You’ve got to admire ambition in winemakers, but there ought to be limits. Last month I attended a seminar at Meadwood resort in Napa Valley. Sitting in the biggest meeting room of the small resort listening to a great roster of heavy hitters in the California wine business speak, I remembered another speech in the same room about eight years ago.

The Napa Valley Grapegrowers sponsored the recent program, but the one that came flashing back in my memory was hosted by the Napa Valley Vintners. The little bit of oratory I remembered wasn’t part of a presentation, per se. It was in the introductory comments by the vintners’ president, or program chairperson, at the time, and I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who that person was.

What I do remember were words to this effect: Welcome to the Napa Valley, the greatest wine region in the world. Not “a great wine region” or “one of the greatest wine regions in the world” but “the greatest wine region in the world.”

At the time I lived in Connecticut and worked in New York, where one heard from New Yorkers on a daily basis that New York was the greatest this or that in the world. And where wine was a truly international business — the home to great wine lists and wine shops, the three leading wine magazines in the country, and the headquarters of many firms importing wine from what I understood to be great wine regions in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany, among others.

So I looked around the room half expecting someone to rebut the assertion of greatest-ness, but no one did. The program started and probably everyone else but me forgot the comment immediately.

How could Napa Valley be THE greatest wine region in the world? Other regions have been making wine much longer — thousands of years longer. Other regions’ wines are more highly sought after in more regions of the world than Napa’s. I think that other regions have more wines selling at higher prices than Napa. Other regions have more wines that age as long or longer than Napa’s.

I believe the assertion was wrong then, and is still wrong today. I love Napa Valley and do think many of its wines are great, but I also think that that attitude hurts Napa more than it helps.

A speaker at the more recent meeting touched on that theme. It was Bill Harlan, founder of Harlan Estate and Bond wineries, and the principal owner of Meadwood. I covered his remarks and those of uber grape grower Andy Beckstoffer in more depth for Wines & Vines.

Harlan pointed out that however successful Napa wines are in the U.S., they still have a way to go in being accepted as great in much of the rest of the world. Napa wines are classified merely as one of many “New World wines” by professional buyers overseas. Partly that’s because Americans have been such good customers that Napa wineries haven’t needed to export to make money. Harlan said he insists on exporting a portion of his output, even though his margin is much lower that way than selling direct to customers on his mailing lists, the waiting lists for which are, presumably, long.

I think that being the greatest is a destination that you may never reach, and if you do it might only be for a season, like an all-time home run champion. Greatness is a goal worth pursuing, because it pushes you on to greater accomplishments. But I think that those who declare themselves the greatest are most likely not the best judges, and they tend to turn the public against themselves.

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