…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
– John Dunne

The shocking news, revealed on its own front page, that the San Francisco Chronicle might shut down offers a frightening glimpse into a future in which nobody is reporting the news, because there’s nowhere for it to be reported.

I’ve always been a big newspaper fan. When I was a kid in New York my parents subscribed to three newspapers: the Post (today infamously owned by News Corp. but back then a liberal paper), the Hearst-owned Journal-American (which ceased publication in 1966) and the New York Times (which is rumored to be edging toward bankruptcy). Ever since I’ve lived in California I’ve subscribed to the Chronicle. It’s become part of my morning ritual, as near and dear to me as that cup of coffee.

The Chronicle, catering to its wine-interested readers, had one of the first and best wine sections of any American newspaper. They did a great job over the years, hiring wine-smart writers and, occasionally, leading trends. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of readers learned about wines, wineries, and wine and food pairing, and about the issues impacting the wine industry, from its pages. That’s far more than any wine magazine ever had or ever will.

If the Chron goes under, it will not be good news to California’s wineries or wine lovers. (Hearst Corp., the owner, is floating trial balloons to see if readers are willing to pay more money to subscribe.) Local wineries will have lost a major platform from which to speak to the public. The letters to the wine editor and the paper’s wine blog will similarly disappear. And there will be fewer working journalists to tell the stories, big and little, that are so important to be told. As the Chronicle’s conservative political columnist (with whom I seldom agree about anything), Debra J. Saunders, writes, “If newspapers die, reliable information dries up.” Blogs, as much as I like them, simply do not have the resources to unearth reliable information the way a working reporter can.

Wine is a conversation between the people who make and sell it and the people who buy it. Like art, music, literature and politics, wine is a part of the culture, where everyone has a point of view, and feels a shared stake in the outcome. It’s not at all like widgits, where you may use an item every day but feel utterly no connection to it or the people who made it. The Chronicle offers readers a window into the personalities and concepts of the wine industry, and reminds us that the men and women who make our local wines are our friends and neighbors. Ripple effects: a more informed, caring consumer demands better wines, and a wine industry driven by competition improves its best practices. So the Chronicle has had a strong impact on the California wine industry in ways not so obvious.

It is so disheartening that the Chronicle is teetering on the edge. The Bay Area, the portal to Northern California’s wine industry, may no longer hear its authoritative and collective voice, may no longer communicate among ourselves on a day to day basis. Are we now supposed to Twitter? If the Chron dies, that voice will have been strangled, and the wine industry, for whom the bell in this nasty recession already is tolling, will be that much more diminished.

P.S.Breaking news

No new wine excise tax in California. Wine Institute is reporting via email the new state budget agreement “did not include the proposed 640% excise tax increase on wine…”.

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Thursday March 26, War Memorial Opera House

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I’ve been noting a curious phenomenon lately: wine writers who complain that certain other wine writers are elitist. Their criticism is that some wine writers engage in purple prose, hifalutin descriptions and arcane references that turn off the Average guy and gal, which is bad, because we want Average Joe and Average Jane to drink wine, not just rich snobs.

Well, who could be against that? Along with motherhood and apple pie, appealing to the Averages is one of the saintly credos of our market-oriented democracy. We come from a long line of Puritans who viewed the upper classes with suspicion, and despised their tendency to speak in codes that excluded what H.L. Mencken called the boobocracy from knowing what was going on.

The latest example of this wine writer-bashing comes from the Sacramento Bee newspaper’s food and wine writer, Chris Macias, who in this column referred to a talk Eric Asimov gave last week at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, in Napa Valley (which I did not attend). Chris says Eric’s “main point [was] Too much wine writing, especially through overwritten tasting notes, creates a sense of elitism that’s contrary to wine’s everyday pleasures.”

Chris goes on to write:

…wine writers need to pull back from prose that’s more purple than petite sirah. We’ve all seen tasting notes that sound close to this:

The wine opens with a windsong of spice and freshly foraged truffle on the nose, with a final whisper of red fruit that coos in the glass; the taste is a ponderous expression of currants, Godiva milk chocolate, Tasmanian honey and a soupçon of gooseberry that pirouettes on the back end of the palate.

Now doesn’t that tickle your gag reflex?

Even my rock-and-rolling fellow wine blogger Joe Roberts today engaged in a little everyman rationale over at 1WineDude. “Why wine appreciation has been put on a pedestal is beyond me,” he writes, suggesting that understanding what you’re drinking is some kind of cult.

