It is probably a form of Bacchic blasphemy to treat wine, the most honored of all beverages, as merely another drink. Yet soda pop—in contrast to the blood of the grape—comes in only about twenty most popular flavors. Beer has four, more or less; whiskey, perhaps six; and the dairy industry now offers us, as beverages, homogenized milk, condensed, evaporated, and powdered milks, buttermilk, skim milk, chocolate milk, and for folks with certain allergies, goat's milk. Why not group wines, too, according to their principal flavors?



To this question vintners usually reply that the products of the world's myriad vineyards cannot be classified as simply as the manufactured uniform flavors of soft drinks. They point out that wines are farm products, as temperamental as the local weather that influences the flavors of their grapes, just as it influences the taste of apples, plums, peaches, and other fruits and vegetables from season to season.

This is why most wines are named for places, some for the specific localities where they are grown and others for the districts where their types originated centuries ago. Other wines display names of the rare, sometimes unpronounceable grape varieties from which they are made, but this, too, involves geography, because the same variety grown in two different localities may produce two quite different wines.

Although there are a few world-traveled experts who know the local geography of many grape-growing regions, and who even possess some knowledge of grape ampelog-raphy, the combination of such wine names—to the average American—is merely euphonious gibberish.

Some travelers often search for an answer to the question often asked by those who return from trips abroad: "Where can I find an American wine like the one I enjoyed in Europe?" The Meursault that was liked in France is grouped with its California relatives, Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, . If Red Bordeaux pleased, so will any well-made Cabernet; and so on.

Some years ago the staff of the Wine Institute, appalled by the confusion then existing, undertook to prepare a set of definitions of the principal California wine types and to write them into a state regulation to guide producers, merchants, and beverage-control officials. The importance of the undertaking can be appreciated when one remembers that California supplies more than four fifths of all wine consumed in the United States.

The staff research into European laws and regulations cast no light. In Europe they found elaborate laws that mainly defined the many hundreds of little viticulture regions and limit vineyard and winery practices, but fail to specify how a wine under a given name shall taste.

They then quizzed California vintners, individually and at industry meetings, on what their labels meant. It was soon learned that one winery's Sauterne matched another winery's Haut Sauterne; that John Doe's Sherry was drier than Richard Roe's "Dry" Sherry; and so on through the entire list of popular types.

Using more wheedling than logic, the researches finally won most leading wineries' agreement to let them spell out measurable steps of sweetness for "dry," "regular," "haut" (sweet), and "chateau" (still sweeter) Semillons, and for "dry," "regular," and "cream" (sweet, "golden," or "mellow") Sherries.

The day arrived for the official state of California hearing on the proposed regulations. Before the time came to discuss Semillon, , the spokesman for a group of wineries made an announcement. "We are artists," he said. "We cannot agree to make our wines all the same. We oppose any definition for Semillons."

Unable to answer that one, the researches contented themselves with establishing the definitions of the three not-too-rigid sweetness levels for Sherries, which scraped through the hearing with only minor opposition.

If you ever have occasion to read the California regulations—which is not recommended for entertainment-please remember that, confusing though they are, no other wine regulations in the world give nearly as much flavor information as these do.

It is unfortunate that Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese wines do not display—as most French and German labels do nowadays—the partially informative legends you read in small type, such as "Red Bordeaux Wine," "White Burgundy Wine," "Semi-dry White Vouvray Wine," and "Rhine Wine."

These represent at least one tiny step toward giving the public a hint of a wine's color and flavor. For if there ever was a product that required lucid descriptions of taste on its labels—and also, for that matter, full "directions for use" on every bottle—that product is wine.