The Power of the Wines You Were Brought Up With
The wines of my earliest memories were the ones my family made. My father would store cases of Mirassou wines under the first tract house we lived in in San Jose to keep them cool, and it was in one of these empty case boxes that my cat, Snowball, would have her kittens. This was when I was 11, and I vividly remember still, crawling on my belly 6 or 7 times to that bloody, mewling box to bring them all out to the light.
We were past the days of Chenin Blanc, one of the big sellers for Mirassou and for much of the California wine industry in the ‘60s, but Monterey Riesling (an off-dry Johannesberg Riesling from our vineyards in Soledad) was a big thing in the mid-’70s, Petite Rosé (pink wine from Petite Sirah) too. Those wines have long given up the ghost but marked many wine drinkers that grew up on my family’s stuff.
The wine press as we know it today didn’t exist then, and the thought of giving any of these wines scores, or really even talking about their comparative quality was for another less fun, future time. These wines were for drinking and carried the sum total of the family’s winemaking knowledge like one holds a street map of his town in his bones: you know what you need to know.
These wines spoke of a place and a culture; they were not “perfect” but they were better than that…they were true.
How to make those wines, the dirt they came from, the seasonal weather, the vagaries of that place, were long ago baked into the family’s wines, just as the oxidation of the Jura and the Brett of Tuscany are cultural artifacts of scores of grandfathers before you were him. What might be considered flaws under the academic aegis of UC Davis are the imprimaturs of authentic expression for those who grew up in the same village, bringing wine to the table as we would sparkling water.
These were the wines of our nascence and our growing up. They were the wines that were the backbone of our village, of our vinous identity; they expressed the truth as far as we knew it, and when we knew it, the only truth that truly concerned us.
I’ve had many wines from Europe, tasting blind with fellow California winemakers that failed the “fault” test, but that were stunningly delicious and of exemplary individuality. These wines spoke of a place and a culture; they were not “perfect” but they were better than that…they were true.