Jason Wilson hits South Jersey wine trail

HERE'S THE acid test: If I popped open a bottle of wine from New Jersey, would you recoil in horror? Would you brace yourself for a cloyingly sweet swallow of a "wine" made from blueberry or cranberry or peach? Would you make a joke, say, about whether we were drinking Snooki's Reserve?

Or would you open your mind? Would you swirl, sniff, and sip - a cabernet franc from Blue Anchor or a merlot from Pilesgrove Township or an unoaked chardonnay from Mullica Hill?

This was the choice I faced last week as I tasted my way through the South Jersey wine trail. My guide for some of this tour was my father, who lives in Mickleton and who has become something of an advocate for the local wine. For the past year or so, he and my mother have been spending weekend afternoons tasting wines with names like Shamong Red (Valenzano Winery) or Crimson Sky (Sharrott Winery) or Battleship Red (Auburn Road).

This has been a surprise, since until recently I knew my father mainly as an unrepentant wine snob who veered more toward Brunello or Rioja or Napa Valley.

"You'd be surprised!" he said. "New Jersey wine isn't as bad as you'd think."

"Really?" I said. "How does it compare to the $100 bottle of Ribera del Duero we had the last time I was over?"

"It's all context, Jason," he said. "Your mom and I have a very pleasant time at these little wineries. The trick is to find a wine that tastes good once you take it away from the tasting room and open it at home."

"Have you found one of those yet?"

"Uh, we're still looking."

Loco or locavore?

As someone who has covered wine and spirits for a number of years, I run into a lot of advocates of the emerging "local wine movement." Wine is produced in all 50 states. A lot of people are very excited by this fact.

They extol the virtues of wine from outside the big producing states like California, Oregon and Washington. They see promise in wines from Pennsylvania, from North Carolina, from Indiana, from Arizona. They speak of grapes like Norton and Concord and Niagara.

They see themselves as evangelicals, envisioning a distant future when these regions might be mentioned in the same breath as Bordeaux or Barolo or even the Yakima Valley in Washington or New York's Finger Lakes.

I am not one of these people.