It was out of the mouths of babes — or, in this case, my cousin Keith — that this interesting question sprang.

We were on our annual drive down to Malibu, where we always do Thanksgiving at Ellen’s house with the rest of the Southern California branch of the family. I was telling Keith and Maxine, his wife, about how I’d just given a rare 100 point score to a certain wine — a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

“Is it ageable?” Maxine asked. I assured her it was.

That’s when Keith asked, ever so innocently, “Why would you want to age it, if it’s a 100 point wine? I mean, how much better can it get?”

Well, I get asked a lot of questions about wine, and some of them are pretty lame. There’s a relative who always asks me what she should drink at Thanksgiving. I mean, I open 10 bottles — a little of this, a little of that — and tell people to grab whatever you want, it doesn’t matter when the table is laden with everything from cheese croquettes and cranberry sauce to green beans, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, fruit, green salad, chocolate chip cookies and, of course, the turkey itself. But this relative always insists that I help her decide which is the perfect wine to have with it all, which is something I just can’t do, and anyway is antithetical to the whole spirit of a Thanksgiving family meal.

But Keith’s question came down like a thunderbolt. How much better can it get?

Of course, this introduces the concept of aging wine. Strangely enough, I found myself struggling to explain to Keith and Maxine what the answer was. I said something like, “Well, it’s 100 points because it was the best wine in a blind tasting of 52 top Napa Cabs I tasted last week, and structurally and in every other respect, it blew away the competition. But it could get even better with time in the cellar.”

In other words, it was a perfect wine, in both what it was and what I believed it will be. But then, why would I advise readers to cellar it? Does 100 refer to now, or to some theoretical future point?

At Wine Enthusiast we’re encouraged to rate wines based on their potential. But since all of us are merely human, and lack crystal balls, precise predictions are precarious. I’ve written before how disappointed I’ve been by California wines I expected to age that didn’t. So here’s my rule: when I give a red wine 100 points, it’s based on a combination of hedonism, which is the “wow now” factor, and optimism, which is my belief in its future.

When a great young wine ages, it undergoes complicated chemical transformations that change its character. The truth is, sometimes a perfect wine doesn’t age as we expected or hoped. I’ve been let down more than I’ve been thrilled by older wines. Aging wine is always a gamble; one can’t stress this enough. It’s utterly counter-intuitive to the average person’s belief that aging always makes wine better and that any wine can be aged. Not so in either case. It’s also true that California wines are being made softer and riper (more alcoholic) and sweeter (apparently so, if not technically so) than at any time in the past, so when a critic says such-and-such a Cabernet will live for 15-20 years, the wise reader should see it for what it is: an educated guess, or, more properly speaking, a hope. But nobody really knows.

So when I gave 100 points to that wine Keith was talking about, the sub-text readers should infer — and the answer to Keith’s question — is this: This is a perfect wine now, with, of course, the proper food to accompany it. It is absolutely the finest expression of its variety and terroir as anything in California today. It is also tannic, so if you’re sensitive to tannins, you’ll find it puckery and tough. It will not die an easy death. It will be with us for a long time. But can I guarantee that you’ll love it in 8 or 12 or 15 years? Nope. Can I guarantee anyone will? Nope. When it comes to predicting the future of California wines, we have the (mostly-nearsighted) blind leading the blind. That 100 point Cabernet could someday be so astonishing that everybody who tastes it — Keith, Maxine, me — will fall to our knees and lift our hands and sing hosannahs to the God of Wine who created such a masterpiece. But more likely is it that Keith, in 12 or 15 years, will taste that wine and ask his cousin Stevie, “Why did you say this was ageable?”

Keith, Maxine, Ellen, Steve, on Big Rock, in Malibu

I thought it was pretty clever for Wine Spectator to choose that Columbia Crest 2005 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, which retails for $27, as their Wine of the Year.

The Spectator has gotten a heavy reputation over the years for being a snobby, rich man’s (emphasis on man’s) magazine that caters to collectors and puffed-up winemakers who want to sell to collectors at inflated prices. That reputation worked back in the old days (i.e. pre-Fourth Quarter 2008), when money was flowing and everybody wanted the latest cult wine. But it’s a lousy rep to have today, being totally inconsistent with the new national trend of modesty and inconspicuous consumption. I obviously have no way of knowing the internal workings at Wine Spectator, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the word hadn’t gone out to the effect that “Let there be something inexpensive this year.” And, lo and behold, there was something inexpensive, not to mention relatively accessible, and from a major commercial producer.

(For the record, Wine Enthusiast on Dec. 2 reveals our Top 100 Wines of the Year.)

