A Wine With Great LegsThe high price...

A Wine With Great Legs

The high price of California wine grapes is sending domestic negociants , those folks who buy, blend and bottle wines for distribution under their own labels, looking abroad--to Yugoslavia, southern France and Chile, among other wine-producing countries. And one has dressed its offerings behind a pretty fanciful name.

Marilyn Merlot .

The full-bodied, red varietal backing up the equally full-bodied image of Hollywood’s former sex goddess originally came from Napa Valley, and the 1,500 cases of the 1985 vintage sold out at $13 a bottle, reports the Wine Spectator. The 5,000 cases of the 1987 edition, however, sport a $9-a-bottle price tag with Merlot grown in the Aude region of southern France. “There just weren’t good-quality grapes at reasonable prices in California,” a Marilyn Merlot distributor told the periodical.

Other California labels are tapping Yugoslav Cabernet Sauvignon (Canterbury, $5.50), and Cannon Wines of San Francisco is blending wines mainly from the Aude with California to smooth out differences in French vintages.

Maybe French negociants will counter with a California wine, properly aged, and labeled Brigitte Bordeaux . . . .

Destructive Harvests

One hope for market incentives to save dwindling tropical forests dimmed recently with the release of a report by two American researchers.

Environmentalists had long advocated wild and cultivated fruit harvesting as a forest industry that would preserve the trees and still provide jobs.

Unfortunately, as Alwyn H. Gentry and Rodolfo Vasquez of the Missouri Botanical Garden found in Peruvian forests, while fruit trees grown for local consumption are tended and preserved, fruits taken from the wild for export are often harvested by the cheapest, most destructive means--simply felling the trees.

“It’s easier to cut the trees down than it is to climb them,” Gentry told a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “When they get that harvest mentality, they wipe out the forests.”

Shopping for Responsibility

The 1990 edition of “Shopping for a Better World,” the Council on Economic Priorities’ guide to “socially responsible supermarket shopping,” is out and about.

It comes in vest-pocket and standard paperback sizes, and rates 168 companies and their more than 1,800 products on everything from environmental responsibility to race relations.

Getting the best marks are companies including Avon, Celestial Seasonings, 3M, Kellogg, Procter & Gamble, Polaroid, Eastman Kodak and Sara Lee.

On the less happy end of the scale are Kimberly Clark, Reynolds Metals, Castle & Cooke and others.

The council also reports that more companies provided more detailed information this year and had improved ratings. The large guide is published by Ballantine Books, the compact version by the council (800-822-6435).