From wine to riches

Today, I saw Napa Valley, a name and place now synonimous of Waterloo to any Frenchman. Here are grown the grapes and bottled the wines which are now wiping our Bordeaux and Bourgogne from the face of the earth. As with many other things, Americans have a methodical approach to sell and market wines, not so much as a product but as a lifestyle. For exactly the same reasons that would lead somebody to buy a Mustang rather than a Porsche -even if the latter is a much better car - one would buy a Californian wine rather than a French one. Those neatly arranged rows of vines, the orderly succession of wineries and their tasting rooms, the fancy houses and the "wine train" composed of old style dining cars, where guests dine and taste during its slow path among the various "grand" wineries such as Beringer, Mondavi, Gallo, compose a picture perfect of what wine country should be. Restaurants with fancy italian names compete with each other along the road (sometimes four lanes wide) that drives through Napa Valley. It's reminiscent of Bordeaux, plus the restaurant and the train, but so far from the laid back and old world atmosphere of Bourgogne, where are still produced wines that let you not only taste the grape but also the earth from which it was born. Selling the wine on its "cépage" (Pinot, Chardonnay etc) only tells half the story; reading the étiquette on a French bottle will tell you exactly from where the wine comes from but looking at the tag on a bottle of Napa Valley wine may tell you which side of the highway it was grown, unless it is bestowed of fancy names such as "Escapade winery", seen today along the Napa Valley road.
Don't get me wrong, some American wines are truly excellent, notably some from Oregon and North California. Napa and Sonoma Valley wines are aperitive wines best drunk before the meal or by themselves. With food, there is nothing to match a good Bourgogne or Bordeaux.
That said, from the renaissance of wine drinking in the U.S. springs again "artitistic drunkenness", a social genre gone since at least forty years. It was until very recently frowned upon to drink a little too much and artists, actors (and Presidents) were strongly advised to present a lean, clean and sober side of themselves. Now that road trips down the Napa Valley are the stuff of movies and that the Wall Street Journal offers its readers a guide to wine tasting in California, it's once again very fashionable to drink a little too much, à condition to do it while delivering lenghty - and usually murkier by the hour - discourses on the art of wine making. In Bonum Vinum as our Roman ancestors knew already.