Make American wine grape again

Watching the World Cup over the past few weeks, I realised football in the USA will always look a little weird to Europeans. Certainly, to the British fan’s eye, there’s something not quite right about those stadiums, which, on the telly at least, somehow seem more like enormous malls or food courts than conventional sports arenas, with endless milling in the concourses, TV screens the size of an Olympic pool, and mammoth spaces for trucks to enter where the behind-the-goal seating should be. Then there’s that insistence on calling it soccer, the quarter-time hydration breaks, and a nagging feeling that, however popular the game becomes there, and however good its players already are, football will never have the central cultural role it plays in Europe, South America and Africa.

There are parallels here with many Europeans’ attitudes to American wine. Despite the fact that it is very obviously a massively important wine-producing nation (the fourth largest in the world, led only by the traditional big three of Italy, France and Spain, and with wine produced in all 50 states) as well as being, no less strikingly, the largest consumer of wine by some distance (Americans drank 31.9 million hectolitres of wine in 2025, which amounts to more than 15% of the entire global wine supply), American still struggles to find a place in the affections of most European wine people know. I don’t want to overstate this; it’s not like they’re going around loudly dissing the wines of California, Oregon or New York State. But I can’t think of a single wine-loving friend or acquaintance on this side of the Pond who buys and drinks American wines more than occasionally, let alone ranks American wines among their favourites.

This isn’t just snobbery or chauvinism, I don’t think, although it might once have been. This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Judgement of Paris, a legendary event in the wine world, in which the English wine merchant Steven Spurrier, got a group of eminent French critics to taste, blind, a selection of the best of California against the very best of Bordeaux and Burgundy. A pair of Californian wines came out on top, the story made it into Time magazine (and much later a book and a couple of Hollywood films), and Californian vintners began to shed any sense of inferiority.

In the years since, California, which accounts for between 80 and 85% of all American wine, has, like everywhere else in the wine world, been through various fads and fashions. But today’s scene – as beautifully described and contextualised in American wine writer Elaine Chukan Brown’s The Wines of California (published last year as part of the excellent Classic Wine Library series) – is filled with brilliant, often surprising wines, with a real sense of American place, from some of the most thoughtful, creative and adventurous winemakers around.

The problem is that not enough of that good stuff reaches us here, and when it does it’s often very often expensive. Instead, what we get too often is American wine’s dark side. There is bad wine made in every country in the world, much of it (most even) in Europe’s classic regions. But when American wine is bad, it’s bad in a very specific way, and one that fits all too well with a smug European stereotype of America and Americans: syrupy, super-rich, loudly OTT, brashly full of alcohol.

In my view, no other wine-producing country is more misrepresented by what’s on offer in mainstream UK retail than the US. But you can get a glimpse of the varied brilliance it’s capable of in the ripe, rich yet luminously balanced The Society’s Exhibition Santa Barbara County Chardonnay, California 2022 (£17, thewinesociety.com); the gossamer delicate light red Arnot Roberts El Dorado Gamay, Sierra Foothills, California 2023 (£36.10, robersonwine.com); the flowing brambly intensity of the old-vine zinfandel-based Ridge Lytton Springs Dry Creek Valley, California 2022 (from £52, thewinesociety.com; fulhamwinecompany.co.uk); and the immaculately succulent, deluxe cherries of Walter Scott Sojeau Vineyard Willamette Valley Eola-Amity Hills, Oregon 2021 (£65.22, justerinis.com).