My post yerterday generated an interesting discussion in the “comments” section that attempted both to focus in on the true meaning of terroir and also to expand upon it. The issues raised included:

– can heavy winemaker intervention “overpower any sense of terroir”? [this is from Stephen Hare]

– What about “the heart, soul and dreams of the people farming the vineyard and making its wine” [from scott]. Romantic notions aside, what is the importance of the winemaker’s consciousness to a fine wine that expresses terroir?

– what is the nature of the interactive process that occurs between the vineyard and its manager/winemaker? Or, to use Joe’s phrase, how important is it for the winemaker “to learn from the vineyard”?

Books could be (and have been) written about all of these concepts, which are complex and interrelated. The notion of heavy winemaker intervention overpowering terroir is probably the hardest to answer. Before addressing it, it might be helpful to ask another question: If heavy winemaker intervention overpowers terroir, then does light intervention safeguard it? (By “light” I mean less new oak or less charred oak, non-dealcoholized wine, unfiltered, natural yeast, etc.) The answer obviously is no. It seems logical, then, to extrapolate that heavy winemaker intervention does not necessarily overpower terroir. Most people, when they think of winemaker intervention, mean oak. Many of the top Burgundies and Bordeaux are aged in 100% new oak, yet they are held up as prima facie examples of terroir. I suppose in theory it’s possible to take a perfectly good wine that does reflect its terroir and then bury it under this and that. I routinely complain about otherwise good Chardonnays, Pinot Noirs and Cabernet Sauvignons that are overoaked. But whether the amount of oak overpowers their terroir, as opposed to their being sound, non-terroir-driven wines that happen to be overoaked, is impossible to tell in a blind tasting. If you know the wine is from a great single vineyard with a high reputation, and the wine tastes overoaked, you can always say, “What a pity they overpowered the terroir with oak.” But what if the wine is (say) a Meritage sourced from various vineyards throughout Sonoma County? You can say it’s overoaked, but you can’t complain that the terroir has been compromised, because the wine by definition has no terroir, properly understood, unless you claim there is a special Sonoma County terroir; and if you do, you would have to claim there’s a special North Coast terroir, and even a special California terroir. It becomes more and more absurd and reductionist.

So it’s easy to show that winemaker intervention can just as easily enhance terroir as overpower it, and that leads to the notion of the winemaker learning from the vineyard. This is often overlooked, by the public and even by some critics, but it shouldn’t be. Christian Moueix once was quoted as saying it would take him 20 years to figure out how to make Dominus (and, in the event, he was right). Here, he strikes to the heart of the matter. It’s not just a question of the grower and vintner tinkering with oak forests or toast levels or yeast types. First they must listen to what the vineyard is saying to them. This is known by the producers of every great wine in the world. Just as a child with certain inherent talents may never be able to express those talents if he is forced into a role by his parents that doesn’t allow his inner uniqueness to express itself, so grapes need to be allowed to be themselves. If there is terroir in the vineyard, the winemaker must understand precisely how to allow it to be expressed through the proper oak regimen, canopy management, winery techniques, etc. It’s an ongoing process that implies an open-minded willingness to learn. But the proof is in the pudding, as reflected by the overwhelming dominance of single-vineyard wines in my highest scores over the years.

And that brings us to scott’s observation about “heart, soul and dreams.” It’s always tempting to get overly romantic and philosophical about fine wine, but in this care it’s justified. Scott is onto something. There is a relationship between terroir (which we think of as firmly rooted in physical parameters) and the winemaker’s mind or consciousness. A very fine wine reflects a very fine mind. There’s no blunter or more accurate way to put it. A wine mind, if you will. To make great wine, the winemaker first must think like a grape.

If a winemaker can obtain a great site and then think like a grape (and this implies his employer giving him the means to do so), then what you have is terroir + the human factor = what Peynaud calls cru. [pp. 225-226 in "The Taste of Wine"]. “A cru is the result of making the most of natural conditions, as we saw in the [discussion of the] human factors in quality.”

I’ve always loved vineyards. When I first started visiting wine country all I knew about vineyards (besides that they were pretty to look at) was that they were where the grapes came from that made the wine. Gradually, after I’d been walked through dozens of them by winemakers and growers, vineyards began to make a certain sense to me, and I started looking more closely at things like trellising, spacing and row orientation, not to mention soils and even what was growing inbetween the rows. I gradually developed an appreciation that a great vineyard is like any great work of art: inimitable and irreplaceable.

When I look over my highest-scoring wines in Wine Enthusiast’s database, it’s hard not to notice the prevalence of vineyard-designated bottlings. About 90-95 percent of my top scorers have borne either the name of a vineyard, or had the word “estate” or “estate-bottled” on the label.

