Judgment Day

With the solemnity of Supreme Court justices, twelve wine-tasters gathered last week in a private room at the California State Fair in Sacramento to choose the best California wines. They had an anxious audience. Since 1769, when Fra Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan, planted the first wine grapes at the Mission of San Diego, viticulture had grown until it is California's biggest agricultural industry, with an investment of $475 million. Last year, California produced 87% of all the wine drunk in the U.S.

Carefully, three clerks sorted out 474 bottles of wine, stripped them of identi fying labels. Then they were carried into the presence. There the judges examined them for color and clarity, sniffed them for bouquet, rolled them on their tongues to test the body, then spat them out into a tin pail half-filled with sawdust.

Quality. Finally they gave their verdict. Top honors went to a small, little-known winery: Wente Bros. It won gold medals for its Pinot-Chardonnay, sweet sauterne, Sauvignon Blanc, Ugni Blanc and Sweet Semillon. For the brothers, these were heady dividends on their policy of quality rather than quantity.

The winery, founded in 1883 by a German immigrant, Carl Wente, is small by California standards. It has only 500 acres of vineyards run by Carl's sons, Ernest, 58, and Herman, 54, who started learning viticulture almost as soon as they could walk. Their wines (trade names: Wente Bros., Valle de Oro) are not widely known because the brothers sell chiefly to the carriage trade, do little advertising. Their prices are comparatively high because their fine-wine vines yield only 1 1/2 tons of grapes to the acre, v. twelve tons for inferior varieties. For the same reason, their volume is small; last year, they made only 125,000 gallons (50,000 cases). They have only 700,000-gal. storage capacity, compared to 29.8 million for Roma Wine, 22.7 million for Fruit Industries, 22 million for Wine Growers Guild, 19.7 million for Italian Swiss Colony.

Quantity. For the great mass producers, the judges also had kudos: a gold medal for Roma's dry vermouth, a silver medal for Wine Growers Guild's grape brandy, gold medals for Italian Swiss Colony's Pinot Noir and California port. But for 14 different varieties out of the 45 judged, the entries were so poor that no gold medals were awarded. This was thin news for the industry, already harassed by the same drop in sales that had hit liquor companies. With much of last year's record crush still unsold, vintners plan to crush less this year --and hope that the public's palate is not as educated as the wine-tasters'.

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