By Neil Crain

I must confess I have been a drinker of California wines for almost 30 years.  That is to say that I have been with Californian wines through good times and bad.  In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Napa Valley wine makers would drag you into their wineries to taste their wine, and some times they had to block the door to keep you from leaving. 

Times have changed.  Californian wine is better and you stand in line to get into some wineries. The wine industry has become big business, generating almost $20 billion a year in California. Vineyard land in Napa sells for more than $150,000 per acre and you have to be a rock star to afford good Californian wine.

Two things brought the rising cost of Californian wine into focus for me.  The first was a recent issue of the Wine Spectator.  In their Cabernet Sauvignon issue, the magazine editors rated 500 Californian Cabernets most from the 2004 vintage.  For these 500 wines the average price was almost $70 and the average rating was less than 87!  That is almost twice the annual subscription price of the magazine for a bottle of wine that is just OK!

The second event was a WineEnabler wine tasting.  We tasted 6 bottles of wine for under $15 and I decided to open a bottle of Cabernet from the cellar.  The wine had been rated 94 points by the Wine Spectator and I had bought it for less than $50.  The wine was good, but showing some fatigue from its time in the bottle.   I would say that today it would get about an 89-90 point rating.  Based on today’s prices that would mean it would sell for at least $100! It was a good bottle, but I will not be replacing it with another from California Cabernet.  Instead I will look for Cab from Washington, Shiraz from Australia or Malbec from Argentina.  There are exceptional wines from these regions and many of them do not cost the equivalent of a days pay.  I will miss my old friend from California, but sometimes friends grow apart.  

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