Reason TV explains how American wines managed to progress from Ripple, Thunderbird, and brown paper bags to beating the French in a famous taste test dramatized in the film Bottle Shock in just twenty years — and why France can’t innovate. In an entertaining and enlightening seven-minute documentary, Reason explores the stultifying effect of French government control over winemaking, including the use of government tasters to approve and reject wines for sale and its diktats on crop choices and methods that keep France’s winemakers straitjacketed. In America, and increasingly around the world, winemakers have the opportunity to take risks, change crops, try new methods, and let the consumer choose what works best:
It’s rather amusing to see the old “wine elves” commercial and James Mason flacking for Thunderbird, a wine usually seen in the better parts of Skid Row. Most people remember Orson Welles for his “we will sell no wine before its time” pitch for Paul Masson wines, a respectable, bulk cheap California wine popular in the 1970s. But the “hamburger nation” had better wine roots than that, even then; it took a long time for it to gain notice, but it eventually broke through. Competition allows for that, and while top-down statist control over the means of production may lock in a certain level of proficiency, it sticks it in amber and assumes that any change will be harmful. As the California wineries have proven repeatedly, innovation is not the enemy of excellence, and failure just means that innovation can be properly directed.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member