To hear it the other day from Asimov, at The Pour, California’s wine industry is on its last legs. On Tuesday he blogged that “the effect of the recession on their businesses [is] brutal” and “anxiety is gushing forth.” Today (yesterday, as you read this) he declares that California growers, producers, distributors, retailers, brokers, equipment dealers and consultants are “anxiety-ridden,” as they see bottles and bottles of expensive wine that have “lost their glamour.”

I know times are tough, but I don’t think California wine is in a state of collapse. As I’ve noted in the past, history tends to repeat itself, and you have to look no further than Bordeaux to understand how that venerable old wine region has sustained itself through centuries of repeated wars, economic collapses and even revolutionary changes in France’s government. Most wines did not go away, they simply adjusted their prices in bad times and jacked them up again when boom times returned. A surprisingly low number of chateaux actually went out of existence; just look at the 1855 Classification, which contains most of the names we know today.

Every wine region is in a state of turmoil now, and California is clearly no exception. But let’s not lose sight of the silver lining around the clouds. Producers of lower-priced wines are doing fine, and by that I mean everybody from Fred Franzia and Gallo (at their value levels) to some mom-and-pop operations. We haven’t seen any massive bankruptcies or sales; certainly it’s no worse, so far, than in the early 1990s, when similar gloomy predictions were being made. Winemaker passion hasn’t waned, nor have the improvements that have been invested in vineyards and wineries over the past years, made possible by the Golden Age of profitability that marked most of the Clinton and Bush years. Wineries will get through this difficult period — most of them, anyway — just as you and I will, by ratcheting down expenses, renegotiating loan agreements, and the like. It’s a terrible recession, but it’s not the end of the world.

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I’ll be gone all next week. Going to New York for Wine Enthusiast’s annual summer editorial meeting, when we plan out the next year’s issue, and also put our heads together trying to figure out how to make the magazine better and more satisfying for readers. I’ll try to blog from the road but it’s not easy, as we’re kept pretty busy all day in meetings and with dinners (and lots of good wine) at night.

Have a great week!

Got this very thoughtful comment yesterday from Shana, who has a blog, Breath[e]:

When you all bring up the subject of experience, I think about the so-called mommy bloggers and their experience. These bloggers are all over the board, from blogs from women about their first child, to moms that adopt, moms that have a few kids, moms that have children in college. Of course, I could go on and on… With mommy bloggers as well as with Wine Bloggers.

And this is what makes any blogging community interesting.

There are so many different perspectives on wine and IMHO that is what readers want. Not everyone wants to read tasting notes from an experienced wine critic (or vice versa) and that is where some of the not so educated bloggers come in and while they may not have the experience, they still are a part of the wine world and can influence those who would rather read their POV.

Anyone who drinks a bottle of wine or visits a tasting room now a days is a potential wine blogger or critic and I think there is room for all sorts of opinions on wine, not just the ‘experts.’

Shana distillizes the pro-blogging camp’s position as clearly as anything I’ve ever read. If I can sum up, it’s “It’s a new world out there. Anybody and everybody can speak authoritatively about anything they want, and that’s good.”

Well, I respect Shana’s point of view, but in this case I can’t entirely agree. Let me state the case, for some of us, for the difference between a good wine blog and a bad wine blog.

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I read a lot of wine blogs. The ones I like tend to be what I think of as more literate, wittier and thoughtful. Also, those written with some particular competence or expertise, whether it’s Tom Wark on the industry at Fermentation to Hosemaster on a rant, or someone telling me something I don’t know about Tuscany or Tasmania.

Then there are blogs that bother me and make me worry. They tend to fall into the category of naivete — marked by passion, but undermined by lack of knowledge and understanding, and by a susceptibility of the blogger being flummoxed and flattered by a winery or wine association. This is both an inevitability, given the nature of blogging, and a danger.

