Just back from my semi-annual trip to Santa Barbara County, where I tasted through a boatload of new Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noirs, various Santa Maria Valley wines, and Santa Barbara County Syrahs, in 3 different flights stretched across 3 days.

For a writer, hitting the road is a mixed blessing. It’s a pleasure to get away from the craziness of the city to the quiet, rural pleasures of wine country. Wine regions are always gorgeous, with their hills and dales, rivers and rolling vineyards, and in the case of Santa Barbara County, the pleasure is double because the tourist infrastructure of the North Coast is largely missing. Or hasn’t yet metastisized. During this trip, some of the locals, particularly the Santa Marians, solicited my advice as to how they could draw more attention to their valley, which is a fantastic source of wine, but is largely unknown to the public. You may be hearing more about this. There’s talk of establishing a symposium to celebrate Chardonnay, which is a great idea: It’s the country’s top white wine, but has no big public venue, unlike various “celebrations” of Pinot Noir, Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc and Zinfandel.

But hitting the road isn’t pure pleasure. It’s hard work. I suppose another wine writer could eat and loaf his way through, spending a few hours at a winery, then relaxing in the hotel jacuzzi for the rest of the day before hitting the bar at happy hour. Not me. My Calvinist work ethic makes me feel guilty for wasting a minute, so I was tasting from early in the morning until nighttime. Tasting can be hard work, particularly in a 48-degree cellar freezing your butt off and wishing you’d remembered the gloves. I actually “hit the wall” after about 200 wines. At my final stop, they’d opened another 40 bottles for me to taste with the winemaker, but I suddenly realized I had nothing left. The tasting machine was out of gas. The palate needed some down time. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. It happens, and you don’t want to fake it, because your brain is in no shape to properly evaluate the wines. I explained my dilemma; the winemaker thoroughly understood. Winemakers taste a lot, too. There’s a lot of empathy between winemakers and writers.

My trip was put together by my friend, the P.R. person, Sao Anash, of Muse Management. She used to run the Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Association before going out on her own. She does a terrific job for visiting writers and doesn’t ask for a thing, except friendship and for us to do a good job. At one of our dinners, I toasted Sao. I told our group that P.R. people frequently don’t get the respect they deserve. The writers and winemakers receive all the fame and glory; the P.R. folks are lube that keep the gears of the machine running smoothly. Here’s to the P.R. pros.

Got back to Oakland just as the city was mourning the deaths of the 4 cops murdered by a paroled thug. Put me in a philosophic frame of mind. How can America be home both to the Santa Ynez Valley with its restaurants and thoroughbreds and contented cows and peaceful villages with cottages and gardens, as well as to a city wracked with pain and poverty and people determined to wreck themselves and others and a government helpless in the face of such anarchy? I don’t know. Tonight, while I’m drinking some Santa Barbara Pinot Noir, maybe an answer will come.

Here’s another episode of my periodic videos. This one features my old friend, Wilfred Wong, the Cellarmaster at BevMo. Click on the link.

Steve’s Wine World TV

I might have argued, until recently, that the best California sparkling wines are equal to the best French Champagne, until Sabawun Kakar, the wine director at San Francisco’s Bubble Lounge, was kind enough to host me through a tasting of 18 French bubblies.

After all, I’ve reviewed California beauties from Schramsberg, Iron Horse, J, Roederer Estate and Gloria Ferrer — mostly bruts — and been dazzled by their authority and finesse. Last year, I gave 97 points to an Iron Horse non-vintage Joy! from magnum that was so good it made me cry. So why wouldn’t I believe California had finally achieved parity with Champagne?

Well, because I’ve been so busy over the years that I didn’t have the chance to pay proper attention to Champagne. Sabawun fixed all that, and opened my eyes to the enormous breadth and complexity of the wines of this ancient region — a breadth that California hasn’t been able to mimic.

We tasted mainly “grower-producers,” small family grapegrowers who produce their own wines, rather than sell exclusively to the big “Grande Marque” Champagne houses, like Veuve Cliquot and Taittinger. (Alder Yarrow wrote interestingly on grower-producers a few years ago, at Vinography.) The wine importer, Terry Theise, is largely credited with introducing Americans to these small producers, and he imported some of the “family fizzes” we tasted at Bubble Lounge.