To some extent this reputation for Spectator snobbery has never been a fair one. The magazine always has value lists and value articles, and I don’t think their staff shies away from reviewing inexpensive wines. But perception is reality, as they say, and whether fair or not, the Spectator has been saddled as the publication of, by and for the cults and triple-digit wines. When I began at Wine Enthusiast, fresh off my stint at Wine Spectator, the decision already had been made by our management to be a (hopefully refreshing) alternative, which is to say a magazine dedicated to the average wine consumer, not merely the collector. That was a philosophy I could buy into, because I have always been an average wine consumer, if by “average” you mean someone who doesn’t have the means to buy lots of expensive bottles. And, I must confess, I had been rather put off by the collector types I met while at the Spectator, who seemed to exist on a plane that was hard for me to relate to.

I think Wine Enthusiast has accomplished our goal. People, both in the industry and “just” consumers, tell me all the time they think the Enthusiast “shares their values” more than the Spectator, which often puts me in the odd position of defending the Spectator, even though they’re “the competition.” I suppose people think if they say something anti-Spectator I’ll like it, but I don’t, not really. It makes me uncomfortable.

Does the selection of the Columbia Crest signifies a sea change at the Spectator — a re-orientation toward more popularly priced wines? Probably not. I’m sure there will be upcoming verticals of Mouton, or the latest $400 garragiste wine, etc. But for the time being the Columbia Crest award removes the elitist bull’s-eye from the Spectator’s tuchas.

Incidentally, Wine Enthusiast’s Pacific Northwest Editor, Paul Gregutt, reviewed the C.C. 2005 Reserve Cab and gave it 89 points, a very good but not great score. On the Seattle Yelp page, public reaction to the award seemed proud that Washington State was honored, but at the same time, bemused. One person called the wine “very flat [and] one dimensional.” Another called it “boring,” while still another said “the choice really has made me wonder what the criteria were.” You can wonder whatever you want to about the selection, but this is true: it created buzz, it got people talking, and it’s better to have people talking about you — even controversially — than not.

Hard to believe in just 37 days the first decade of the 21st century will end. Seems like only yesterday we were partying like it was 1999 (wait, it was 1999) and in a panic about the Y2K meltdown. Now here we are on the verge of 2010. In the blink of an eye, a decade has flown by.

It’s been ten years of discontinuity and discombulation for everything in America, and that includes the wine industry. I went back to review some things I wrote for Wine Enthusiast back in 2000, to see what we were thinking and talking about then. The wine market was, of course, robust in 2000, coming off the previous decade of up, up and away. In August of that year I wrote a column that reflected on the historical swings of the Bordeaux market over the preceding, well-documented two centuries. “Switch now from Bordeaux to California, and especially Napa Valley,” I said. “Many of the top wines, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon, have doubled in price since 1990…the price of many, if not most, expensive wines has got to come down, and will…If you don’t believe that the world’s most prestigious wines can suddenly, exuberantly collapse in price, just read ‘The Wines of Bordeaux’ and find out.” That book, by Eddie Penning-Rowsell, traces the sine curves that Bordeaux prices always have described.

The dot-com bust and Sept. 11 dealt blows to the wine industry, but nothing like the staggering knockdown that the Great Recession of 2008-2009 delivered. I still see “suggested retail prices” of $100, $150, $250 for certain Cabernets, but frankly, I don’t believe them. A winery owner can claim to be asking (and getting) triple-digits for his wine but that doesn’t mean he is. So I was right that prices would collapse, but it’s a prediction anybody can make, at any time, because sooner or later, prices always tumble. But that has never stopped certain people from trying to talk prices back up, as for example this article from Investors Chronicle, which argues that “the market for quality wine has enjoyed a rapid turnaround” and cites somebody from something called The Wine Investment Fund as saying that fine wine “has earned it[s] place alongside gold, equities, bonds and other assets in an investment portfolio.” We may forgive The Wine Investment Fund, which is based in London, Bermuda and Hong Kong, for hyperbole, since it’s hardly a disinterested party.

I asked, also in a 2000 column, the following question: “Have you noticed that wine is getting sweeter and softer?” Apparently, I had, although 2000 was a little before I remember actually becoming convinced that California wine had a real problem, namely lack of acidity and excessive residual sugar. Later that year I wrote a little story about Jess Jackson stepping down as Board Chairman of Kendall-Jackson, and quoted him as saying, “I’m seventy. I’m retiring.” Some retirement! But along less happy lines, at the end of 2000 I reported on the news that Robert Mondavi Winery had “extended its reach to a fourth continent, Australia,” with its announcement of a joint venture with Rosemont. In retrospect we can see that this really was an early warning sign of the winery’s impending demise, caused by the hubris of exalted ambitions. RMW’s actual death dragged on for another four years, but finally occurred in December, 2004, when the company was sold to Constellation.