The worst thing a wine blog can do is to shill, however inadvertantly, for a winery or region. The minute I read about someone’s “delightful” visit to so-and-so, they’ve lost me. Visits may indeed be delightful, but the writer shouldn’t say so, because it just sounds — I don’t know — smarmy and credulous. If the blogger describes the visit as “delightful” then her credibility suffers, in my mind. What if the wines suck? Would the blogger say so? Or is the blogger so delighted with the visit — with the hospitality of the owners, the personally guided tour of the winery and caves, the lovely luncheon by the pool, catered by the winery chef, and with the gorgeous tranquillity of wine country — that he’s unable even to know that the wine is mediocre?

Ditto for writing that might have come straight out of a press kit, which too many wine blogs sound like. I saw a blog the other day where the Lodi Winegrape Commission sent the blogger a case of samples, and the blogger wrote that Lodi is “one of the up-and-coming wine regions” and is a “gem of a wine region.” He compared Lodi to Napa and Sonoma and determined that Lodi’s wines “rival” theirs, but at lesser prices.

Now, I’m sorry, but these are not true statements. Lodi is not “up-and-coming,” it’s been around for many years and actually peaked some time ago. Lodi’s wines do not rival Napa’s or Sonoma’s nor for the most part do they wish to do so. Lodi is about value, or should be, and when it’s wines get too expensive, they’ll suffer. (Which is probably happening to some right now.)

If the blogger in question had done his homework he would know that what he said about Lodi isn’t true. How should he have done his homework? By reading, reading, reading the work of those who came before him and who know better. Throughout history, wine knowledge was accumulated slowly by individuals who studied it for years, then had apprentices to whom they handed down their knowledge. This assured continuity, which in turn gave us a collective inheritance, a bedrock, called “truth.” We had the medieval guilds and now their modern descendants, V&E departments, and even groupings like the M.W.s who similarly try to pass organized knowledge on from generation to generation. If you think about it, this is the only way real knowledge and truth can exist in a turbulent world. Imagine if, say, medical knowledge were haphazardly reinvented every day, with every doctor coming to his own opinions regardless of what the medical community had previously determined to be true. I would not want to be treated by a witch doctor who hadn’t studied his craft, or who thought that his opinion was as valid as those who worked harder and longer than he had.

The problem with this age of the Internet is that everybody feels he can be his own expert. But just because somebody says something doesn’t make it true.  

I fully understand that every wine blogger has got to start somewhere, and that is usually from a zero knowledge base. However, if you really want to learn about wine, you need to know what people with more experience and understanding have to say about things, and then go on from there. You can’t just come out with inaccuracies or repeat banalities told to you by a P.R. person.

That’s why this kind of thing is a danger. I’m not really worried that genuine wine writing is going away, because the cream will always rise to the top. But we — the wine community — do have to be alert to naive bloggers, with potentially sizable readerships, being “useful idiots” for wineries and associations.

Having said all that, I’ll revert back to Shana’s comment. “Not everyone wants to read tasting notes from an experienced wine critic (or vice versa) and that is where some of the not so educated bloggers come in and while they may not have the experience, they still are a part of the wine world and can influence those who would rather read their POV.” I have now read these words many times, and they fill me with complex, confused emotions.

I was saddened by the apparent demise of Appellation America, which I learned about through Tom Wark’s commanding post yesterday at Fermentation.

Tom did a superior job analyzing the reasons for AA’s failure and its meaning. Although he made many fine points, the most interesting (and alliterative) in my opinion was this: “Where profitable publishing is concerned, there is something to be said for paper.”

I do sense a retreat from the gloom-and-doom prognostications of six months ago that wine magazines are dead and that the Internet, through social media and blogging, will take their place. That hasn’t happened, and if anything, it looks like paper is getting stronger while the Internet is treading water. My feeling is that, as the Recession retreats (and it looks like it is),  we’ll see advertising recover. Subscriptions remain steady and, certainly in my travels and contacts around California, I’ve seen no evidence that wineries view paper-based wine magazines like Wine Enthusiast with any less importance or respect than they ever did.

Sure, wine blogging has attracted wineries’ attention, as evidenced by Napa’s embrace of the Bloggers’ Conference this year and Washington State’s of it next year. But I’m not sure this pas de deux means anything other than that the industry wants to forge some sort of relationship with the blogosphere, and showing up at a Conference and hosting an event is a very inexpensive way of doing it. It doesn’t cost  wineries anything, or very much, to make kissy-face with bloggers. To understand how wineries actually assess the importance of any particular writer or publication you have to look at where they put their money. And industry money is still pouring into paper-based magazines (through advertising), not into blogs.