These words, “estate” or “estate bottled,” are defined elastically by the Feds. The official TTB definition is “Estate Bottled means that 100 percent of the wine came from grapes grown on land owned or controlled by the winery, which must be located in a viticultural area. The winery must crush and ferment the grapes and finish, age, and bottle the wine in a continuous process on their premises. The winery and the vineyard must be in the same viticultural area.” In other words, if winery “X” has longterm contracts for grapes from several different growers in the same AVA, it can call the wine “estate bottled,” but that does not mean that it is from a single vineyard. However, in most cases, I know when the wine actually comes from a single vineyard, and I find, looking at the database, that my highest-scoring “estate” wines are indeed from individual vineyards.

Why should it be that the best wines come from individual vineyards?  Terroiristas insist that a wine grown in a single place shows a unique sense of that place. Of the wine we now know as Chateau Haut-Brion, Samuel Pepys wrote, on April 10, 1663, that “it hath a good and most particular taste,” a humble but sound description of this “placeness.” Professor Saintsbury, 270 years later, wrote (of an 1858 Romanée-Conti he drank when it was 25 years old) that it “hold[s] to the blood of its clan,” meaning, I think, that it was absolutely true to its terroir (not that Saintsbury ever used the word terroir). Throughout the literature of wine, you hear this stress on place. The Chablisians use the term fleur (flower) to describe those vineyards where Kimmeridigian clay, laden with limestone, rises to the surface. It’s their way of describing special places.

Old Europe, of course, has had a long time to figure out where the special places are to grow the most special wines. Here in California, people were not particularly obsessed with individual vineyards until comparatively recently — let’s say, the last 30 or 40 years. Heitz’s Cabernet Sauvignon from Martha’s Vineyard certainly put the concept of “the single vineyard” into the imaginations of wine lovers. There followed a rush to plant vineyards with the intention of making vineyard-designated wines. A case can be made that the most important viticultural development in California over the last 40 years has been planting the right varieties in the right climates. But equally important has been the development of very great vineyards dedicated to designated wines.

A sense of placeness always has been hard to define. Part of the reason a vineyard-designated wine tends to score highly may well be due to the mysteries of terroir, but it’s also because, with a single vineyard, a winemaker and grapegrower can achieve greater focus and concentration on the vines. It’s hard to pull everything together when you’re managing multiple vineyards. Even if you can control the timing of the pick, you can only be in one place to oversee the sorting area (where many sins occur). If the grapes have to be trucked over any distance to the winery, other unfortunate things can happen, including the premature beginning of fermentation, injury to the grapes, infection through insects, etc. But if you are working with one, single vineyard, located contiguously or close enough to the winemaking facility, it’s much more likely that your grapes will have been meticulously grown and harvested. This is why some wineries (Mondavi, Beaulieu) have created dedicated winemaking facilities for their top wines.

If you have never taken the time to familiarize yourself with a great vineyard, from the pebbles and dirt to the top of the canopy, do so next time you’re visiting wine country. Most likely you’ll find someone who’s delighted to give you a little tour. It will give you a deeper and more profound respect for great wine.

Two years ago, when I started playing in the blog sandbox, wine blogs seemed like the wave of the future.

The conventional wisdom was, Print was as dead as the dinosaurs, advertising was flooding away from magazines and newspapers to online, and an older generation of Baby Boomer critics was rapidly being killed off by young blogger guns, who were strangling the necks of old critics like a chicken in the hands of a poultry farmer.

Well, in the words of Churchill, “Some chicken; some neck.”

Even an organization that’s desperately trying to make a living from online blogging, Palate Press, ran an op-ed piece called “There’s a Reason No One Reads Wine Blogs,” that I largely agree with, although the author, Tom Johnson, is overly-broad in his conclusions. For one thing, it’s patently not true that “no one reads wine blogs.” Tens of thousands of people everyday read the top wine blogs, including mine.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s main indictment is that very few people read wine blogs compared to other kinds of blogs; “the top 100 wine blogs combined would be the 280th most popular blog in the country,” he argues. (Readers should be aware that all statistics regarding blog readership, including my own, are to be viewed with skepticism. There simply are no reliable metrics.)

Okay, so wine blogs aren’t as popular as political blogs, or technology blogs, or sports or celebrity entertainment blogs. I have no problem with that; it’s what I’d expect. Lots of people like to drink wine, but far fewer of them enjoy talking about it, the way people talk endlessly about March Madness or iPads or Sandra Bullock’s husband’s infidelity.

