North American Wines
I have a terrible confession to make: I have never had a North American wine!
I have tried wines from all over the world, both old world and new world, from Spain, France, New Zealand, Chile, Bulgaria, you name it…. I’ve even had Chinese wine. But I’ve never, ever tried a bottle from the U.S.
I think I’ve been living in Spain for too long. It’s so hard here to find anything other than Spanish wines that we rarely drink anything else. You can, of course, go to wine shops which will have a handful of foreign wines, mostly French, a couple of Argentinean / Chilean wines and maybe a New Zealand or Australian bottle or two and that’s about it. If the wine shop owner is really adventurous there just might even be a solitary South African bottle somewhere in the shop. In addition to the lack of selection, there’s the problem of price: these wines won’t be cheap.
I’ve been living in Spain for 10 years now and before then I lived in Hong Kong where we hardly ever drank wine. The taxes on wine in Hong Kong were so high that even a mediocre wine could easily double or triple the cost of a meal. The duties on wine have recently been removed in Hong Kong so my friends still living there might be able to indulge more often now but that certainly wasn’t the case before. Practically the only times we had wine was when we went to Macau, then a Portuguese territory, had some vinho verde and brought a few bottles back to Hong Kong in our luggage.
Even before that, living in Ireland and the UK, North American wines hadn’t really made a name for themselves. Those of us who were more adventurous and dared try anything from the New World didn’t even think of North America. It has come as quite a surprise to me since joining Excel Wines to learn how vibrant the U.S. wine industry is, the range of wines being produced, the large number of wine-producing areas and the ratings that a lot of these wines are receiving, and not just from U.S. wine critics.
I suppose I’m going to have to remedy this dreadful gap in my wine education one of these days but I’m not sure how. If anybody knows anywhere to get some North American wine in the Bilbao area, please let me know….
Ane Miren