Under a bright California sun, I’m sipping a crisp, juicy, salty-tasting white, a vermentino with a very seductive texture. On the Italian island of Sardinia, you’d drink wines made from this often-underrated grape with sea urchin or spit-roasted suckling pig on a perfect beach. You get the idea.
But I’m savoring a new Napa Valley version, the second vintage from well-known winemaker Steve Matthiasson. It’s one of several whites in his lineup, which also includes a light, pretty scheurebe, a grape native to Germany.
Although the most celebrated wines in the valley are still the super-pricey cabernets and cabernet blends you know and maybe love, during several recent visits I’ve encountered dozens of surprising new whites. While some, such as the just-released inaugural chenin blancs from Larkmead and Palisades Canyon, hearken back to Napa’s past before cabernet took over in the 1980s and ‘90s, this white trend started about seven years ago with the valley’s ever-growing number of sophisticated, expensive sauvignon blancs.
Napa’s new love affair is part of the wider global momentum for whites in regions famous for grand reds, including France’s Rhône Valley, Italy’s Mount Etna and many others.
Why? Well, they’re what so many of us want to drink!
A 2023 report from the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OUV), an intergovernmental institution that deals with wine, announced that global thirst for whites and rosés now surpasses demand for reds. And in the U.S., market-research firm NIQ has reported that over the four weeks ended May 18 alone, whites accounted for 50.5 percent of wine consumption, compared with red at 43.1 percent and rosé at 6.1 percent.
Put the shift down to changing taste fashions, the younger generation and climate change. As Florence Quiot, co-president of the Côtes du Rhône section of Rhône Valley trade association Inter Rhône, puts it, “Currently white wines are very well-adapted to the modern taste and way of drinking.”
In other words: While big, bold, tannin-rich reds are great with steak, today people dine on more diverse fare and aim for healthier diets, so they look for fresher, lighter and easier wines to match.
The switch in France has been particularly dramatic. In 2000 reds accounted for 56 percent of wine production. Twenty-one years later that number had dipped to 33 percent, while whites rose from 36 percent of production in 2000 to 50 percent in 2021.
A recent tasting of Rhône whites in New York showed just how diverse they are—from fresh, lively and lean to rich, powerful and textured. About 12 percent of the valley’s wine production is white, up from 7 percent in 2015, but Inter Rhône has stated that the region intends to increase production significantly by the end of the decade.
In Bordeaux’s Médoc—home to first growths such as Château Lafite Rothschild—Château Brane Cantenac released its first white with the 2019 vintage, while Château Margaux added a second white, the 2022 Pavillon Blanc Second Vin, earlier this year. Château Loudenne is planting viognier, chenin blanc and sauvignon gris. Proposed new regulations aim to permit other varieties including albariño, voltis, liliorila and floréal.
In Italy, on Mt. Etna, there were 28 percent more bianco bottlings in 2022 than a year earlier, according to the Etna wine consortium, and the number of biancos is on track to eventually equal that of its rich, expressive rossos.
Global warming is partly responsible. Most whites are picked early, before the wildfires threaten, and even if grapes are slightly underripe they can still make delicious wines. Etna’s main white grape, carricante, is more resilient and adaptable to extreme weather than the region’s red grapes and keeps its freshness even in super-hot vintages.
You might think China, where red wine has always been king, would be the holdout. Not so fast, says Lenz Moser, an Austrian winemaker who’s spent 20 years there working with Changyu, the country’s biggest wine producer, and makes his own white from cabernet. “A white wine boom started two years ago,” he says. “And when the Chinese jump on something, they really jump.”
