in wine today

Gallo Galore!

By Georges Meekers

Local importers and merchants stock a wine selection with a preponderance of worldwide-distributed brands. Strangely enough, wines produced by E .& J. Gallo in Central Valley, California, the biggest single wine operation on earth, are hard to find in Malta.

Gallo is not only the world’s biggest wine producer, but lays claim to around 60 per cent of the total Californian harvest, a total storage capacity of 12.5 million hl, more than 9000 acres of vines, and, a production of almost 100 million cases.

The firm is also very much a self-sufficient enterprise owning most of its vineyards, its own sales and international distribution force, a research department, its print shop, transport company and, at the beginning of the bottling line, its own glass factory, which is the biggest factory west of the Mississippi.

For long the E. & J. Gallo name remained reserved for the more expensive premium wines, while cheap wines of every kind were being sold under other brand names such as Carlo Rossi and Livingston Cellars.

Apparently, the newer wines labelled Gallo Sonoma and many other brands, including Turning Leaf, Gossamer Bay and major export success Garnet Point are good at their level. Most likely these mid-priced and heavily advertised wines are the ones that will sooner or later wash ashore in Malta.

More recently, Gallo has moved towards developing new, small volume brands with no association with the Gallo name. Among the latest additions are Marcelina Vineyards for Napa Valley wines, Indigo Hills for Mendocino wines, Anapamu for Central Coast wines, and Zabaco for Sonoma County wines.

It's fashionable to sneer at the world's largest winery, and then again the Gallo’s are a bizarre and at times toffee-nosed breed.

Would you believe the Gallo’s have tried prohibiting Chianti Classico producers from using their age-old symbol of the black cockerel, or Gallo Nero, and that they are pitching River Crest, their latest cheap Californian generic white and red, as the opportunity for 'disillusioned' beer and spirit consumers to move up to wine. Undeterred by its youth, E. & J. Gallo is at pains to stress the so-called historical depth of the establishment. Little does it matter that the Gallo wineries resemble oil refineries and that most vineyards have been physically contoured by modern bulldozers, Gallo’s very own of course.