Cabernet Franc 2006, Veritas
10th November 2008
In the past I have poked fun at the European systems for classifying wines. As these offer no guarantee of quality, I wondered whether anyone really benefited from them and their accompanying bureaucracies (apart from the bureaucrats, obviously). I contrasted this system with the more relaxed approach of the New World, which tends to leave the description of wines, and their reputations, to the market.
The contrast was something of an exaggeration. In point of fact, the US does have a wine appellation system. The so-called American Viticultural Areas, or AVAs, are administered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, part of the US Treasury Department. The chances are you have never heard of them, and there is no reason why you should, because like all such systems, the AVA classifications are of no use at all to drinkers of wine.
It is not just that AVAs tell you nothing about how good a wine is. They can’t even be relied upon to tell you where a wine is from. An AVA merely names a location from which at least 85% of the grapes used to make a wine must have been grown. So there are AVAs for places that contain no wineries. There are AVAs that overlap. And there are AVA boundaries that do not correspond to anything in physical or political geography.
At the last count there were 190 AVAs, the smallest being the 62-acre Cole Ranch AVA in Mendocino County, California, the largest the Ohio River Valley AVA, covering 26,000 square miles across four states. Somewhere between these two extremes of size lies Virginia’s Monticello AVA, named after the estate of Thomas Jefferson, the United States’ first serious wine buff. This AVA lies just to the east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, across Albemarle, Nelson, Greene and Orange Counties. Veritas is one of its newer wineries, having been in business since 2002.
The name comes from Pliny the Elder’s adage in vino veritas, “in wine there is truth”. The old boy simply meant that people reveal themselves by what they say and do when drunk, but I fear the Veritas winery may have attached some profounder significance to his words. Well, no matter. Their Cabernet Franc is very good and well worth seeking out, especially if you are wearying of corpulent fruit bombs from California and South Australia. It weighs in at a well-balanced 12%, with a nose of earth and cloves and a palate of violets and strawberry jam. It costs $18 in the US. I do not know if Veritas wines are yet available in the UK, but I gather they were received enthusiastically at a London wine expo last year. All I can is suggest is that British readers interrogate their nearest wine merchant. But for heaven’s sake, don’t try scoring points by talking about AVAs. No one will have a clue what you’re talking about.
