IT IS WITH some regret that I have reached the conclusion I must stop carping about white wines from California. I will always regard their plumpness, their butteriness, their fruitiness as less satisfactory (in fact far less satisfactory) than the sharpness and acidity of counterparts from Europe and the Mediterranean basin generally. But the truth is that it is unfair to compare, in effect, apples to oranges, and to be impatient with California vintners for failing to make their oranges more like apples – or is that apples more like oranges?

The veil was lifted from my eyes in the course of a recent conversation with a local vintner in which he described California's soil as "loamy." Loam, of course, is black earth – the rich stuff in which anything and everything will grow luxuriantly. It is garden soil – and California is a garden, with plenty of the warmth, water, and sunshine most gardeners love.

The catch, at least for those of us who like our white wines to be flinty, citrusy, granitic, and austere, is that California is too kindly an environment. When you hear someone talk about a "fat" chardonnay, you know the grapes were grown here – were in effect given too much of everything, like spoiled children. The great white wines of the Old World, by contrast, are grown in chilly climates (as in Burgundy and Champagne) or dry ones (Sardinia, home of the first-rate vermentino grape), or in relatively inhospitable soils. The northeastern coast of Sardinia, heart of vermentino production, is bleakly granitic. Champagne's soil is chalky; that of the upper Loire – point of origin of Sancerre, an incomparable wine made from sauvignon blanc – is dominated by chalky marl and hard limestone whose flintiness recurs in the grapes grown from it. There is something to be said for leanness and struggle.

Yet these dour combinations of climate and soil simply do not exist in our own wine country, at least not in what we think of as wine country. Anyway, as the vintner pointed out, California wines should not really be made and judged as replicas of Old World wines but on their own terms, reflecting local conditions and, for that matter, tastes. Even I do not dislike big, buttery, toasty California whites; I just don't like them as much as I like European and Mediterranean whites.

In the past 15 years or so, wine makers interested in French styles have migrated north, to the cooler climes and volcanic soils of Oregon and Washington. But, having just returned from Tahoe, I am reminded that California too has chilly climates and granitic and volcanic soils. Alturas, anyone?