“I didn’t know they made wine in them thar hills!”

“How do you spell appellation?”

Those are some of the comments I get - more frequently than you might think - when I tell people that the Web site - this Web site, for whom I toil - is named what it covers.

It’s annoying, but more important, it’s extremely disappointing, to have to explain over and over what the hell an appellation is, anyway. And why should they care? Take my mother, for goodness sakes…pleeze. Millie has no idea what the heck it is I write about and for whom. Oh, she knows I write about wine, but she doesn’t know what an appellation is, and she doesn’t know how to explain it. My own mother!

Imagine if you will when she has to explain to “the girls” over the “two-bam, three-crack” cacophony of the mah jongg game, what it is her son does for a living, such as it is (which is another story for another time).

But the real story here is my attempt to play off a piece that a colleague – the fine wine editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Jon Bonné – wrote recently.

The piece was a pretext for the interminable debate about whether or not Calistoga should be granted American Viticultural (AVA) status, on which I’ve written numerous articles in these pages over the years, and which, (according to the latest from TTB), “hopefully” will be decided “before the end of the year”. The article was titled, “Overhaul of labeling rules stirs up wine wars”, and it was a lengthy and exhaustive front page treatise on why Americans don’t really give a fig about appellations.

The well-written and researched report backed up Jon’s assertion that appellations are about as high up on most American consumers’ radar as are agate-sized English league cricket scores in the sports pages. And he would be right.

Bonné quoted my friend and flack-extraordinaire Harvey Posert – who these days is the main flack for chief industry agitator little Freddie Franzia (he of Two Buck Chuck) – as saying, “America is a brand country; it’s not terroir country … They don’t think about these things - except the wine writers.” Harvey, bless his heart, would be right.

The point is further hammered home when wine shop owner Gerald Weisl administers this: “Lots of people come in and ask if we have Anderson Valley Cabs and Alexander Valley Pinots - and of course they have them flip-flopped. Both start with A.” Gerry, who is one of my favorite wine characters, bless his heart, would also be right.

Appellation, too, starts with the first letter in the alphabet but it’s not the first thing Americans think of when they think about wine. That’s why we at APPELLATION AMERICA (commit it to memory and your “bookmark” button, already) have as our raison d’être, appellation. We believe in appellation. We breathe appellation, and we pound home appellation everyday in our writings, rantings and ravings on this site (you remember our name, right?).

We do all of the above because we think it essential and necessary that you too will embrace it (and hug us, please). Origin of grapes is essential to why a Cabernet Sauvignon from Paso Robles could be different from say, Napa Valley, if only the winemakers really, really wanted to make them different, pretty, pretty please with a cherry on top.

But it’s like Sisyphus putting his back into that boulder, trying as he might, to push it up a 35 percent grade. No, trying to get our point across - that appellation is where it’s at - is more like getting my aforementioned mom to figure out how to set the clock on her VCR (yup, she still has one).

Forget about how to get her to play the damned thing. Which is like getting the winemakers and their marketing people in their upstairs offices above the cellar to stop telling us they make wines of appellation distinctiveness when most of them smell and taste the same (the wines, not the good, bathed people of the wine industry).

But one day, one day soon, they’ll get it. When those American palates, so new to wine and still in their wine formative years, begin to mature, they’ll get it. They’ll get that terroir and the provenance from where their wines come really can be made to taste unique from where any other wine came.

In our commercialized and commoditized society, the corporate suits use the word “consistency” to describe their products as if that’s a good thing. Consistency is a good thing if you’re making VCRs (do they still make those?) or if you’re producing cars. But wine ain’t those things. Wine comes from the ground and is at the caprice of the weather.

Let the big boys in their corporate suits - who, alas, produce most of our wine now - make a commodity out of it. But you little guys and gals, for real, give us what you really got. Give us wines of difference. Give us, really give us, wines of your appellation.

Maybe then people will stop asking me how to spell ‘appellation’ and won’t confuse it with Appalachian State, the little college that rose up one Saturday and smote the corporate school. And maybe Millie, my mom, will learn how to work her VCR. Not.