What’s the ultimate sign that an emerging American wine region has finally broken out of obscurity? An influx of winemakers from Napa or Sonoma eager to try their hand in the area? Showing up regularly on grocery-store shelves in other wine regions? Getting featured as one of the best wine regions you’ve never heard of in Vogue magazine? Having wines that regularly score more than 90 points in a major wine publication? The establishment of subappellations and stricter geographic labelling requirements by the government?
Many such milestones measure the path towards a wine region’s greater prominence, but marking the inflection point of a wine region’s ascendancy seems possible only in retrospect. Nonetheless, I recently found myself trying to gauge the trajectory of Colorado’s wine industry, which has recently experienced every single one of these milestones, on my way to judge that state’s annual Governor’s Cup wine competition along with some very high-profile fellow judges.
While it beats digging ditches (and garners little sympathy from those who have yet to experience the sensation of tasting their 150th wine of the day), wine judging is, in fact, fairly thankless work. Which is why the world’s largest wine competitions spend a good portion of their budgets compensating the judges who spend multiple days in windowless rooms courting splitting headaches while sorting through 100 glasses of mostly mediocre Syrah.
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This article is my monthly column at JancisRobinson.Com, Alder on America, and is available only to subscribers of her web site. If you’re not familiar with the site, I urge you to give it a try. It’s only £8.50 a month or £85 per year ($11/mo or $111 a year for you Americans) and well worth the cost, especially considering you basically get free, searchable access to the Oxford Companion to Wine ($65) and the World Atlas of Wine ($50) as part of the subscription costs. Click here to sign up.
Image of the Grand Valley AVA courtesy of the Colorado Wine Board.
