Wine Industry

With the declining value of the U.S. dollar and increasing wine sales overseas, Charles Shaw wine, an American favorite, may seem in some places more like "One-Buck Chuck." ? That's because the low value of the dollar is starting to turn California wines into bargains abroad. ? 2007 was a vintage year for wine exports, which grew by almost 9% to a record $951 million, the Wine Institute, the industry's main trade group, said Thursday. California wineries make 95% of the U.S. wine sold abroad. ?

When Liu Lan entertains clients at her Shanghai cosmetics shop, she pulls out a jug of Gallo's Carlo Rossi red wine. "The taste is fresh and it's easy to get used to," said Liu, 32, who thinks the big bottle "looks special, different from other wines." The cosmetics shop in crowded Shanghai represents just how much has changed since Ernest and Julio Gallo founded E.& J. Gallo Winery in an industrial section of rural Modesto after Prohibition ended in 1933. With annual sales of $3.

IN a small, windowless laboratory -- far removed from romantic vineyard vistas -- scientists at the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) are attempting what most wine lovers would say is impossible. They are developing a test for terroir, the seemingly indescribable site-specific character attributed to fine wines (and named for the French word for soil).

CALLUSED palms and bandaged fingers; broken fingernails stained black with dirt -- Hollywood actor and director Emilio Estevez proudly shows off his vineyard worker hands as he walks the vine rows. Four years ago, Estevez planted this half-acre Pinot Noir vineyard around his Malibu home.

NAPA Valley lost a charismatic leader when Robert Mondavi died on Friday. Has the Napa Valley that fostered such a maverick passed as well? Mondavi's Napa was the Wild West of winemaking. For the dozen wineries in operation in 1966, costs were low, there was room to grow and mistakes weren't fatal. The challenge was to persuade Americans to drink wine at all. Today, high costs have created a region dominated by small producers.

AS HE stands before his Sensory Evaluation of Wine class at UC Davis Extension, John Buechsenstein, winemaker, professor and commercial vineyard location scout, sticks his nose into the tilted wine glass and breathes in deeply. Ah, Sauvignon Blanc: the chameleon of the wine world. Buechsenstein's nose knows. As an instructor at Davis and at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena, Buechsenstein teaches students how to sniff out wine's variations.

Vineyard manager Steve Thomas grasps the trunk of a zinfandel vine, a redwood of the vineyard, gnarled with age and planted in the days when irrigation meant a barrel of water on a horse-drawn cart. The workhorses and carts are long gone. But these old zin vines at Kunde Estate in Sonoma County still get their water the old-fashioned way, from rain, dew and a deep root system.

Last year, my French friend Claude told me there were wine caves you could drive through in Moldova that had extraordinary wine collections. I like wine. I like travel. I decided to see for myself. Why not? Change is good. Few people, myself included, know much about Moldova, and fewer still have visited here. This former Soviet republic is sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine.

There's a ghost in my wine. I haven't always believed in ghosts. That's a recent development. In the spring, my wife, Jenn, and I headed to the Napa Valley for a seance, of sorts -- an attempt to summon the spirits of winemaking past. I'm not talking about ghouls, goblins or apparitions in flowing gowns. I'm talking about the ghost wineries that dot the valleys, mountains and benchlands of America's most famous winemaking region. So what exactly is a ghost winery?

Don Cohorst has acres of vineyards, a stash of small-batch vintages and a barn he wants to turn into a cozy tasting room for wine-sipping visitors. He's convinced he can ply those wine lovers with samples of his Syrah and Muscat Canelli and sell them single bottles for as much as $20 -- more than twice the price he now gets from the small retailers who sell his wine.