Rolling Back the Years

Ahead of hosting a dinner at the Club this month, wine writer Jon Bonné explains his elation at the evolution of California wine.

Before the airplane had even touched down in California, Jon Bonné was far from rhapsodic about the state’s wine industry, which was about to become the focus of his job as the San Francisco Chronicle’s wine editor, after relocating from New York.

“Too many wines were too alcoholic, too monotonous, too expensive. They were made to impress a handful of critics who liked big, self-important wines, but they had nothing to offer the broader world of wine lovers,” the 43-year-old says. “It wasn’t that California should taste like the Old World, but the style of California wine that had entranced the world in the 1970s had largely fallen away.”

California wine was, in part, a victim of its own success. After the pest phylloxera devastated many of the state’s vines in the 1980s, the vineyards were replanted with young vines that created riper, more opulent wines, which swiftly garnered the approval of numerous critics. The praise swelled as the wines became bigger, jammier and somewhat generic.

In the role he took up in 2006, Bonné familiarized himself with local vintners and vintages and, along the way, made the gratifying discovery that “a new generation of winemakers was starting to emerge, ones who saw California’s future in subtlety and restraint and a deep belief in terroir, rather than the all-power wines of the late ’90s and early 2000s,” he says.

Bonné chronicled the rise of this eclectic band of winemakers in his well-received 2013 book, The New California Wine: A Guide to the Producers and Wines Behind a Revolution in Taste. The comprehensive tome details the state’s lesser-known wine regions, more than 100 trailblazing wine producers and a substantial selection of wines.

One of the more experimental winemakers featured is Abe Schoener, who runs the Scholium Project in Suisun Valley and who will be joining Bonné at an evening of New California wines at the Club this month. According to Bonné, Schoener pushes boundaries and “uses his wines as a way to ask compelling questions about the nature of wine and of expressing place.”

Since the book’s publication, Bonné has seen the New California movement attract a following of East Coast buyers and young consumers. “Millennial wine drinkers form a big part of the support for New California wines, in part because they see a correlation to other wines they love from elsewhere in the world,” he says.

That support has prompted producers to tinker with new styles and tweak the classics, says Bonné, who once again lives in New York, where he is an editor at Punch online magazine and is working on a second book, The New French Wine.

“At the same time, there has been a surprising amount of interest among a much older drinker who remembers what California wine used to be in its classic era, and see in the current wines a continuity with that earlier time,” he says. “They are again finding wines with the qualities they love.”

New California Wine Dinner with Jon Bonné and Abe Schoener

Words: Wendi Onuki