Ag at Large: Wine sophisticates need endless facts

Unless you've grown up in the wine business, or been educated in viticulture or enology you might want to reconsider if you're thinking about becoming a wine connoisseur. A recent study by researchers at the University of California's Giannini Foundation specifies some of the elements necessary to determine the price of choice California wines from the state's major production areas.

And while authors Oh Sang Kwon, Hyunok Lee and Daniel Sumner evaluate the production areas, the varieties and the vintages, they conclude that many factors they didn't consider can affect the reputation of a given wine and the price consumers will pay for it.

Nevertheless, a wannabe wine aficionado can count on a cabernet sauvignon from Rutherford in the Napa Valley or a pinot noir from the Paso Robles area as top dollar commodities. Their values will be firm even if they were produced last year, and absolutely solid if they are six years old.

But things get complicated after that. The authors of the report identify 63 wine appellations (locations) in California. They chart the effect of location on price for such Northern California appellations as Fiddletown, Mount Veeder, Shenandoah Valley and Clear Lake for Cabernet and Chardonnay wines.

All wines produced in California are required to have the appellation shown on the label, and that location must be a region drawn with official boundaries. An appellation might cover a single county, or part of it, or several counties, even the catch-all California designation for grapes grown outside some of the more tightly drawn locations.

The appellation indicates only the location where the wine's grapes were grown, unlike Europe, where it connotes additional information about variety or production methods.

Additionally, appellations can be based on American Viticulture Areas (AVA), which can be as small as a few acres. California's first AVA was designated in 1980, and since then more than 100 have been specified, most of them in the north and Central Coastal areas, stretching from Mendocino County to Santa Barbara County.

The budding wine expert must know the effect of the "estate bottled" designation. It means that the grapes were grown only in the named appellation on land controlled by the bottling winery and made in one continuous process at the site of the winery.

The only relief for the neophyte expert regards the term "reserve." It can be disregarded, for it has no legal content in the United States.

The authors of the university report have mixed all these terms and specifications together to determine how they affect the price of a bottle of wine. They state that most statistical analysis on wine prices employs dummy variables to represent categories (or clusters), and estimates their effects using least squares.

So maybe viticulture and enology degrees are not adequate; competence in math or economics may be necessary as well.

If the background or available time is not adequate to allow a full investigation of the nuances of California wines, perhaps you can select a different California commodity to discuss at the next social occasion, say carrots, sugar beets, garlic or horseradish. Better make sure the occasion is not a wine tasting.

Don Curlee operates his own public relations firm specializing in agriculture issues. His column appears in The Sentinel every Thursday.