Jaina Shah, left, and Anusha Manjunath drink wine at the bar at Printers Row Wine Bar and Shop on June 16, 2024, in Chicago. Earlier this year, winemaker Patrick Cappiello of Monte Rio Cellars, a small producer of wines from Lodi and Mendocino in California, made a“American wineries are struggling right now,” he said.
“If you look at U.S. wine consumption, the vast majority of what Americans consume is, in fact, domestic wine,” explains winemaker Nova Cadamatre, a Master of Wine and owner of the wine brands Trestle Thirty One in the Finger Lakes region of New York and Fiadh Ruadh in Napa. After all, imported wine comprises just 30% of the U.S. wine market by volume.
“There’s absolutely a bias towards European wines,” says Lee Gusman, the wine director at Printers Row Wine Shop, describing the preferences of American distributors, buyers and sommeliers who funnel wines to end consumers. “There’s a wonderful irreverence here unlike anything in Europe, a distinctly American spirit of discovery that can make our wines really fun and adventurous, sometimes weird and unexpected too,” he says.Unfortunately, “many of America’s most phenomenal wines are simply not making it into the hands of consumers,” says Grant Barnow, the wine director at The Oakville Grill & Cellar in Fulton Market.
In the meantime, it’s never been a better time to drink American wines, if only for the sheer pleasure and discovery of doing so. “Anyone who’s a die-hard white Burgundy fan would love our chardonnay,” Cadamatre says of this supple but briskly balanced wine sourced from Seneca Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region. “It’s an amazing value for the quality compared to what you’re getting from Burgundy,” she says.