So the white wine list is coming soon, but I wanted to point out that the Chronicle has put out its list of the year’s top 100 wines. This list was put together from the weekly reviews of varietals and wine regions put out every Friday in the Wine section. Just like every other list out there of the top 10, 25, 100, or 4,387 top wines of the year, I’ve had, like, two of these, although I’ve seen a number of them spoken highly of around the web and among well-educated wine drinkers I’ve talked to. Still, I’m really not in a position to judge the quality of the wines that were selected, which is fine…except one thing: why is this list restricted to California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho (?) wines only?

Backtracking for a second, let me say that I think that it’s great that the Chronicle has an entire section in its paper for wine. It makes sense, too, because the Bay Area is one of the great food-centric cultures in the country. It’s the intersection of a lot of exciting and creative cuisine, much of which comes from the blending of different regional culinary styles to create something that is different and yet wholly representative of its surroundings. I’m thinking here of places like Manresa, Slanted Door, Betelnut, Ame, etc. The Bay is the epicenter for a lot of global ideas and experimentation in the way food is prepared and presented. The Chronicle food critics, for their part, seem to have embraced this concept. And yet the one word that springs to mind when running through the Chronicle’s wine list is…provincial.

Not to get all Kermit Lynch on you guys, but these days, it is fairly difficult to find good bargains on quality wines coming from the west coast. Decent zin starts at around $15-20, syrah $20-30, pinot in the $40s and cab…oy. Don’t go there. On the Chronicle’s list, only 3 of the 22 pinots they offer come in below $30, and only 2 of the 8 cabs. The high prices aren’t really the fault of the vintners, either. Farmers have to sell their grapes at a certain price threshhold to make enough money back to survive. That cost gets taken on by the wineries, who then have to pass most of it on to the consumer. A lot of the sticker price on California and Oregon wine comes down to land, and how expensive that land is in the prime U.S. winemaking regions: Napa, Sonoma, Santa Ynez, Willamette Valley, etc. The price of that land means the wine that comes off of it is gonna be expensive, whether you’re growing your own grapes or buying them from someone else.

So California and its neighbor states aren’t good places to find bargain wines. Where are the good QPR wines? France, with its huge grape glut, has a lot of affordable wine coming into the US every year. Rieslings from the Mosel and Austria can be terrific bargains. If you can figure out some of the grapes they use, Italian wines can be great and cheap. There’s quality wine at good prices coming out of Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, not to mention New York, Greece, and Slovenia. So why is the Chronicle, which has witnessed the growth and support of a very healthy global cuisine among its readership, ignore all this great, affordable wine? How about some spicy, earthy mourvedre from the Rhone, or a clean and balanced pinot blanc from Alto Adige? Again, I’m not saying that the wines that were chosen weren’t worthy. I’d love to have a case (or two) of each of them in my closet cellar. But I don’t think that having a bottle of Edna Valley chardonnay or Ravenswood zinfandel sitting on every table at Firefly and Limon is the wave of the future, either.