THE VINTAGE YEARS OF MAYNARD AMERINE
By George Medovoy

DAVIS, CALIF. -- This is a retrospective look at the late Dr. Maynard Amerine, who, more than anyone else, was the driving force behind today’s thriving California wine industry.

Back in the 1970’s, I was a feature writer with The Sacramento Union, at the time one of two daily newspapers in California’s capital city of Sacramento.

A newspaper with a very colorful history, the Union had published Mark Twain’s famous letters from the Sandwich Islands. It folded a few years ago, but in its heyday, it was a kind of rough-and-ready, spirited place to work.

One day, the feature editor asked me to head out to the University of California at Davis to interview Amerine, who at the time was chairman of the respected UC Davis Viticulture and Enology Department.

I didn’t have very far to go because Davis is a suburb of Sacramento. (See “Uniquely Davis,” below).

An interview with Amerine, I discovered, was as much a way to understanding not only his pathfinding role, but that of the university itself, in helping California skyrocket to its respected place in winemaking.

To some, Amerine was a kind of Babe Ruth of the California wine industry.

His work made the UC Davis Viticulture and Enology Department one of the most respected in the world. The department attracts students not only from the United States, but from many countries to learn everything there is to know about winemaking.

The man who peered at me from behind a cluttered desk in a small UC Davis office was associated with the campus since January of 1930, when he arrived here as a third-year transfer student from Modesto Junior College in California’s great Central Valley.

Amerine’s father grew peaches in the Modesto area, so Amerine had been close to agriculture while growing up.

Once at UCD, Amerine studied plant physiology as an undergraduate.

“I think I counted pear leaves that spring or the following fall,” he recalled. “I don’t know why pear leaves had to be counted, but they did.”

Amerine completed his studies for a Bachelor of Science degree at UC Berkeley.

“At that time,” he said, “ you could finish at either place. It didn’t make any difference.”

Amerine’s Ph.D. thesis, taken through the UC Berkeley Department of Plant Nutrition, was on photosynthesis and how plants of different colors respond to light and temperature conditions. He remembered it as being “not very brilliant.”

He originally had intended to get his degree at Cornell University, but the cost of travel to and from New York at the time was prohibitive. The country was in the middle of the Depression, and, as Amerine told me, “there just wasn’t that much money floating around, and besides, I already had a scholarship to Berkeley.”

In his early days on the Davis faculty, Amerine would leave Davis with some colleagues at four or five in the morning to collect grapes and come back in the evening to get them into the fermentation vats. He worked long hours, totally absorbed by the challenges.

Amerine’s book, “Wine: An Introduction for Americans,” written with Professor V. L. Singleton, was awarded the Andrea Simon Literary Prize by the Wine and Food Society of London. His book, “Dessert Wines,” written with Professor M. A. Joslyn, received the Diplome d’Honneur de l’Office International de la Vigne et du Vin of France.

Amerine’s two greatest contributions to wine making were in working out the right type of grape for the right growing area, and, with Professor Joslyn, in writing a series of reference works on table wines, dessert wines, and brandy.

The reference works were especially important because during Prohibition, a large gap had been created in wine research in the United States.

Few people could read the research of other lands due to the language barrier.

Amerine had a working knowledge of seven or eight languages, and being able to read this foreign literature and incorporate it into the reference works was a very big contribution.

The UC Davis enology library today is considered one of the best in the world.

Amerine’s work confronted the effects of Prohibition head-on.

“Prohibition,” he told me “was an unmitigated tragedy for the industry.”

Under the Volstead Act, there was a big market for California grapes for making home wines. But the good varieties of grapes before Prohibition all had to be taken out because they wouldn’t ship East. Only thick-skinned varieties -- which do not make good wines -- could stand the 7-14-day journey.

“If you shipped White Riesling or Pinot Noir,” he said, “you’d just have grape juice between here and Boston on the railroad tracks. In many cases, that’s exactly what happened.”

