Sipping wine doesn't suffuse the drinker with an understanding of the underlying science. Nor does not drinking wine mean that I don't understand the science behind it any more than my vegetarianism means I don't understand husbandry.
I'll answer your questions straight up, though:
First, supreme "freshness", in the the context of cheese and wine, isn't relevant because France has no comparative advantage when it comes to freshness versus California because CA has its own vineyards and free-range cattle.
Insofar as freshness is relevant in products that are both the product of fermentation, that is something the markets can decide - whether it's winos or connoisseurs. If freshness really makes a difference, and the end product of non-certified farms is deficient in that regards, then the connoisseurs will follow the quality. The best wineries will have the best reputation and and the worst firms will have the worst. Why is more regulation necessary?
Second, your view that "freshness" is the foremost consideration in wineries planting their own vineyards disregards the fact that really it isn't. The point of wineries planting their own vineyards is that they can control every aspect of the wine production process. Temperature, water, breed, vine age - all those interact with the post-harvest choices of zymurgy in subtle ways. And the very point of independent wineries is that they should be free to decide exactly what their label stands for.
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. In France, the "authorities" can mandate only a certain vine is permitted in a certain region.
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.
Mns wrote:
I suppose that you'd be right if there was a place with the exact same traditions, climate, elevation, amount of sun, equipment, and water as the places I listed, but I don't think there's anything like that.
Now this is where you make the jump from being merely snobbish to 100% wrong.
If you knew anything about agriculture you would know that crops often perform best in regions to which they are not native. This is the principle behind invasive species, of course, and it's true in agriculture too. Irish potatoes. American cotton. Florida oranges. Washington apples. The list goes on. So your ignorant belief that all species, domesticated or otherwise, are optimally adapted to their native environment is just that - ignorant.
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.
Again, the US is big and diverse. You can go look at a map, or travel (a little or a lot) and see the tremendous diversity and gradual contours of the American environment. In CA alone, the terrain goes from below sea level in the basin of the Central Valley to two miles above it barely two hours' drive away. Temperatures at any given time of year vary from below freezing at the peaks of the Sierras to never dipping below 50 degrees in Death Valley. Between those extremes there is every permutation you can imagine.
This is all the more true because France is a temperate region and all plants grown there are suited for the happy mediums that every permutation of exists here in the US.
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.
As for "traditions", you're using the word as a sort of voodoo.
The thing about "tradition" is that it is a living and evolving thing. As I pointed out, many of these "traditions" are themselves alien innovations made possible by outside influence and change. As I pointed out with hamburgers, many cultural innovations reach their zenith in the hands of some other culture. No one would seriously argue that people from Hamburg make a better hamburger than In-n-Out any more than anyone would seriously argue people from Italy make a better pair of jeans than Levi Strauss.
Honoring a tradition is all well and good. But there is a difference between honoring a tradition and treating it like a "living extinct" species that can't continue to get by in the wild because it's no longer viable, so it has to be hobbled along with artificial insemination and antibiotic regimens. Traditions evolve and many traditions only fully realize their potential after they've left home.