Several conclusions can be drawn. Wine prices are down now, but unless this is the End of History they will rise again, pace Penning-Rowsell, although it could take a while for the high end to recover; there were eras when Bordeaux took decades to come back. Softness and sugariness remain stubborn problems in California wine, but there’s evidence that that trend-line has peaked, thankfully (although it’s a Dracula that threatens always to rise again from the grave). Jess Jackson happily remains with us, at the helm of a great wine company. And the unhappy experience of Robert Mondavi should be a warning sign to ambitious empire builders. What are its lessons? Be careful what you wish for because you might get it. The Devil’s in the details. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Dot your i’s and cross your t’s. The fundamentals still apply as time goes by.

And speaking of the second decade of the 21st century

The world will have heard by now that Gary Vaynerchuk has won Wine Enthusiast’s “Innovator of the Year” Wine Star Award for WineLibrary TV. I am personally thrilled by the prospect of finally meeting Gary when we all gather, in black tie, at next year’s gala ceremony, at the New York Public Library’s 42nd Street branch. I feel like I know Gary from his comments on my blog, and he is obviously a force to be reckoned with as we head into the two thousand and teens. Congratulations to Gary and to all the Wine Star Award winners!

Wes Hagen, at Clos Pepe, sent me (and also Mr. Laube) a PDF of an old wine book he stumbled across. “It’s an 1892 book on the evaluation of wine, written in CA!,” Wes wrote. “Note his suggestion of a 6 point and 10 point wine evaluation scale.  I’m sure you guys get questions all the time about ‘points’—it may be the idea’s been around for longer than 100 years.”

The book, published in 1892 by the University of California’s Viticultural Section (in its pre-Davis, Berkeley era), is entitled WINE: Classification – Wine Tasting – Qualities and Defects. Yet it was written, not in California or by a Californian but an Italian (Grazzi-Soncini), and happened to be translated by F.T. Bioletti, the polymath whose work at U.C. included classifying vinifera grapes in California, founding the school’s grape breeding program, and research into grape diseases. He also was the V&E department’s first chair.

Grazzi-Soncini begins by making a vital distinction between “the taster” and “the chemist.” The former is able to make inferences about wine’s quality and defects, even without a thorough understanding of “the physical components of wine,” while the latter “is limited to making a diagnosis,” which Grazzi-Soncini implies is not particularly useful for the wine drinker or wine seller. He then lays out his own classification system, dividing wine into “High-class Wines” (Lafite, la-Tour [sic], certain Chiantis), “Fine Wines” (Saint-Julien, St.-Estephe), “Fine Common Wines” (“produced in large quantities in Italy”), and “Common Wines, or Wines of the Plains,” which are for “the working classes.” Finally there are “Low-grade Wines,” of which the less said, the better. So once again we see the universal need, which seems always to have existed, at least since the Greeks, for classifying wines.

Having set the stage, Grazzi-Soncini now moves to his chapter on “Tasting.” His cogent point is that “Any one can say whether a wine pleases him or not” but “only the experienced taster can pronounce with any degree of certainty…”. Without “long practice” the “somewhat difficult art” of tasting “cannot be acquired” (which will frustrate some of my young blogger friends but is inescapably true).

Grazzi-Soncini’s 10-point scale, like his classification system, also testifies to the need in the human soul or mind for hierarchies and tiers, of which the 100-point system (actually in Wine Enthusiast’s case a 21-point system) is merely an elaboration. I quote from Grazzi-Soncini:

10. Perfect.
9. Almost perfect.
8. Quite good.
7. Relatively good.
6. Fair; sound, but not harmonious.
From 5 to 0 indicates various defects, according to their gravity.

(Could this have been the origin of the famous U.C. Davis 20-point scoring system?)

Grazzi-Soncini reserves his longest chapter for wine defects. Then, as now, it was more difficult to pinpoint why a wine is good than explain why it is not. When a wine is good, all you can do is use qualitative adjectives, such as “Perfect” or “harmonious,” which really have no meaning at all to anyone, unless you know what they mean or think you do. It is much easier to explain that a wine is, for example, “decrepit” and “past its prime” because it has lost “all, or nearly all, of [its] color” and become “disagreeable” in bouquet and “vapid, flat, insipid” in the mouth. (All italicized descriptors are Grazzi-Soncini’s.)