Appellation America wasn’t the only online  publication to hit the dust last week. So did Yummy, a wine, food and lifestyle site out of San Francisco, to which I contributed for a few months. Yummy was a fine read, informed and informative, and the publisher tried her best to support it through advertising. But it didn’t work. “The bottom line,” she emailed me, “is that no one sees a true value in online. While they may enjoy receiving e-letters and reading blogs, they are not willing to pay a premium for ad space as they are in print.” The publisher also puts out a paper-based magazine, Northside San Francisco, that brings in quite a lot of cash in ads. But “No one is going to pay that for online,” she said.

I think this reality is sinking in, dashing the optimism of bloggers and rekindling hopes for paper-based magazines, whose publishers after all are the ones that must make these all-important decisions. The Recession, with its fearful anxieties of last winter, no doubt made publishers and editors more nervous than ordinarily they would have been, and contributed to feelings of dread, as well as published reports of print’s impending demise. But we have gotten past the worst of things (I hope), and the major wine magazines have emerged unbowed and untattered, for the most part.

Years ago I sponsored a debate between the owner of Cody’s Books, in Berkeley, and the head of U.C. Berkeley’s New Media Department. The topic was “The future of print.” The U.C. professor said that paper-based pubs would soon be obsolete, to be replaced by lightweight, flexible hand-held devices (of course, that was before Amazon’s Kindle). The bookstore guy said it would never happen, because there’s something in our human nature, or soul, that makes us want to hold and admire a real book or magazine made of paper. I think he was right. Even though Cody’s had to close last year due to the tough economic times, I believe paper-based print is entering a new heyday. It’s undergone a jolt, but the survivors will emerger stronger, leaner and meaner. Blogging also will continue, but independent bloggers (as opposed to “lifestyle managers” like Hardy Wallace)  are going to have to give up on the idea of getting paid, for now.

Florence, Italy – Italian researchers claim that levels of sexual desire were higher in women who had drunk a couple of glasses of red wine…

Amazing! Who would have thought it? All this time, men believed that the way into a girl’s, err, heart was to not let her drink alcohol. Generations of horny teenaged jocks went to great lengths to hide the liquor when Sherry or Sally came over, lest she imbibe some hooch and become unavailable. Now, we find out it’s just the opposite!

Don’t you hate when that happens? I mean, when Science proves something that’s not supposed to be true? It’s like when we were told that bears really do defecate in the woods. That really shook me. It is never a pleasant thing to have one’s core beliefs upset, but Truth is a demanding mistress we are compelled to obey when she cracks the whip.  

Anyhow, the Italian researchers had the ladies drink a bottle of Chianti, and then gave them “a questionnaire to assess their interest in sex.” Through much hard journalistic prodding, I managed to get my hands on the questionnaire. And fortunately, because of my Ligurian background (we were originally the Heimoffscenti), I’m able to translate it for you into English. Here are some of the more cogent questions:

What does the Leaning Tower of Pisa remind you of?

Are you feeling tired? Would you care to lie down on the couch and take off your shoes?

Would you like some more wine?

Some chocolate candies? 

Is that better? 

How much longer can you stay?

The Italian researchers did not conduct a similar study on men to see if wine increases their sex drive, although there is anecdotal evidence that it may. I invite my male readers to weigh in on this topic. Feel free to attach jpegs.

It never fails to amaze me how winemakers routinely let others make the decision when to send tasting samples out — even when it’s against their better judgment. But the fact is, too many good red wines are released too soon.

Who better than the winemaker knows when a wine is showing well? Not the marketing people. Not the sales people. Not the P.R. people. And not some CFO whose realm is more in the world of numbers than the palate.