As a result, California vineyards lost many of their good grape varieties, all of their equipment, and their winemakers. Only six wineries operated in California during Prohibition, making sacramental and medicinal wines.

After Prohibition’s repeal, Amerine and colleagues made tours of the Golden State, advising people in the wine industry that they would have to grow the right kind of grapes.

“I remember in Napa,” said Amerine, “one of the winemakers said, ‘No, you’re all wrong. Golden Chasslas makes the greatest white wine ever produced in Napa Valley.’

‘And Alicante Bouschet is absolutely a great variety.’ Well, it’s just not true. He said that because he had a vineyard of Golden Chasslas and Alicante.”

The work of educating the wine industry in California formed what Amerine called the university’s biggest post-Prohibition contribution.

In the 1930’s, it was quite common in California wineries to see open fermentors, open troughs, piles of pomace, fruit flies, and a lack of waste disposal facilities. In 1937, so much distillery waste was poured into the Mokelumne River that the fish were killed off.

Before Amerine, everything was being done on the basis of chance. There was no real system in place. This was true everywhere in the world, as well.

Under Amerine, the university’s work in wine technology stressed cost savings, and this is still true.

“We did have an automation slant form the very start,” Amerine said. “I think, however, that the main emphasis to the automation came from the industry itself. They saw they had to automate. There just wasn’t that much labor around. It was getting more expensive all the time.”

The wineries of the rest of the world learned a great deal from California wineries, according to Amerine.

“They’ve really become sort of imitators of California,” he told me. “We’re lucky, you see. We didn’t have the weight of the ages dragging us down. So, we didn’t have to crush any grapes with our feet.”

Tasting, Amerine said, plays an important role in wine education at UC Davis.

“If the wine doesn’t taste good,” he said, “you’ve made a failure, even though it’s not spoiled. I think that we at UC Davis have probably had as big an imprint on that as any place.”

For years, the university was the dominant factor at wine judgings throughout the state.

The UC Davis department insisted -- often against the wishes of wineries -- that first prize in judging did not necessarily mean getting a gold medal if the wine wasn’t worthy of it.

“We fought very hard for that, starting in ‘38 and ‘39,” he said, “and we did the same thing at the Golden Gate International Exposition in ‘38, when we had the judging there.

“By making that point, I think the industry in the long run was better off. They know when they make good wine today because there’s been somebody from the university who said, “That’s not the best wine. You ought to do better.’”

Back in the 30’s, Amerine and his colleagues would go off on day-long grape-sampling trips up and down the state. These were wonderful times, filled with great food and wine.

California back then was very different -- there were no freeways, no big shopping centers, no fast food. Things were a lot more relaxed.

The itinerary was planned out in advance, including stops for the all-important picnics and a 4 p.m.. sherry stop somewhere along the road.

The picnics were a real spread, including stem glasses for wine. A typical menu might include cold leg of lamb, fresh crab, bread, cheese, and salad greens.

And, of course, plenty of wine!

On one trip to the Redwood Country, the group crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in the early morning mist and spent the day gathering grapes. When it came time for dinner, they decided to stop at a restaurant.

As was usually the case, one of the group would go in and look the place over. If it seemed okay, they would all go in and inquire if the management would mind their bringing in their own wine and cheese. In most cases, there were no objections, and a corkerage fee was paid.

In the course of the interview, I asked Amerine about taste, wondering if one acquires a palate, or if it is a born talent.

In his characteristically matter-of-fact way, Amerine told me: “It’s an acquired thing. You may be a little more sensitive to acid or to camphor smell than somebody else. But it’s pretty rare to find a taste moron or odor moron in the modern world.

“We’ve tested literally thousands and thousands of people here at UCD.

“We had one person who couldn’t taste bitter, one could couldn’t taste acid, or had a very high threshold for acid. And we had one person who had been injured in inhaling smoke and had destroyed the olfactory nerve. That person could barely tell the difference between ammonia and hydrochloric acid.”

But those are three out of thousands.

