I wasn’t going to post until this Friday but I had the delightful experience of spending 4 hours yesterday at Oakland Airport only to have Jet Blue announce that all flights into New York were being canceled for the rest of the day due to a monster storm. So here I am back at home, trying to rebook a flight. I picked up our local newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, and came across a story whose headline caught my eye: “Beers with more alcohol, flavor gain market share.” Basically, it said that bland beers like Budweiser and Coors Light are flat in sales, while so-called “extreme beers” are “grabbing a growing market share in the U.S…even at prices ranging from $4 to more than $100 a bottle.” The article quoted the CEO of Bend, Oregon-based Deschutes Brewery as saying, “We want somebody to take a drink, stop, look at the glass and say, ‘What was that?’”

Extreme beer. Hmm. Even the Napa Register is reporting on it. A leading beer magazine, Beer Advocate, defines extreme beer this way:

“Often style defying – from beers with alcohol contents that rival spirits, beers aged in bourbon barrels, beers made with enough hops to rip your tongue from your mouth, beers from yore and beers employing exotic ingredients that make one ponder – there’s a bold new concept of brewing in America, and it’s called Extreme Beer.”

Does this remind you of anything? It’s the exact equivalent of the same phenomenon in wine: superripe, high-alcohol, highly-oaked wines of the kind often referred to as Parkeresque.

We have entered, it seems to me, an era in which American consumers are looking for extremes of everything: extreme sports, extreme violence in movies, extreme culinary tastes, extreme vacations. It makes you wonder why. The Biblical and Greek injunction toward moderation in all things has tilted in favor of immoderateness in our new Age of Anxiety, and it seems to be driven by younger people, not the Boomers. Could it be because people under the age of 35 or so no longer believe in the future, and so feel they must cram as much living into the now as they can

P.S. Please check out my new post at Wine Enthusiast.

Interesting story in the Times about a brouhaha in St.-Emilion, where the decennial reclassification of Chateaux is in total disarray, the result of the hidebound bureaucracy that governs French wine law.

The French penchant for classifying wineries and regions has long been part of the allure of their wines. When I first learned about the Classification of 1855, I practically memorized the entire chart, and tore through Eddie Penning-Rowsell’s “The Wines of Bordeaux” in an effort to understand why Lafite was a First and Cos d’Estournel, just across the street, wasn’t.

Every once in a while, somebody tries to classify California wines. In the Eighties, somebody named Roy Andries De Groot proposed one. A couple years ago, Alder, at Vinography, reported on a fellow who classified California Cabernets and Bordeaux blends by winery. More recently, Lettie Teague, over at Food & Wine, wrote a thoughtful analysis and concluded (a little whimsically, I thought) that the best classification scheme for California would apply, not to wineries or vineyards, but to winemakers.

Let’s face it, there never will be an official classification in California of anything to do with wine. Nobody would tolerate it and nobody would accept it even if there was one. Can you imagine the fallout if, say, Harlan was declassified from a First to a Second (for whatever reason)? It would be the lawyers’ full employment act.

Anyway, I’m off to New York for the week for our annual summer meeting at Wine Enthusiast. We’ll be planning the 2009 editorial calendar, determining the nominees for our Wine Star Awards, touring the magazine’s brand new office building, and, oh yes, eating a lot of great food and drinking quantities of great wine!

It’s a good opportunity to see my fellow editors and catch up on what’s happening in their territories abroad. My favorite part of the week is when we all gather to pitch our nominations for the awards. There are 11 in all, including categories such as Wine Region of the Year, Winemaker of the Year, American Winery of the Year and Lifetime Achievement. Everybody usually has someone in mind for each category, and we get to defend our nominees and try to convince a majority to support us.

It’s also interesting to brainstorm the articles. Looking ahead is always precarious, and seems especially so now. Who knows what will happen in the year 2009? Earth-shattering events could overshadow the next trend in mixed drinks, and are likely to. The U.S. will have a new President (yay!) and the economy could seriously tank.

However, we have to soldier on, and the likelihood is that Americans will continue to enjoy their alcoholic beverages and there will be news to report and plenty of wines to review.

So it’s on to the The Big Apple for me. I’ll be back next Friday, Aug. 1.

P.S. Check out my new Wine Enthusiast blog, available Monday Aug. 28.

Heidi is the wife of Bo Barrett, Chateau Montelena’s winemaker; he’s the son of the winery’s founder, James Barrett, who just sold Montelena to Cos d’Estournel. I got to know Heidi pretty well after including her in New Classic Winemakers of California. We chatted right after the sale.

SH: We knew the family was interested in selling, but Cos d’Estournel was a real surprise.
HB: I love it, that no one had any inkling at all. Isn’t that the best part?

SH: Why did Mr. Barrett want to sell?
HB: Well, he’s 81, and wants to retire. He just doesn’t feel up to running the winery anymore, and it couldn’t pass to the second generation.

SH: Why not?
HB: The taxes would have killed everybody, and we [Bo and Heidi] couldn’t afford to buy him out.

SH: The sales price is said to have been $110 million.
HB: That’s wrong, just incorrect. And no one’s going to talk about it, because it’s nobody’s business. Probably some of the people who put in offers early on are guessing.

SH: Like who?
HB: I can’t say. But we refused them all.

SH: Why?
HB: They weren’t the right person. We were really looking for a steward of the property. They [Cos d’Estournel] understand quality, and they won’t lose the integrity of the chateau. They realize what a jewel it is.

SH: It would have been terrible if some big corporation bought it.
HB: I agree, and I think most people in the valley would have hated to see that happen.

