. No matter. Their quixotic vision attached to a modest and very earthy end-a bottle of wine- makes for forty very interesting heroes and heroines. These are the people who invested lives and fortunes in wine at a time when that investment seemed romantic to very few Americans. When they began, they had little reason to believe that great wine was possible and not much reason for thinking that their countrymen would ever care about it if it were. But interesting or even compelling subjects aren't enough to make a good book, and Lukacs's prose is, like a good wine, well balanced and generous. He wears his extensive knowledge of wine graciously and shares it easily. It's no small part of the book's charm that every chapter is loaded with information about the history and culture of wine so that the book ends up as worth studying as well as browsing. Having written a wine book myself, I appreciate the difficulty of the job. Best of all, the individual chapters are an endorsement for the idea that there is serious purpose in simple pleasures. The Great Wines of America belongs on the same shelf, and a bit ahead of, Butler's Lives of the Saints. While Butler's saints are often difficult people, and their virtue something of a rebuke to the believing reader, Lukacs's pioneers are people we could imagine being ourselves. When they succeed, we do too. And besides, between saints and winemakers, who would you rather spend your time with? Comment | (Report this)