|
Lower standards for vintage labeling: The
Corporate Wineries are taking one more step in the direction of making
"cookie-cutter" wines that have more sameness (read "dull")
and less variety (read "interest"). If they are successful, it will
become more difficult for the hand-crafted wineries to even exist, let alone
compete. They want to change vintage label requirement so that if a wine claims
it is of a particular vintage, it would be permissible for up to 15% of the
blend to be from another vintage. Currently only 5% of the blend can be from
another vintage.
Personally, if wineries plan to continue "vintage"
dating, they better deliver as advertised, undiluted. If the big producers can't
deliver vintage dated products with flavors that reflect the growing conditions
of ONE year, they can label their wines WITHOUT vintages. Wine Institute Legal
Counsel Wendell Lee apparently thinks the public should not have a say in this
issue. What do you think? More information follows.
Please let Wendell Lee <webmaster@wineinstitute.org>
and Mike Falasco
<mfalasco@wineinstitute.org>
know where YOU stand on this issue.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following article, written by Dan Berger, appeared in the San Francisco
Chronicle on Thursday, July 17, 2003
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trade Group Seeks to Lower Standards on Wine
Vintages
(Dan Berger, Special to the Chronicle)
A controversy over standards on vintage-dated wine is brewing within the wine
community, possibly pitting large producers against small family-owned wineries.
It stems from a Wine Institute memo sent to members recently saying the trade
group supported a proposal to lower the requirement that a vintage-dated wine
contain 95 percent of grapes from the identified year.
Wine Institute's Technical and Public Policy committees unanimously recommended
that the trade organization petition the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade
Bureau to lower the required amount of grapes in a vintage-dated bottle to 85
percent harvested in the named year.
The proposal suits large wineries, allowing them to more easily hit production
targets. For example, if a winery normally needs to produce 4 million cases of
Chardonnay per year and after an abundant harvest has 4.5 million cases, the
winery is now stuck with 500,000 excess cases. Now assume the following year is
a short harvest in which the winery can make only 3.5 million cases of
Chardonnay, not enough to meet expected demands.
If the winery could use 15 percent of the wine from the prior year and keep the
vintage date on the label, it could unload 450,000 cases of the leftover
Chardonnay. The proposal also allows inexpensive wines to be blended to meet a
particular house style rather than suffer the variability that can happen
vintage to vintage.
Smaller wineries say the Institute's proposal would hurt them if only because it
would make their larger competitors' marketing efforts that much easier.
John Williams of Frog's Leap Winery in Rutherford says, "I think it's
irrelevant to me. I have to ask, 'Who's hurt?' I'm always going to make the best
wine I can." Williams says the bill may help move hard-to-sell vintages,
"so you save some of it and blend it out over the next two or three
vintages." Originally, the federal government allowed a 5 percent fudge
factor to accommodate for topping up barrels.
"This is an issue of product integrity," says Patrick Campbell, owner
of Laurel Glen Vineyard in Sonoma Valley, "and I don't think 85 percent
meets the test of product integrity. "If you say (a wine) is from that
vintage, it should be from that vintage. I think 95 percent is a reasonable
accommodation . . . because 5 percent of something else can help a bad vintage
without changing the essential nature of the wine."
In making the proposal the Wine Institute points out that European Union rules
permit wines to be made with 85 percent of grapes from a single harvest.
However, classified growth Bordeaux must be made entirely of wine from the named
vintage.
Pete Downs, vice president of government affairs for Kendall-Jackson Wine
Estates in Santa Rosa, says he didn't think the proposed rule would benefit
consumers, adding that he wanted to hear their arguments before forming a final
opinion. Downs also says the vintage proposal would certainly provide more
stability for the bulk wine market in a short year.
Neither Kendall-Jackson nor Laurel Glen is a member of Wine Institute, but both
Downs and Campbell are on the board of Washington, D.C.-based trade group
WineAmerica.
The Institute proposal will go to the board of directors, which will meet Sept.
9 to discuss whether the proposal should be turned into a formal petition to the
Tax and Trade Bureau. "Wineries need to ruminate about this, and discuss it
at our board meeting. We don't know how our membership feels, and that's why we
are giving an adequate period of time for our members to consider and make their
positions known," says Wendell Lee, legal counsel for the Wine Institute.
"Does this not open other issues to public scrutiny?"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please let Wendell Lee <webmaster@wineinstitute.org>
and Mike Falasco
<mfalasco@wineinstitute.org>
know where YOU stand on this issue.
E-Mail:
beekman@conversent.net
Website Design ©Maron Marketing Consultants, Inc.
|