I don’t like this tendency to charge the more, uhh, serious of us writers with being elitists, or putting things on pedestals than don’t belong there.

Look, it’s easy to poke fun at anything, and wine writing is especially vulnerable to ridicule. I suppose you could dig up a wine review or two I’ve penned over the years that might make me blush. But this carping about over-wrought writing puts me in a bad mood and moreover does wine writing a disservice, IMHO. Macias writes: “Don’t know about you, but the last people I want to share a bottle with are a bunch of humorless eggheads who want to dissect a wine to death. Wine can certainly be the center of discussion over dinner, but it should be done with laughs, a sense of fun and sharing.” Hey, when I’m dining with wine-minded friends, we often talk about wine quite seriously, swirling and sniffing and tasting and analyzing. We also liberally laugh. If Macias left us in a snit, it would be his loss.

Wine criticism can be geeky stuff, in the best sense of the word, and nobody should be ashamed of thinking deeply about this historic beverage, around which western civilization has arisen. Wine writers of the world, stop apologizing for being smart and writing smart. You don’t have to pretend to be Joe Average when you’re really feeling like the love child of Professor Saintsbury and Jancis Robinson. You want to be scholarly? Go for it. Don’t dumb stuff down. Free your inner geek. You have my permission to write as purple as you please.

Image courtesy epicurious.com

I was raised to take relationships personally, including working relationships. People have criticized me for sometimes taking things too personally, but what the heck, it’s the way I am. It’s easy to make me happy — just be nice to me — and it’s easy to make me miserable: be mean. But if you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you, and then it will be a better world.

What put me in this reflective frame of mind is that I got an email from the P.R. representative of a certain Napa Valley winery whose name I won’t mention, except to say that they were made famous when a bottle of their wine was featured in a Hollywood movie. The P.R. firm had just taken over the account and they wanted to know if I would write about the winery, which the email described as a “cult” winery no fewer than three times (just in case that fact escaped my attention).

Well, I’m certainly aware of the winery. I wrote about them in Wine Spectator when I used to work there — not a shabby place for a brand new winery to get a write-up. But you know what? When I left the Spectator to go to work for Wine Enthusiast, the winery owner never again contacted me, never returned a phone call, never invited me up to visit, never sent me a review bottle to sample. It was like I’d ceased to exist. Sure, it bothered me, to an extent, but I know how the game is played. All during the 1990s and 2000s, the winery didn’t need articles or reviews from me. Business was booming; they really had achieved cult status. Fine. I had more than enough fish to fry without losing any sleep over something like that.

Fast forward to Feb. 24, 2009, and here’s that incoming email basically begging me to show the winery a little love. But they’re gonna have to get their lovin’ someplace else, cuz it ain’t comin’ from me. (Why am I suddenly starting to talk like a blues singer?)

Is that unprofessional behavior on my part? Probably. Hey, I never said I was the most mature guy. I’m just a helluva good wine writer who’s made a modest success of things. But I’m still human, still Steve, and I feel like if you give me the finger for the better part of 20 years, then please don’t come to me for salvation just because the economy is tanking and you’re not selling those $100 bottles like you used to.

Like I said, relationships matter.

I have many friends who are among the 55 judges at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, whose results were published over the weekend, and among those I do not personally know are people whose professional reputations I admire. So I am not being disrespectful of these men and women when I say that the nature of a competition so heavily larded with judges is one reason to question its results. But there are others, as well.

Making decisions by committee may sound democratic, may appeal to our national spirit of teamwork, and may even present the illusion of balance. After all, it eliminates the extremes of “love” and “hate” in favor of a broad consensus right down the middle. But this median-izing of the wine review process is exactly what weakens it. Too often, the wines that make it through this gauntlet are those that are clean, properly varietal, and don’t turn anyone off. Wines with a little eccentricity, that reach beyond the ordinary in order to achieve extraordinary distinction, need not apply.

How could it be otherwise when so many people are being asked to agree about something? Anyone who’s ever participated in a group tasting with other professionals (critics, winemakers, sommeliers) knows that dissension is bound to occur. If critic “X” is dazzled by a wine but critics “Y” and “Z” aren’t, then that wine suffers in the results, robbing consumers of a potentially exciting experience. And the more people who are asked to make a decision, the more mediocre — in the literal sense — their choices will be.