The problems with young wines are manifold. Not being a chemist I can’t explain them that way. But a wine that’s too young can be an unintegrated, rude little thing. (I love that word, “rude.” Another one is “impertinent.”) All its parts haven’t knit, so it can taste too oaky or too smoky, or too sweet in primary fruit, which gives it a jammy simplicity, or too acidic. It can even smell sulfury. Sweetness and structure, you might say, haven’t come together. The result can be most unpleasant.

Sometimes, a critic can fathom that a young wine that’s not showing well has a future. Certainly, if the wine has a history of ageability, that can point you in the right direction. But what if you’re tasting blind? Then all you know is that you’re tasting something that’s rude and unpleasant, and your review/score must reflect that disappointing reality.

I suppose a case can be made for a palate so exquisitely discriminating, so educated and refined, that it would never confuse a wine that was rude and unpleasant and not going anywhere, with one that was rude and unpleasant because it was immature. Perhaps such folks exist among the exalted ranks of M.W.s. But I doubt if anyone has a 100% perfect batting average at this. 

Several examples bring up these thoughts in my mind. One concerned a Williams Selyem Pinot Noir, submitted to Wine Enthusiast years ago in response to a tasting feature deadline. It did not do well in the blind tasting. Months later, when the results were known to all, the winemaker, Bob Cabral, confessed to me that he had not wanted to send the wine out at that time. He’d wanted to hold onto it for (as i recall) another 6 months, but had been overruled by his marketing people, who told him, “We must make the Enthusiast’s deadline if we are to appear in their Pinot Noir issue!” Well, the wine did appear, but with a middling score. “I learned something from that,” Bob told me. “From now on, I make the decisions about when wines go out!”

More recent is the case of the Ancient Peaks 2006 Oyster Ridge red wine, a Cabernet, Petite Sirah, Syrah and Zinfandel blend from Paso Robles. When the winery sent it to me, last January, I disliked it intensely. It was all sour acidity and sweet jammy fruit, and tasted unbalanced, and my score reflected that impression.

Fast forward to June of this year, when I went to Paso Robles for my 106-wine blind tasting. Among the wines in a paper bag was this very one. I gave it a high score, and was, of course, surprised and upset to find out, later on back home, that it was the same wine I’d despised six months previously.

I called the winery. They sent me two new bottles, which I tasted over the course of the next several days. I liked the wine better and better each time. I called the winemaker, Mike Sinor. Had he experienced bottle variation with this wine? No, he said; he’d heard of none from his accounts. It puzzled me. How could my January tasting have been so different from my June and July experiences?

Well, Mike said, after all, the wine had just been bottled in December — a month before it was sent to me. He hadn’t wanted to send it out at that time, but had been overruled, again by others whose motives were different from Mike’s.

Even for a dim bulb like me, I saw the light. In the bottle less than a month! Then undergoing a long, bumpy delivery by truck. I shared with Mike my philosophy: never let the business and finance people make these sending decisions. They should be made by the winemaker! Mike listened deeply, then said that I’d given him the “ammunition” — his word — to insist on making sending decisions himself.

So, memo to winemakers: Don’t let them tell you when to send wines to critics. If you think a few more months will improve the wine, insist on it. Consider it the Oyster Ridge Lesson: send no wine before its time.

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Dept. of What were they thinking?

Alabama is among the leaders of all U.S. states in obesity.

It’s the 5th dumbest state.

Like other southern states, a huge percentage of Alabama’s adult population has less than 9 years of education.

Alabama ranks #4 among states for greatest percentage of its population living in poverty.

Alabama has one of the U.S.’s highest crime rates.

Last year, Republicans introduced legislation in the state Legislature to allow the teaching of creationism and intelligent design “as though they represent accepted scientific principles.” (The bill did not pass.)

Few American states have less to be proud of when it comes to, well, anything, but Alabama lawmakers now have earned extra bragging rights for stupidity. Last week,  the state’s Liquor Control Board banned the label on a bottle of Hahn’s Cycles Gladiator wine as being too racy.

She is a hot little strumpet, isn’t she?

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My cousin, Loretta Weinberg, was just tapped by N.J. Gov. Corzine to run for Lieutenant-Governor in the next election. Way to go, Loretta! We’re proud of you!

The Guv and the Cuz