Berger: Are you drinking faux wine?

There are many kinds of wine in this world, and two of the most important categories are:

1. Legitimate wine that displays all the characteristics of the grape, the region, and the vintage.

2. Faux wine, which is manufactured to appeal to people who basically do not like wine, or cannot understand it. Not that it’s all that complicated. Or perhaps they just never took the time to learn about it.

Still, I know a lot of people who will pay outrageous prices for wines that sell for $200 a bottle but still falls into Category B.

One of the cheapest tricks for making faux wine is to make it sweet. Even red wines. And in today’s “better wine through chemistry” world, we have many ways to do this.

We can leave actual sugar in the wines by stopping fermentations early; we can use wine concentrates after fermentation, which adds more sugar; we can add certain legal additives, such as guar gum, that soften the mid-palate of a wine; we can lower the acid as well as raise the pH, making the wine taste sweeter still, and we can make wines with lots of alcohol. High alcohol has become a common tactic over the last 20 years.

If a winemaker uses all of these techniques (and there are others!), the result will be a sweet wine.

But does sweet sell? More than you might imagine.

Meiomi is a brand that was developed a few years ago basically to make sweet pinot noir. The producers say Meiomi is almost all pinot noir, but it has a number of white-wine grapes like riesling and Gewurztraminer added.

And it is sweet. This is not the pinot noir that Miles Raymond of “Sideways” went so nuts for, or the pinot noir that Russian River Valley or Santa Lucia Highlands wineries get $50 a bottle for.

But last year, sales of Meiomi Pinot Noir went well over 500,000 cases. And last week, a multinational corporation acquired Meiomi for $315 million.

I called a friend, winemaker Clark Smith, about my thesis that there are two kinds of wine and that sweetness is the hallmark of one such category. He said he thought there were three kinds of wine, and he used a motion-picture analogy.

“There are the action-adventure wines, where the fruit is left on the vine a long time so they have projectile noses, big harsh tannins intended not to please but to impress, and they are soft and sweet,” Smith said.

“These are impact wines, complete with a ‘wow’ factor. They have completely hijacked the zinfandel category.”

The second kind of wine, he said, was called the Stupid Disney Comedy - “wines that are supposed to make us say, ‘Yummy,’ but they are sort of like cola.”

He said both kinds of wines are going for the cheap trick, sugar. “They do not go for profundity,” he said. “All the good stuff is covered up in the quest for intensity.” Delicacy takes a back seat, if it’s even there at all.

Some of these wines boldly state on their front labels that they are sweet. Others say nothing about the sugar, and hope the wines appeal to those who want sweetness in their red wines and sauvignon blancs.

The third category of wine, he said, was akin to dramas and foreign films. “These are wines of balance and harmony, and do not employ cheap tricks.”

The first two groups of wines, he said, are basically for people who have only been drinking wine for a year or two.

“We all start out with comic books and eventually some of us end up reading” more profound works, he said. “And you have to remember that 95% of all wine is made by 200 or so million-case wineries and the other 5% is made by the other 99% of wineries in the world.

“That’s where the really interesting stuff is,” he said, adding that this has nothing do with price.

“Go to Hong Kong and walk into a high-end bar and you’ll see all these guys sitting there in their thousand-dollar Armani suits drinking Chateau Lafite, and they’re pouring Coca-Cola into it.”

Columnist Matt Kramer of the Wine Spectator magazine had an excellent article on the Meiomi phenomenon last week, in which he wrote, “To paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s immortal observation, nobody ever went broke underestimating the American taste for sweet wines.”

Category A, it is not.

Wine of the Week: 2014 Clos du Gilroy, Monterey County ($20) -- Winemaker Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon has long made a lighter, elegant Grenache with this faux-French fanciful name because it’s close to the town of Gilroy. The almost-rosé wine is made like Beaujolais with pale cherry and berry aromas and no heavy tannins. It’s a light, chill-able red for barbecue meats and even salmon.

Sonoma County resident Dan Berger publishes “Vintage Experiences,” a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com.