My favorites were Fleury NV Carte Rouge, Andre Jacquart NV Grand Cru Blanc de Blancs, an exotic Michel Loriot NV Blanc de Noirs made entirely from Pinot Meunier, an Henri Billiot NV Brut Rosé (which Sabawun insisted we drink from a wine glass instead of a flute) and a mind-blowingly good Henri Goutorbe 2000 Cuvée Special Club that had us doing handstands. But of more interest  from an intellectual point of view is why these grower-producer Champagnes blew away the Bollingers, Delamottes and Pol Rogers we also tasted.

The question concerns single vineyards versus blends, always an interesting topic whether you’re talking about sparkling wine, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon or just about any other noble wine. The Champagnes of the big houses tend to be blends, often from scores of vineyards whose grapes are owned by independent growers who then sell them, whereas the wines from the grower-producers are their own. My thinking has gone round and round over the years about whether the best wines necessarily come from single vineyards. The idea is romantic, but the downside of a single vineyard is that you’re restricted to whatever Nature and the Vintage give you. If the wine has divots any particular year, you have to live with them; you can’t buy fruit to make up for something the wine lacks. Of course, the upside of a single-vineyard wine, as the most involved connoisseurs appreciate, is to experience a truly terroir-driven wine.

It was terroir that we tasted from the grower-producers, and it was exciting. In California, we have nothing to rival the diversity of these smaller-production wines, and we’re not likely to, given the fact that sparkling wine consumption in this country is more or less stagnant, and the number of producers — you can count the good ones on both hands — has been steady. Given the hardship of the American market, sparkling wine producers are not likely to tinker with adventurous new blends or styles; they tend to stick with their tried-and-true bruts.

(By the way, for snacks we had take-out from the little tapas restaurant, Bocadillos, next door. Our mutual friend, the P.R. pro Kimberly Charles, set down the roasted potatoes and mini-sandwiches in paper boxes, and we ate them with plastic stemware; but such is the nature of Champagne that it turned into a 4-star meal.)

I’ve gone to Bubble Lounge on and off since it opened 11 years ago, and it truly has become a San Francisco icon. Sabawun told me business has been a little more difficult this year, but an eclectic mix of older business people and Millennials still fills the sofa’ed room most nights, willingly dropping 50 bucks on a couple glasses. The lounge is in North Beach, right where Chinatown, the Financial District and the design district along Sansome Street converge, and on the window of an antique store I saw the following words, which seem to say something about all great art, including wine:

An interesting plainness is the most difficult and precious thing to achieve. — Mies van der Rohe

P.S. If you go to Wine Enthusiast’s Toast of the Town-San Francisco on March 26, look me up.

P.P.S. Don’t miss my blog tomorrow, when I’ll debut my new Wine World TV video, with my friend Wilfred Wong.

The 2008 crop, measured by tons, was nearly identical to 2007’s. The crush has actually been quite consistent over the past 10 years, fluctuating between 1999’s low and 2005’s record high; but if you go back to the ten years before that — to 1989 — this decade’s crops have been far higher: always in excess of 3,000 tons, whereas California did not see a crop above 3,000 tons until the banner year of 1997. The large crops of recent years clearly reflect increased plantings. The 2009 numbers won’t be out for another year, but based on what I see in my travels, there aren’t a lot of new vines going into the ground these days. California’s crush may be in a holding pattern for some time, barring some unusual weather.

Chardonnay remains the most widely crushed wine grape variety, accounting for 15.4% of the total. The second leading percentage of crush was Thompson Seedless, and let’s not make the mistake of thinking all those bland green grapes went only onto tables. (Does the number 74.9 mean anything to you?) In third place was Zinfandel, followed by Cabernet Sauvignon. Surprisingly, there was more Pinot Noir crushed — 2.9% of the total — than Syrah. Who woulda thought?

Dollars per ton spiked slightly in 2008, for all grape types, good news for growers, but prices still lagged behind their historic highs of the mid-1990s, for both red and white wines. But if you drlll down into specific varieties, you find a different story. Napa grapes, mainly Cabernet, were up a modest 5% over 2007, but Chardonnay was up 14%, and Merlot prices increased by 10%. Zinfandel, though, fell 1%. Poor Zinfandel. For all the affection we Californians feel toward Zin, its price remains mired in the basement: about $463 dollars a ton in 2008, lower than almost every other red variety in the state, except for Alicante Bouschet, Barbera and Dornfelder.

And Pinot Noir? Red hot. At $2,094 a ton, it was the most expensive variety of all, red or white, except for certain rare and exotic varieties, such as Aleatico.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about sugar levels in grapes coming down, with consequent lower alcohol levels, but the data don’t support this claim. The average brix level from 2007 to 2008 rose in every important red variety: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petite Sirah, Pinot Noir and Zinfandel. Ditto for Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.

