Fourteen Mountains, Zero Personality
TASTING NOTES: “Crisp and clean, this wine delivers mouth watering flavors of white peach and green apple. Serve with your favorite cheeses and appetizers as well as spicy Asian fare or chicken chili.” (AbV 13%, pH 3.2)
VARIETALS: 100% Sauvignon Blanc
BARRELS: Aged 6 months in neutral French oak
PAIRS WITH: Serve with your favorite cheeses and appetizers as well as spicy Asian fare or chicken chili.
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Pine Mountain — the vineyard source for this wine, sitting at 2,300 feet above sea level in the Pine Mountain-Cloverdale Peak AVA.
There are at least fourteen Pine Mountains in the United States. Maybe more, depending on how generously you define “mountain.” There’s one in Georgia, one in Kentucky, one in Wisconsin. Colorado has a Pine Mountain. So does California, obviously, and Virginia, and Connecticut. At some point this stops being a place name and starts being a personality type — the guy at the party who, when asked where he’s from, says “oh, you know, just… around.” Pine. Mountain. Very evocative. Extremely specific. Thanks, early American settlers.
The naming of American geographical features is a genuinely chaotic enterprise. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names — yes, that’s a real federal agency, established in 1890 — exists specifically because the country had gotten into such a spectacular mess of duplicate and contradictory place names that the government had to step in. At one point, the Postal Service and the War Department couldn’t agree on how to spell “Gettysburg.” The Board has since standardized hundreds of thousands of names and officially banned apostrophes from nearly all U.S. geographic features in 1890, which is why it’s Pikes Peak and not Pike’s Peak and why cartographers have been quietly furious for over a century.
