‘Vintage’ Will Profile History of the Grape

One of the most energetic television productions on the history of wine will premiere in Los Angeles on May 13 when the first of 13 episodes of “Vintage: A History of Wine” airs on KCET Channel 28.

The half-hour shows, which will run locally at 5:30 p.m. for 13 consecutive Saturdays, will feature wine author Hugh Johnson as he travels the world, visiting areas where wine originated and where it gained its greatest fame. Locations include Soviet Georgia, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, France, England and California.

The show will describe “how this natural agricultural product pulled itself up by its bootstraps to be a work of art,” Johnson said.

The show was produced jointly by WGBH in Boston and Malone Gill Productions, the company that also produced such public broadcasting masterpieces as “Civilisation” and “Alistair Cooke’s America.”

Johnson, whose “Modern Encyclopedia of Wine” and “World Atlas of Wine” are two of the best-selling books in wine, also has contracted with Simon & Schuster to publish the book that inspired the TV series. The book, out later this year, will sell for $39.95.

Johnson is the author of more than a dozen books on wine as well as books on gardening.

The production is a kind of expanded, video version of the Robert Mondavi Mission, a multimedia show that the Napa Valley winery produced last year and took on the road, showing it to members of the media. The Mondavi exhibit told of the historic, religious and social significance of wine on mankind throughout the centuries, as reflected in art, music and literature.

Television station KQED in San Francisco will air the show at 10:30 a.m. on consecutive Saturdays starting June 17, and KPBS in San Diego will show the program at 6 p.m. on 13 consecutive Sundays starting May 28.

The 1982 vintage of Salon, one of the finest Champagnes in the world, has been released a year earlier than originally scheduled.

The all-Chardonnay Champagne, which comes from a single vineyard, is more accessible than the previous vintage, with excellent fruit and rich body. Compared with the leaner, more tightly structured 1979 Salon (the last vintage released before 1982), the 1982 is more enjoyable today. The 1979 will age better.

Salon sells for about $100 a bottle, the most expensive Champagne on the market today.

The wine cellar from Le St. Germain on Melrose, which closed its doors last November, will be auctioned off May 13 at Christie’s spring auction of fine and rare wines in Chicago.

The restaurant’s cellar had more than 5,000 bottles evenly split between Bordeaux and Burgundy.

A dispute between Pommery Champagne and Pommeraie Vineyards has ended before it ever became interesting.

It all started when Pommery and Greno, the large Champagne producer from France, decided to file a lawsuit against tiny Pommeraie, a Sonoma County winery owned by Curtis Younts and his wife, Judith Johnson, claiming the California winery’s name was causing confusion with its sparkling wine.

The lawsuit filed April 10 in Superior Court in San Francisco asked that Pommeraie stop marketing wine under that name. Pommeraie was founded in 1979.

The Yountses, contacted at the winery, had not heard of the suit, but said that the names are spelled differently and pronounced differently (pom-uh-ree for the French company and pom-uh-ray for the Sonoma winery). Moreover, Pommery makes only Champagne and Pommeraie makes only still wines--Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Muscat.

Further, the Younts wondered how a company whose formal name is Pommery and Greno figured that it could drop the Greno from its name and infringe on its use of the term Pommeraie, which is a French word that means “apple region.” The winery is located in Sebastopol, one of California’s prime apple-growing areas.

In any case, the lawsuit will be dropped, according to a spokesman for the winery. “It should never have been filed in the first place,” said the spokesman. He attributed the filing to an overzealous lawyer working for the French company to protect its name.

Pommeraie “Vineyards,” incidentally, is a stretch of the imagination. The Younts own just over a half acre of vines and they support the winery with their other occupations. Curtis is a chemical engineer specializing in toxic materials; Judith is an environmental chemist.