So, if, then, a palate is acquired, what does it take to be a good wine taster?

“The amateur has the hardest job,” Amerine said, “seeing that there are differences. At first, wines all taste more or less the same to him.

“And every amateur will say, ‘I like this one, and I don’t like that one.’ If you give him the same two wines in another situation, he may say just the opposite. He doesn’t really know why he likes one and not the other.

“That’s the mistake people make when they let amateurs judge wines for them. They can’t get reproducible results. People are always saying, ‘Well, they’re the public, they’re going to drink the wine.’”

But, Amerine suggested, “ the market tone is set by experienced people -- those without enough experience are constantly changing their minds.”

And as far as which wines to judge, judges should give opinions only on wines with which they have had experience, according to Amerine.

“If you’ve never tasted French wine,” he said, “you shouldn’t be judging it. A Frenchman who has never tasted California wine should not be judging our wine. We make them differently than they do French wines. Our wines have different standards. They don’t taste the same, they don’t smell the same. Nor do French wines taste or smell the same as ours.”

To emphasize his point, Amerine drew on one of his various references to music. And it wasn’t by coincidence that he played both the French horn and the piano.

“Just as Beethoven is different from Brahms,” he noted. “As I’ve said many times, if you judge Brahms symphonies based on Beethoven’s symphonic concepts, Brahms is going to come out pretty bad, because he didn’t compose as Beethoven did. Or vice versa.

“So you have to learn the standards of reference for that particular product. It takes time.”

But some people, Amerine added, pick up an incredible amount of wine information just by growing up in families where wine has been taken with meals.

They can tell whether a wine is woody or moldy and when it has any off odors. They also know a water-logged smell (due to a water-logged barrel), and whether the wine is acetic or bacterially spoiled.

During our interview, I was tempted to ask Amerine about his favorite wines. But I learned that he did not believe in advising people on something so subjective as which wine to drink.

As he put it, “One man’s meat is another’s poison. There may be somebody in the world who doesn’t like Brahms -- maybe he prefers Mozart.

“I know people who would probably buy what we said, but that wouldn’t be what they should buy. They should buy the thing they like. It’s their money, their palate.”

Amerine once put this another way, in a short essay on sparkling wines prepared for the Wine and Food Society of San Francisco.

“Which then is the best? The one that sings the sweetest songs for you is the best wine for you. Never give it up, once you have found it. Happy hunting.”

UNIQUELY DAVIS:

THE CENTRAL VALLEY’S QUIRKY LITTLE TOWN

A few years back, the police in this fair town gave someone a citation for snoring too loud.

That news item, reported around the world, has become a kind of watershed event in the collection of quirky firsts for which Davis, a town of 60,000 souls in California’s Central Valley, has become known.

There have been other events, too, which have brought Davis some real screwy publicity in recent years, including the famous toad crossing, which was financed at a cost of $40,000 by the city fathers to provide a crossing tunnel through which our city’s toads might cross over a newly-built stretch of roadway.

Of course, just try to convince the toads to use it!

But all this silliness has given Davis a bad name.

The town, thank goodness, is known for other things, too, including the prestigious University of California campus -- one of nine and the northernmost in the statewide public system.

The sprawling campus divided by the meandering Putah Creek still includes some of the earliest buildings, dating to the time when UC Davis was known as University Farm, a kind of adjunct to UC Berkeley.

Today the campus stands on its own, boasting some of the finest research and academic specialties in the world, from medicine, genetics, law, veterinary medicine, and the arts.

Located about an hour and a half by freeway northeast of San Francisco, Davis is a friendly university town known also for its emphasis on bike power -- there are bike lanes throughout the city’s neighborhoods and along its myriad greenbelts.

In recent years, the town has also had a sometimes vociferous debate, at the city council and in the local press, about controlling growth. At one time, someone suggested building a moat around the town to prevent growth from other communities from spreading into town.

But to Davisites, their town, with all its quirks, is still a special place with a sense of community.