SH: Well, whatever the price was, now you’re all rich.
HB: Well, we’re not, because we don’t own the winery. It’s owned by my father-in-law and Bo’s mom. Bo’s just been an employee all these years. People assume that [we’re rich] but they’re just wrong. It’s like, when Screaming Eagle was sold, people thought I got millions, but I got nothing. I was just getting a paycheck.

SH: What will Bo do?
HB: He’ll stay on, for now; it’s all being decided. He’s definitely interested in staying on, but in more of an executive position, which might involve him going to France and working with their winemakers. And we’re working on something together.

SH: You and Bo?
HB: Yes. We bought a property in Calistoga and we’ll start planting next year. It’s a project we’ll do that we’re jokingly calling über-Cab.

SH: What’s new at your personal brand, La Sirena?
HB: I’m trying to establish that as the new Screaming Eagle. I see a little opening there, with the changes they’re making in quantity and wine style. They’re leaving that space wide open and I want to grab it.

SH: How would you describe that style?
HB: Very layered, very pure concentration of flavors. Other than that, La Sirena is doing really well. The Cabernet is at French Laundry, and so is the Barrett Syrah.

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I taste alone, but I’ve been on enough panels to last a lifetime. I was reminded of all this today when I went to the New York Times’ Wines of the Times, where their tasting panel went through a bunch of California Sauvignon Blancs. I tend to focus on Eric Asimov’s blog, The Pour, and I tend to forget they also have their panel in New York.

Here in sunny California, the best known panels are the big wine competitions, like the Orange County Fair’s and the San Francisco Chronicle’s. These are where hundreds of wines pass through the palates of many judges over the course of several days. Gradually, the losers are eliminated and the winners get their golds, double golds and so forth.

I don’t trust competitions like these, and I think it’s silly when wineries brag about having won a medal in them. How can a big group of people judge a wine? Committees lack a unifying vision; opposite views cancel each other out, politics intrude, there’s no consistency. Personality comes into play. The average usually wins out over the unique. Wine competitions represent the triumph of the banal.

Another problem with big wine competitions — and it’s one they’re reluctant to share with the public — is that the better wineries refuse to submit bottles for them. Why should they? They have little to gain, and a lot to lose. If you sift through all the entries in the big competitions, you tend to find supermarket wines, or wines from modest wineries looking for anything they can find to promote themselves. When you’re some struggling little operation out in the boonies, I guess it’s better to have a bronze medal from the Topeka State Fair than nothing at all.

I realize consumers are swayed by these things. Lots of tasting rooms are literally plastered with medals and ribbons they’ve won over the years, and it must be impressive for unawares tourists to see them. But I think insiders understand that the sum total of all those ribbons means little.

The most consistent wine reviews must come from single tasters. Nothing has to be debated. You don’t have to add 2 and 8 for a total of 10, then divide it in half and come up with a five. It’s either 2, or it’s 8. Consumers who feel the need for guidance can learn which reviewers they like and trust and which to be wary of. And along these lines, I stumbled across a funny post on a blog called DenoPhile. Here it is:

Why Heimoff Pisses me OFF!

Okay…I have had it with his constant slamming of Zins with high alchohol content. Every single review he writes goes something like this:

87 pts: While this wine exhibits blah, blah, blah…it is far too high in alchohol…blah, blah, blah and is too hot on the palate…blah, blah, stinkin BLAH!

I suggest that they assign him to the North Pole after global warming and he can write about ice wine and lower alchohol whites;-)

[This is Steve again] Please check out our Editors Blogs at Wine Enthusiast’s UnReserved.

When I was a kid my mom read the women’s magazines, like Ladies Home Journal. I have no idea what kinds of articles they contained because they weren’t my idea of recreational reading (I preferred Spiderman and the Hulk comics), but I can’t imagine there was much about wine. Maybe something about making a martini for your hubby (and don’t forget the olive).

How times have changed. I was down at 24 Hour Fitness the other day and needed something to read on the exercycle. The only thing around was a magazine, More. I quickly divined that it’s aimed at women of a certain age (the cover story was “Fabulous Over 40: You’ve Never Been Sexier”).

Oh, well, I thought. Better than nothing. I skimmed through (the story on Ellen Barkin was pretty cool.) But what really struck me was how wine was portrayed. Here are a few examples.

Item: The illustration for an article by a guy singing the praises of his wife depicted a man toasting a wine bottle whose label bears a cameo of her.

Item: In one story, they profiled the owner of a Beverly Hills nail salon and asked her what her “essentials” were. Answer: “A little glass of red wine at the end of the day helps me say the day is done — let’s get up and do it again tomorrow.”

Item: They had an article on a Pasadena woman who opened a wine bar, Vertical, at the age of 51. It detailed the hassles she went through at first, and how the wine bar today is “packed even on weeknights.”

The analytical part of me just loves deciphering the semiotics of things like this. The overall message is that wine is and should be part of a modern woman’s life. And not just any woman, but aspirational, with-it women on the move who aim to accomplish something. The nail salon lady seemed sassy and filled with celebration, the implication being that wine helps nurture those desirable qualities.

The message of the wine bar woman was equally powerful. She was the Hollywood producer of such movies as the three Terminator flicks, and the fact that she could do anything that she wanted in life, and chose to start a wine bar, testifies to wine’s chicness, excitement factor and desirability — not to mention that you can make money at it.

But it was that image of the man toasting his wife’s image on the wine bottle label that really got me. Equating your wife with inanimate objects is a high-risk thing that can cause serious backlash. Would they have put her face on, say, a bottle of beer or a prime rib of beef? I don’t think so. (Maybe on a box of chocolates.) But to equate your wife with a bottle of wine confers upon wine a feeling of warmth, trust, intimacy, safety, and even love. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.