First off,
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All this would be obvious to you if you had spent any time studying agriculture, visiting wineries and vineyards, or getting hands-on experience with any aspect of production.
Despite your experience with hobby gardening, you don't know this either and haven't had any experience with the above.
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This is a field in which CA has a major advantage over France. CA's willingness to experiment and deregulate means that any given winery has a much wider gradient of options available to them.
The majority of California wineries produce only a handful of varieties of grapes, so this point is moot.
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In France, the "authorities" can mandate only a certain vine is permitted in a certain region.
False. You can grow whatever vine you like (though certain strains are kept within certain wine producing regions due to better soil/temperature/etc for the grapes), but AoC prevents labeling of certain products outside of a region. A carbonated wine can only be called Champagne if it is from Champagne, etc.
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Furthermore, one of the great advantages the US as a whole and CA in particular has is tremendous diversity of climate. If you knew what you were talking about, you would know that many of the most successful agricultural regions in CA are actually not naturally fertile. Many of these regions have no native water supplies and are wholly reliant on aqueducts to bring water hundreds of miles down from the Sierra Nevadas. Now what this means, and the huge advantage it confers, is that producers can actually create optimal environments on what is in essence a blank slate.
This is a terrible practice and not sustainable.
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If you want objective proof, look at Hollywood. One of Hollywood's enduring strengths as a movie maker is not its community, but the simple fact that within a 500 mile radius of the city is every type of terrain and climate known to man. Films appear shot on site when in reality they merely exploited the contours of the terrain.
Yet the vast majority of films nowadays are shot on location for maximum authenticity.
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Now, if these cheeses can't do the same, then their problems are entirely of their own making.
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Yet they do. Anyone who even remotely considers themselves a foodie will go for the imported cheeses over the American ones. Sure, there are some great creameries stateside (Mt Townsend Creamery, Cypress Grove), but we're crippled in a few ways (ntm that all of the good cheese makers come were trained in Europe), most notably (imo) the ridiculous bans on the usage (and importation) of raw milk goods.