If Grazzi-Soncini were involved in the conversation or debate that occurs frequently here on my blog in the Comments section, I think he would side with those who say a wine taster doesn’t need rigorous scientific training or academic winemaking credentials to be good at his job. Rather what is needed is, as I have quoted, “long experience,”…“a clear eye [and] very delicate organs of taste and smell.” Here’s a key phrase: “When the last two organs [i.e. taste and smell] have the requisite sensibility, practice alone is necessary to give [tasters] the skill needed in tasting a wine.” Not viticultural and enological aptitude; not a thorough knowledge of wine chemistry; not even (dare I say it?) a moment of work-time in a winery. A sharp eye, nose and palate, and long, practical years of experience: that’s what it takes to be a good wine critic.

I suppose it’s not particularly original to point out that social media is not the first movement to revolutionize the authoritarian structure of broadcast communication in this country, but the second. The first was the rise of cable T.V., which was supposed to “let a thousand flowers bloom” by breaking up the old network model, dominated by NBC, ABC and CBS.

That the three traditional nets took hits from cable is undeniable. But they’re still powerhouses, aren’t they, and who’s to say they, or one or some of them, won’t come roaring back? Still, gone are the days when (as I was reminded by a neighbor), John Chancellor could intone, in stentorian cadence, “This…is John Chancellor,” pronouncing the final syllable as in “lord”, thus underscoring that the hierarchy ran from God to NBC to us.

Those were the good old days because you didn’t have to think. John, or Uncle Walter, or Chet or some other trusted and knowing white man told us how it was, we believed, and all was well in America.

Then came cable. There would be dozens of channels, it was said — maybe 100! It was unthinkable for Baby Boomers raised on four (the nets plus one local). Viewers would have choice. And so it came to be, but of an order of magnitude even greater than anticipated: We now have hundreds of channels. And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same. The voices of authority did not go away; they simply changed. Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Chris Matthews — these are the new (albeit more opinionated) newscasters, the Uncle Walters and David Brinkleys of the cabes. Whoever said cable T.V. was changing the rules was wrong.

Which brings up the question of social media. It is now supposed to do exactly what cable T.V. was supposed to do: wash away all vestiges of concentrated, top-down communication. To be sure, there’s been much chatter, over the dreary and pessimistic duration of the Great Recession, that the New Media are replacing the Old Media, and good riddance to bad rubbish!

Let’s take a closer look. Let’s restrict it to the wine industry, which is after all the main thing that links us together. Yes, we now have a vast array of social media and, yes, for sure, the wine industry is watching, looking and listening. (A friend just called to announce she’d gotten a job as social media director for a large winery chain. What hath Hardy Wallace wrought?) But what else do we have? If I ask you — any of you, and there are thousands of you out there — to name a certified social media superstar, you will come up with the following:

- Dr. Vino
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Alder Yarrow
- Tom Wark
- Eric Asimov

(All white guys, I might add. Hmm…)

Isn’t that true? They are the most widely-read blogs on every list; their names are becoming brands (in Gary V.’s case he already is a brand). What’s more, it’s hard to see the platform expanding much beyond them. Maybe there’s room for a few more names; two or three or five or six, but you get my point. There’s not an infinite amount of room at the top of the social media pyramid to sustain fame for more than a handful of celebrity bloggers, any more than there’s room in cable, or was room in network T.V., for more than a handful of celebrity news voices. So what, exactly, has changed?

Well, for one thing, in social media there exists the reality of instantaneous two-way communication. In the old days, if you disagreed with something Uncle Walter said, all you could do was shout at your T.V. Fifteen years ago, if you found Rush outrageous (and I hope you did), you were similarly stifled. Today, of course, you can email, or comment on a blog, or blog or Facebook or tweet on your own, to the whole world. That’s new.

What isn’t new is that we’ve simply replaced an old generation of authoritarian critical voices with a new one. But the new boss is the same as the old boss, in essence. It’s been said that each additional Parker point is worth $7 in the wine’s retail price. How much is a Gary V. recommendation worth? (I can’t tell you how much a Heimoff recco is worth in dollars, but I’m told a good score from me moves bottles.)

There’s nothing really unusual or revolutionary about social media when you think of it along these lines. People — the hoi polloi — always have wanted guidance with wine. In Rome, everybody wanted what Caesar drank. Later, they followed the Pope, or the monks, and when Europe became secular, the likes of Professor Saintsbury and André Simon provided guidance. Parker is a late incarnation of Thomas Jefferson, giving trusted advice to his friends. Gary V. is a (I can’t say the) new Parker.

So enough about “down with authority!” We’ll have famous wine critics as long as we have 5,000 brands for sale in the Wall of Wine and a confused public desperately seeking guidance. The only difference is that the new famous wine critics are pronouncing from the Internet. (Wait a minute, isn’t Gary V. writing books now? I guess predictions of the Death of Print have been exaggerrated.)