There are two kinds of wines, and many varieties of grapes to make them. There is red wine and there is white wine. I grew up in the wine country. Napa County was literally two ridges over, about 15 miles away. I was half a mile from Matanzas Creek Winery, which is famous for its Chardonnay, a well known white wine. I do not like white wine because the cheap stuff is awful. You need to pay over $9-12/btl to get a white wine that is drinkable, and it must be served very cold. White wine is made by removing the grape skins from the juice during a certain stage of the fermentation. You also have to have white wine grapes. You can make various white wines from red grapes using this technique, including Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Grigio. Sauvignon is what you make Cabernet Sauvignon from, the sign of basic competence. Cabernet grapes do not mutate so their wines all taste largely the same, provided they are made correctly. Compare this with Pinot Noir, which mutates like crazy and picks up a lot of variation from local terroir, soil and microclimate, including atmosphere and salt spray, such as is found in the fog off the San Francisco Bay which creeps into the Carneros District just west of Napa and over towards Sonoma north of the salt flats between Hwy 37 and Highway 12. This is important because those tiny crystals of salt make the grapes fruit slightly more concentrated and result in world class award winning Pinot Noir wines. The best looking winery in the district, btw is relatively new, and there to attract tourists. I watched them build it over several years back in the 1990s. Old Wineries, like Chateau Montelena have been around for over a century.
If you like wine, white wine is an expensive taste. If you like wine, drink reds. They have a lot more flavor for your dollar, can be purchased and travel better and offer a far broader temperature range for serving, go with more foods and appetizers, and are often grown in more places, further increasing supply and reducing price. Ergo, if you LIKE wine, red wines give you better flavor for your dollar, and that dollar buys more of it. Cabernets are a sign of competence. Sometimes you find wineries that screw that up, so $3 cabs are to be avoided. A $5 cab is probably just as good as a $12, though feel free to buy both and after a 30 minute rest or aeration, taste test them. I generally recommend this to determine what price you should buy to, ergo if you can taste the difference between a $10 and $12 but not a $12 and $15, buy the $12 and limit yourself appropriately. If you find that $6 and $8 are both fine and can't taste the difference, buy the $6 and be happy. And stock up because not all wines stick around forever in shops, and having bottles in a rack or cellar is a fine investment in stress relief, cheaper than a sports car or a divorce.
Lately, a Lodi Zinfandel (Lodi is to Zinfandel what Carneros is to Pinot) called Victor Vineyards has become available through a local discount grocery chain. It is very good, a $12 wine for $6. Dad and I bought a case. I am enjoying it slowly because it really is very good. To buy an equivalent Chardonnay, I'd need to spend around $16 a bottle. And chill it really well. Chardonnay is a good choice for Thanksgiving, or a roast chicken, even chicken bbq, or pork roast, but Zinfandel is great for streak with pepper, beef stew, bbq ribs, or one of those $15 burgers that a $15 minimum wage will produce.
When I worked in the wine industry in Healdsburg, walking during my lunch break up to the overlook for the Russian River, the Alexander Valley lay to the north and offered some very good Zinfandels, Cabernets, and Chardonnays, the trifecta of critical wines. It turns out the screamy girl from the Jurassic Park movie was from there. The vines are mature, and the old prune plum orchards and walnut orchards were being ripped down and sold off or ground up at the local lumber mill and then replanted with vines of the coming thing. Lots of famous very rich people have homes in that area because it is scenic and peaceful, other than when the fans are turned on because of frost anyway. Those wines earned the area $4 Billion a year. Think about that. Alexander Valley, Napa Valley, and Sonoma Valley WINES made California $4 billion a year. For about 20 years. More areas sell wines so the prices have dropped and the money coming from those 3 valleys has dropped as well, but overall the state is still making big money from wine. When it rains properly, and the aquifers and reservoirs refill, they can ramp up production once more and more Americans can learn the difference between white and red wines and why they are good and how much to spend to satisfy their tastes. Good wine is civilized. California, especially where I grew up, is a lot like Provence, without the muslim terrorists. Speaking Spanish rather than French is also somewhat useful. We have great restaurants, as well as bad ones, but the profitable ones stay open. I miss my home sometimes, particularly the fog, and meandering along in a car between vineyards, probably driving too fast for the speed limit signs but that's what a BMW was for. If you were dumb enough to go fast with a straight axle then you deserved what you got.
It would be nice if the better aspects of my home asserted themselves. Good wines, good food, good weather, enough rain, patience, and the long warm afternoons that ripened grapes before the sudden onset of heavy fog that shut it down before too much sugar developed and ruined them. Its the hot afternoons and fog which are believed to be so critical to really perfect grapes, though science has found a way to water precisely to accomplish this trick without fog. But that's a story for another day. If you desire to visit Provence for food and wine, consider Napa and Sonoma and Healdsburg instead. The people speak English. If you want the architecture of 2000 years in stone, go to Provence.
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