Based on the 2008 data, it’s hard to make predictions. The upward trend in dollars per ton over the past few years undoubtedly hit a speed bump during the third quarter of 2009. We can’t really expect that trend to continue. Sure, certain vineyards will continue to out-perform, because their grapes are in high demand. (I was up in Napa yesterday and people were speculating about who it was that paid $27,500 a ton for 18.7 tons of Cabernet in a single deal, as the Crush Report showed. I think I know, but can’t say. By the classic formula of the bottle price equaling 1% of the grape price, that would come to $275 per bottle.) I expect 2009′s Crush Report to be disappointing, with prices down across the board.

So Eric Asimov says over at the Times, a paper whose future is as unpredictable at this point as, well,  the San Francisco Chronicle’s. Eric, who previously has argued the case for a lighter-style California Pinot, nonetheless engages in a bit of hyperbole when he affirms that “a rebellion is brewing” among the state’s vintners who are turning to “finesse…instead of a rich, mouth-coating impression of sweetness…”.

Rebellion: a journalistic word editors love. I wouldn’t call what’s happening with California Pinot Noir a rebellion. Thomas Jefferson fomented a rebellion when he planted grapes in Virginia he supposed would lead to an American wine industry. (He failed.) I suppose you could even say Robert Mondavi led a rebellion of (mostly Napa) vintners who felt they could usurp Europe’s place in prestige. (They largely succeeded.) If there were Pinot Noir rebellionistas, they were pioneers like Joe Rochioli, Jr., Joe Swan and Richard Sanford who dared tackle the grape, 35 and more years ago. To call anyone today making Pinot Noir in California a rebel is looking for someone to lead a cause of the writer’s own imagination. People are tinkering with style, not looking to overthrow basic concepts.

But that’s not to forswear the conversation — not an argument — between fans of a lighter style and those who prefer a riper approach. I was reminded of this on Saturday when I tasted his Pinot Noirs with Jean Charles Boisset. I had given his 2006 JCB Pinots good scores — 88, 89 and 90 — but Boisset felt these did not adequately reflect the wines’ qualities, and being in a compliant mood and liking JC, I agreed to retaste with him. Aside from the fact that they were now 7 months older in bottle, which improved them as time often does, they still seemed to me as I found them last summer: wines of great elegance, but light, and missing the stuffing I prefer, and which I reward with scores in the higher 90s.

I explained to Jean Charles that there’s a sweet spot in Pinot Noir that’s hard to hit. It’s not underripe or over-cropped, which gives minty, green and thin flavors, and it’s not extracted and super-mature, where the wines have a heaviness more like a Rhône wine. Instead, it’s right in the middle. Wineries that consistently exhibit this balance include Williams Selyem, Merry Edwards, Goldeneye, Testarossa, Siduri, Breggo, Marimar Estate, Melville, Hartford Court and Bonaccorsi. What they have in common — hard to put into words — is a rich deliciousness, and yet an elegant structure.

Jean Charles, being a Burgundian (he grew up in the Clos de Vougeot and his family owns the largest winery in Burgundy, as well as DeLoach) feels too many California Pinot Noirs are too heavy (here, he agrees with Asimov). There are certainly heavy Pinots out there. But let me try to put “elegance” in context. As much as I like his JCB wines for their racy elegance and Yves-St.-Laurent classicism, for me they could use a dose of California audacity. It was Jean Charles himself who raised the YSL metaphor with respect to Pinot Noir. He was thinking, I believe, of a classic men’s tuxedo, or perhaps Deneuve in a pants suit with trenchcoat — linear, austere, minimalist.

But I had serendipitously just happened to have come from the big new YSL exhibit at the De Young Museum, in Golden Gate Park, where Yves’ outrageous hommages and over-the-top exclusives for Euro-trash were on exhibit in all their gaudy flamboyance. Believe me, the designer could be outrageous, in a drag queen way every San Franciscan understands. And that made me realize something. A truly great California Pinot Noir needs not only a classic nobility of line, but a touch — nothing too heavy — of the flashy decadence of drag.

Oh, uh, and another celebrity is making wine

Now it’s Sting, who joins Madonna, or was it Mother Theresa, with a new wine line.

The flood of Time Magazine cover people jumping on the wine bandwagon is tidal. Soon we’ll have to re-jigger Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame to “Some day, 15 percent of all the people in the world will have their own wine brand.” Jean Charles asked me if I thought about coming up with a brand. Oi. I have enough tsouris not to have to worry about that.