There's a Slate.com article supporting French wines. Many of the writer's excellent points cannot be intelligently disputed, but some statements are pretty ridiculous:
1. "France continues to churn out most of the planet's truly great wines." Come again? I haven't counted, but I see hundreds of non-Gallic wines that win 95+ scores.
2. "No other place comes close to matching France for sheer number of benchmark wines." Given France's longer history of fine winemaking (dating back to the Romans, and possibly earlier), one might expect this to be true. But is the number of great wines the best measure of wine greatness for a nation? How many 95-100 point French wines have you enjoyed in the last year? I submit that a country's wine greatness is more about producing, across the board, bottles of wine that are well-made, delightful to drink, and can be had at a fair price. From long personal experience, I can tell you that France is not so great by this standard. Oregon and Washington, in contrast, simply blow France away in that regard, with the huge numbers of their very good wines, mostly at relatively low prices, and with tremendous variety as well.
3. "There is no other bubbly that can rival a premium Champagne for complexity and pleasure." Wrong again. Try Roederer (admittedly a French family) in CA's Anderson Valley, or Argyle in Dundee. Roederer's vintage sparklers are awe-inspiring, truly celestial in their perfection.
4. "You will meet scores of people who were once hooked on Napa cabernets or Australian shirazes but who have now partially or completely sworn them off in favor of Bordeaux, the Rhône, and other things French."
For every person who moves towards French wines (and many do it, I suspect, are motivated more from wanting to appear sophisticated than through a true understanding of wine), there must be three who discover the pleasures of a well-made wine from somewhere else. Try an old-vine Garnacha from Borsao, or a reserve Malbec from Argentina, or any of a number of great everyday wines from Italy.
I find too many French wines poorly made. They are too thin, too tart, too something, and stories abound of horrifying winemaking conditions there, borne of centuries of arrogance or apathy, that only now are being improved as a result of losing market share to the better winemaking of other countries. Too often I have been disappointed by the so-called "great wines" of France, and by lesser French wines as well. Although many French wines are good, I tend to distrust most French wines now. I'm sorry that the country is wounding itself eneologically; we can all grieve for that. But for me, the fruits of the "terroir" are simply better elsewhere.
[Mike Steinberger is Slate's wine columnist. He can be reached at slatewine@gmail.com. His book, Au Revoir to All That, is about the rise, fall, and future of French cuisine.]
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