Wine Revolution: As Drinkers And Growers, U.S. Declares Independence

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The vineyard at Round Pond Estate in Rutherford, Calif. Napa Valley is just one of wine- rising regions across the nation.

The vineyard at Round Pond Estate in Rutherford, Calif. Napa Valley is just one of wine- expanding regions across the country.

A curious shift has happened in international wine- consuming trends: Americans have overtaken the French and Italians, Europe's classic lovers of the fruits of the vine, as the world's prime wine marketplace.

And it is not just wine consuming that's taken off stateside: U.S. wine production is also on the rise.

Back in the 1970s, there had been about 400 wineries in America. Right now, there are more than seven,000. And they are not just in destinations like Napa, Calif. Walla Walla, Wash. and Willamette Valley, Ore. They're in areas that are significantly less familiar as wine areas : Texas, Ohio, Hawaii and even Alaska.

" I have had some gorgeous American wines, and I do not believe any person really should assume that American wine is automatically inferior to, say, French or Italian," Jancis Robinson, a leading authority on wine, tells Weekend Edition host Scott Simon

Robinson is the co- writer of American Wine: The Greatest Companion to the Wines and Wineries of the United States. The book traces what she calls an American "wine revolution" that is sort of amazing, thinking of it was only twenty years in the past that the industry was feeling threatened by Neo-Prohibitionists.

"But now, wine seems to be this kind of a popular interest with a entire load of men and women notably young people," Robinson says.

That interest has even led to wineries sprouting up suitable in the middle of cities. Just ship in grapes from a nearby vineyard, and you have received a resource for city-dwellers to see how wine is made.

Whilst you may possibly consider your neighborhood wine can't probably be as great as some thing imported, that's not automatically the situation, Robinson says.

She says she's especially a fan of some wines generated around the Finger Lakes in New York. She's also identified a really very good copy of champagne from the Gruet household in New Mexico.

" Very significantly all nations that make wine make some fantastic wine and some terrible wine," says Robinson. "Yes, it can be true that the bulk of the very, incredibly, quite finest wines I have ever had have been from France, but then, France helps make more wine than everyone else most many years."

Since winters can be pretty harsh in the American interior, European grapevines are difficult to increase. But new varieties like Traminette were bred to survive the climate. Then there is the all-American Norton grape, found in Virginia and particularly popular in Missouri vineyards.

"It makes some really serious red wines," Robinson says. "So you can have extremely respectable Missouri Norton that has not an ounce of influence of France or Italy in it."

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