Wine history by the bottle

ERNIE Farinias sweeps a proprietary arm across the entire floor-to-ceiling tableau of dust-covered wine bottles, pivoting to take in distant precincts of the cellar. “The 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and the present are on these walls,” he says.

In the expansive cellar beneath the UC Davis instructional winery sleep 60,000 bottles of wine, a unique and little-known collection in which, theoretically, a person could taste his or her way through the evolution of California winemaking over the last 70 years.

To walk in the low light and cool temperatures of the place, contemplating its long walls of wine and steeping in its aromas of old wood and fermented grapes, is to sense physically the vastness of the undertaking that has been California wine.

In 1966, Ansel Adams was moved to photograph it. Soon his black-and-white images may be all that remains of the cellar, which probably is in the last years of its life.

From the necks of the unlabeled bottles dangle numbered tags that identify the wines among the 27,000 lots kept here. A bottle pulled at random from one of the earlier precincts of the cellar bears the number 8584. It contains a wine, once white, that has turned an old gold with time.

“Let’s go see what it is,” Farinias says.

Farinias, a research associate at Davis’ Department of Viticulture and Enology, leads the way to a remote corner of the cellar where stands a rusty card-file cabinet. He picks through the contents of one of its drawers until he comes to a card keyed to the number on the bottle.

The card, wine-stained and softened by many thumbings, identifies the wine as a Malvasia, vinted from grapes picked at the university’s Davis vineyard on Sept. 30, 1958. It was made by the late Maynard Amerine, one of the giants of enology who helped turn UC Davis into a world-famous center of wine knowledge.

In the mid-1930s, Amerine and his colleague Albert Winkler set about making wines from various regions of the state to determine what varieties did best where -- a Herculean effort to impart rationality to the chaos that had ruled California winegrowing for most of the last century and a half. Their crusade endured for nearly 50 years, and played a defining role in the establishment of the state’s premier winegrowing regions.

More than anything, says emeritus Professor Vernon Singleton, who is 79, the cellar mirrors “the history of what we as researchers here were trying to contribute as a group.” Singleton’s own signature work -- on the complex chemical changes a wine undergoes as it ages -- was conducted on the cellar’s wines.

In the early days of the cellar, Singleton says, 80% of California wines were of the sweet, fortified variety, such as sherry.

Thus, the collection’s earliest specimens tend to be of that type. The single oldest bottle in the cellar is a fortified 1937 Muscat Hamburg.

The bulk of the wine in the cellar was made over the decades for educational and research purposes by UC Davis faculty and students, mostly from grapes grown in the university’s nearby vineyard.

The university also owns a 40-acre Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard in Oakville in the Napa Valley. The product of that vineyard is worth a lot of money, however, and most of it is sold to commercial wineries, the profits being used to finance research. Each year, however, Farinias makes a barrel of wine from the Oakville site and cellars the bottles here. The practice has endured for four decades, enabling students to taste how an estimable wine from a single place differs from vintage to vintage, and how it changes with age.

Old wines are kept for maturation studies and because they sometimes prove unexpectedly useful to new research projects. However, an estimated 4,000 bottles are added to the cellar each year, and a like amount must be gotten rid of annually. Because the university’s winery is not bonded, most of the withdrawn wine is simply dumped down the drain.

Modernization inevitably has begun seeping into the cellar. Farinias is building a computer database of the collection to replace the ancient card file, a task he expects will require an additional two years to complete.

Shortly thereafter, though, the old cellar will likely be emptied and converted to other use when the enology department, its winery and wines are relocated to the university’s Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, which is slated for completion in 2006.

For now, however, the evocative old place endures, a hidden shrine to California’s transformation into a premiere wine producer, and to those who catalyzed the transformation.