Terroir, or not Terroir, that is the question

Folks out in the Tracy area (slogan, "The Place to Live Your Future") have reason to celebrate.  After a five-year battle, they’ve been granted the latest AVA – American Viticultural Area – for the Tracy Hills AVA.  Such a privilege allows vineyards from that area to, theoretically, earn more for their grapes, since producers can use the appellation on their labels instead of simply "California".  The TTB grants AVA status to a region when it proves it has a unique and identifiable characteristic worthy of recognition.

I have to send kudos to the mastermind behind this effort – Jeff Brown of Tulip Hill Winery, who spear-headed and funded the entire effort.  The AVA contains four vineyards as well as Tulip Hill, and is the prospective home of its second winery – Windmill Ridge Winery.

And the small size of this appellation brings up some interesting questions about AVAs…

Just what IS the minimal requirement for an AVA?
Interestingly, 15 minutes of Google research on AVA requirements produced a long list of hoops you need to jump through before applying for an AVA.  But the none of them mentioned the most fundamental requirement (at least, to my humble mind) – there appears to be no requirement that the defined area produce a wine of a distinctive nature, different from other wines made from identical grape varieties.  If any of you know otherwise, please post a comment! 

Perhaps this is due to our national inability to grasp the idea of terroir that the French seem to be born with – the notion that a wine reflects not just the grape or the winemaker’s craft, but a unique sense of place.  But unless an AVA can boast a unique characteristic to its wines, what good, really, is its marketing value?  Why put it on the label?  Sadly, the current approach seems to be, at best, of little value and at worst downright deceptive.  Despite my opinion on this topic, new AVAs keep popping up…

How many AVAs are there in the US? 
This seems to be a moving target.  Wikipedia indicates either 235 or 173 AVAs (depending on which page you look at), 97 of which are in CA.   The Winepros website lists 162 AVAs as of January, 2006 (though it seems we’ve added 11 new ones in 2006, making the 173 number in Wikipedia seem likely).  But this is picking nits – whether 162, 173 or 235, my next question is still most relevant…

At what point are there so many AVAs they no longer bring the marketing value intended?
At this year’s conference for the Society of Wine Educators, a talk was given about what it took to create a new AVA.  One of the points of the conversation was that most wine drinking Americans know two or three wine-growing areas:

1. Napa Valley
2. California
3. Sonoma Valley

And if these are the only three areas most wine drinkers can identify, will they REALLY pay a premium for a wine from the Tracy Hills Appellation, or any of the other 159 appellations they DON’T know?

I am MOST interested in hearing your comments on this topic!

Happy Thanksgiving! 
Dave Chambers, Wine Merchant
(I hesitated to include such a temporal reference in a posting that lives in digital perpetuity, but decided it better to include this short apology to Googlers who discover this posting in the coming weeks/months.)