That’s one reason to doubt the outcome of such a large group tasting. Another is the fact, widely reported last month, that critical inconsistency is endemic to these sorts of things, and such inconsistency can seriously undermine the validity of the results. As I wrote here on Jan. 30, a study “found that over a three-year period, 90% of the [California State Fair’s] judges…basically blew it in blind tastings when presented with the same wine.” Clearly, if that could happen at the California State Fair, it can, and is likely, to happen at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

There’s another reason to wonder about the results. Nearly everything wins something, so everyone has something to brag about. For example, 81 Pinot Noirs, by my count, won awards. Since these were divided into 4 tiers by price, this enables 8 of them to claim they won a coveted “Best of Class” award. Is there a difference between “Best of Class” under $14.99 and “Best of Class” above $35? Probably. But the consumer wouldn’t have any way of knowing that, since most wineries tout only their “Best of Class” medal. Ditto for the 139 Cabernet Sauvignons that won. It’s a little like the children of Lake Woebegon: they’re all above average.

And don’t even get me started on the palate exhaustion problem that plagues these marathon tastings. Believe me, fatigue sets in and makes it nearly impossible to render a fair opinion.

Look, wine competitions have become big business for struggling print periodicals. They have their place. Awards make wineries happy, because they can use them in their P.R. The Chronicle’s Wine Competition is no worse than any of them. But it would be interesting to take the results and match them against the reviews that some of the individual judges gave the same wines in other venues. (Some of the judges review and score wines for their employers, be they wine stores or newspapers.)

I just happen to be among those who believe that, when it comes to wine criticism, it’s better to go with a single, trusted taster, whose palate you understand, than with a huge, largely anonymous panel, about which you know little or nothing, except that they’re in the wine trade.

I was up in Napa Valley for a couple days to check out the Rutherford area for an upcoming article in Wine Enthusiast, and then on to Premier Napa Valley on Saturday. Napa was very beautiful and warm between winter storms. The skies were clear, Mount St. Helena’s peaks were dusted with snowy white, the flowering plum trees were pink, and every vineyard and hillside was splashed with cheery yellow mustard blossom. But people seemed to have the blues.

The view from Rubicon, looking north

Everywhere I went, I asked winery folks how business was going, and the answer invariably was a shrug of the shoulders or a roll heavenward of the eyes. Winery owners large and small told me things are tough; they’re hanging in there, hoping for better times. A friend, a wealthy grower, cracked that even the multi-millionaires are scared: they used to be worth $20 million and now it’s only $10 million. I went to Dean & DeLuca’s wine store, filled with dozens of tiny-production Cabs priced from $75 to $100 and up. “How’s high-end Cab doing?” I asked the guy working the floor. He shook his head. “Terrible.” People just aren’t buying anymore.

I stopped by the Oakville Grocery for lunch. There were two beefy guys, contractor-types, grabbing coffee and danish. I overheard one tell the other, “I told him I have to cut his salary if he wants to stay employed. Hell, I cut my own salary 25 percent.” As I handed my credit card to the lady at the register, the guy said to me, “You wouldn’t be needin’ any work, would ya?” I laughed and said, “Only if you let me pay on credit.” He laughed back. There’s a kind of grim, gallow’s humor these days, even in Oakville.

Went to a famous cult winery and asked the winemaker how sales are doing. Pretty good direct, he said, meaning through the tasting room and wine club, “but New York is dead.” The head of another cult winery said he’s seeing a big drop in off-premise sales, which is a mainstay of cult Cabs. “A lot of this is anecdotal,” he shared, “but we hear about restaurants closing all over the country, and customers shifting from going out to dinner to buying more of their wines at stores.” No way will 2009 repeat the sales of 2008, he fretted.

On the other hand, the parking lot at Auberge du Soleil was jammed, while limo drivers waited out along the curb on winding Rutherford Hill Road, to whisk sated guests back to whence they came.

But of course it was Premier Napa Valley weekend, second in importance only to the Napa Wine Auction itself, and an important gauge as to how the economy is doing; and in Napa, topic number one was the collapse of the Naples [Florida] Winter Wine Auction. Held  Feb. 7, it saw the take plunge to $5 million from 2008’s $14 million, a shocking fall of 65 percent. Everybody was wondering if it could happen here. During the barrel tasting at the Culinary Institute of America, a winery owner confided, “I’ll be amazed if PNV does half of last year,” when the auction fetched $2.2 million.

Well, in the end, PNV did better than that: nearly $1.5 million, or about 68 percent of last year’s haul. In his article in the Napa Register, my old friend, the writer Pierce Carson, called that “exceeding expectations” because the fears of a fall off the cliff had been so widespread. I guess that’s true, but still, when you’re down 32 percent from a year ago, it’s not really good news.