More Label Stuff

I saw a wine last night called "Pleasant Hill Red." Now, Pleasant Hill is a town in the San Francisco East Bay, so I kind of expected that 75% of the grapes in the blend would have come from Pleasant Hill ... but there ain't no grapes in Pleasant Hill to speak of.

I asked the winemaker and he referred me to the "back" label which indicated that this wine actually bore a California appellation and that the grapes came from hither and yon (no relation to Sigfried and Roy), i.e. Lodi etc. All the right info was there.

As has been already discussed in the forum, thanks to a bottle's geometry, front and back are relative. A winemaker can have an accurate, conforming, but perhaps graphically not so hot label, call it the "front" label, and have it approved, but then also provide a more appealing "back" label which will be what is displayed in a store. I get that. It's a good idea.

What I don't get is that that other label can include information which is not in accordance with federal regs. This fellow used a geographic indicator in the name of his wine which was not accurate and the wine within was not 75% from that geographic area. By the same token, Fred Franzia could keep making his "Napa" wines and use the same label legerdemain.

What's the point of all the regs if you can crawl through a loophole like that?

[David M. Bueker]

Pleasant Hill is not an AVA, so it can be used (at least that's my understanding). You know where it is, but until you defined its location I would have had no idea & so no loophole was used (at least to me).

I've seen many wines with names that were towns & unless it was a specific AVA name never thought of it as any kind of wine labeling scam.

Pleasant Hill is not an AVA, so it can be used (at least that's my understanding). You know where it is, but until you defined its location I would have had no idea & so no loophole was used (at least to me).

I've seen many wines with names that were towns & unless it was a specific AVA name never thought of it as any kind of wine labeling scam.

Under U.S. regulations an AVA and an Appellation of Origin (AO) are two different animals. For an AO, the rule is:

Appellation of origin is another name for the place in which the dominant grapes used in the wine were grown. It can be the name of a country, state, county or geographic region called a viticultural area or their foreign equivalents.

A country, state or county appellation or their foreign equivalent on the label means that at least 75 percent of the wine is produced from grapes grown in the place named.

An AVA sets an even higher standard:

An American viticultural area is a defined grape-growing region with soil, climate, history and geographic features which set it apart from the surrounding areas.
...
A viticultural area appellation on the label indicates that 85 percent or more of the wine was produced from grapes grown in the named area.

These are quotes from WHAT THE WINE LABEL TELLS YOU on the TTB website.

Under these rules Pleasant Hill is a place and would seem to be an AO (not an AVA) and fall under the 75% rule.

I'm not saying the winemaker is perpertrating a scam, but he may be using a label statement which technically he shouldn't be. Perhaps anything smaller than a county doesn't count? I don't know, but I have seen AO's as small as a stretch a road being used.

More precisely, we have: "The appellation of origin must be a state (or foreign equivalent), multi-state (U.S. wine only), county (or foreign equivalent), multi-county (U.S. wine only) or viticultural area." By my reading that means Pleasant Hill could not be an AO.

See http://www.ttb.gov/appellation/index.shtml

[David M. Bueker]

Think of it this way - if the name of every town and subdivision in the USA was ineligible to be on a wine label unless the grapes came from there then Pride (lots of them), Ravenswood (WV) & Ridge (again lots of them) would be disallowed just to name a very few.

Think of it this way - if the name of every town and subdivision in the USA was ineligible to be on a wine label unless the grapes came from there then Pride (lots of them), Ravenswood (WV) & Ridge (again lots of them) would be disallowed just to name a very few.

That little catch would probably not bother federal regulators one bit, but a little more research has shown, as indicated by others above, that the smallest political subdivision is indeed a county where an AVA is not involved, as the TTB states in Wine Appellations of Origin .