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WINEMAKING he says, the concept of dry wine emerged, but as a description of how the wine felt in the mouth, not a measure of sugar. Elevated sugar and alcohol were by far the surest means for keeping wine tasty until Pasteur—and likely many decades after. The premium on sweetness survived long after the discovery of microbes. Hanni and others are fond of showing off wine lists from fancy restaurants and editions of the Larousse Gas- tronomique indicating that sweet, white wines outpriced the First Growths of Bordeaux well into the 20th century. It is also clear that sweet wines were not relegated to the dessert course but were seen as viable options on the dinner table. Furthermore, many wines we think of today as perfectly dry were in fact decid- edly sweet some decades back, including all Amarone, Montra- chet and nearly all Champagnes. After World War II, the tilt toward dry wines was steady and dramatic across the globe. The full explanation for going dry is still a work in progress, but some factors are clear. At the Sweet Wine Symposium, Davis wine historian Jim Lapsley argued that most California wine was pretty dicey stuff until the 1960s, at which point dry wine production quickly improved, while sweet wines remained backward in technology and quality. Hanni em- phasizes a shift in what wine writers, educators and other "ex- perts" had to say: Sweet wines were recast as "dessert" wines, and drinking sweet at any other time was transformed from the height of luxury to the very depths of winohood. Something big happened, both in Europe and the United States. Hanni loves to point out that the wine-drinking decline in France and Italy maps nicely with the turn from sweet to dry wines, with younger drinkers moving from wine to Coke, Budweiser and cocktails. In any case, the story now is that well-made sweet wines are a niche product, selling well in tasting rooms but far off the mainstream radar, and bulk sweet wines—like those 16 million cases of White Zinfandel sold every year—hardly count as wine at all for the "serious" element. Intolerant tales Along with all the crunched numbers from his survey, Hanni has some great anecdotes these days. One involves the time he was at dinner at a very famous Napa restaurant with Lissa Doumani, co- chef-owner of Terra in St. Helena, daughter of Napa wine pioneer "I was told I must not have enough taste buds, or I was from the South and used to Coca-Cola." —Harvey Posert, wine marketer Carl Doumani, and clearly a woman who knows her way around a wine bottle. As the meal unfolded, Doumani found the officially matched wines downright painful and asked Hanni to find some- thing she'd like on the wine list. The server insisted to everyone that the prescribed choices were simply the best matches, at one point saying to Hanni, "If you knew anything about wine…" A fruity rosé was finally secured. Another story involves Harvey Posert, a near-legendary Napa PR guy with more than four decades of experience in the industry. Read it, Search it, Share it, Download it! (866) 453-9701 winesandvines-digital.com 58 Wines & Vines MARCH 201 1