I’m not so sure, as Johnson advises, that wine bloggers should stop reviewing wine. They can write about whatever they want (Sonadora, this is for you). But the fact is that no wine blog is going to out-influence the most important wine magazines, including Wine Enthusiast, for anytime soon. That could change, under the right circumstances, but some very particular events would have to occur, in precisely the right way, and the odds of that happening presently are slight.

Johnson is right when he says that interlinking wine blogs is a good thing to do. That’s pretty obvious. It takes advantage of the structure and spirit of the Internet. I probably don’t interlink enough with other wine blogs, although, come to think of it, that’s exactly what I’m doing right now with Johnson’s and Sonadora’s Wannabe Wino’s. This interlinking is what makes these blog discussions so interesting.

But where I think Johnson misses the mark entirely  is in his hope that some quick fixes (of the type he recommends) will “make wine blogs relevant to wine drinkers” and therefore, miraculously make them into major economic factors in wine. I just don’t see that happening. A wine blog is, at most, a perfunctory daily stop for people, mostly in the industry or hoping to get into the industry. Does anybody really think that there’s anything a blog, or even an agglomeration of blogs (as some hope), can achieve the power and influence of a big wine magazine? I don’t think so.

What’s fueled the top blogs for the last few years is a hope that blogging will lead to something more rewarding. I’m not talking about wine bloggers who blog just for the heck of it. But, let’s get real here, there’s a ton of ambition among wine bloggers. Although some insist they’re not in it for the money, they doth protest a little too much. So, as the possibilities dwindle that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the blogging rainbow, I can’t see some of the top bloggers continuing to produce 3, 4, 5 well-written blogs a week. It’s a lot of work (more than the casual reader knows), without pay, or, even if the blogger accepts advertising (which I don’t), without much pay. Sooner or later, some bloggers are going to start wondering if it’s worth the hassle (or their spouses will make them start wondering).

People sometimes ask me why I spend so much time blogging about blogging, social media, etc. It’s because we’re talking about the future of wine writing and criticism in this country, and that’s something I have a stake in. I’d probably do myself more good, and make myself less of a target, by just talking about wine, terroir, etc. But wine writing is something I take as seriously as my retirement account. When the time comes, I want to hand it off, to whoever it may be, to people who believe in wine passionately, sincerely, with every ounce of their being. To people who are willing to live wine 24/7 — not just blog about the free sample somebody sent them yesterday. Fortunately, there are such bloggers out there; they know who they are. All I’m saying is that they’re not going to make a living doing it anytime soon. They’re going to have to either wait for the system to change, or they’re going to have to make it change, or get jobs within the system that will no longer allow them to freely blog on their own. I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s just the way it is.

P.S. On “Blood Into Wine“: I had a nice little part in that documentary about “Tool” frontman Maynard James Keenan, and I thought I came across pretty well. But I have to say this: They blind-tasted me on several wines, including Maynard’s. I didn’t like Maynard’s Arizona wine at all, but the filmmakers left that part out.

With Fess Parker’s death, which was announced by the family yesterday, I started thinking about all the wonderful people who helped shape the modern California wine industry — not way-old-timey people like Harazsthy or Georges de Latour, but the ones who, from the 1960s onward, pushed, pulled, promoted and did whatever they had to do to boost quality, and then let the world know what California could do.

Coincidentally, there came to me yesterday an email press release from Napa Valley College and the Culinary Institute of America announcing a special May 8 dinner in honor of Belle and Barney Rhodes, to “celebrate the[ir] significant contributions and impact…”.

Now, I suspect a lot of you never heard of Belle and Barney Rhodes, who are a married couple. But I want to tell you a little about them, and about some of their friends, who, in the 1960s, were directly responsible for helping make Napa Valley what it is today. (If you’re interested in attending the dinner, you can contact Holly Krassner at 707-252-7281, or holly@hkconnects.com.)

I first heard about Belle and Barney when I read through all of Harry Waugh’s wine diaries, 30 years ago. Harry was a Brit who was long connected with the London wine merchant and auctioneer, Harveys of Bristol, and also was a director of Chateau Latour. Born in 1904, he was already of considerable age when he received an invitation to visit Napa Valley. This had occurred after he ran into Fred and Eleanor McCrea, who had started Stony Hill, one evening in London. They invited him to visit next time Harry was in the States, and Harry dutifully set off his journey, in the Spring of 1969.

Harry already had made the acquaintance of William Dickerson, who ran the “First Growth Group,” a like-minded group of wealthy connoisseurs in San Francisco. Dickerson, learning of Harry’s impending visit, arranged for Harry to meet with Joe Heitz on his Napa trip. Harry’s plane landed on March 28, and who was at SFO to meet him? None other than Belle and Barney Rhodes.

Belle and Barney showed Harry everything there was to know about the wine scene back then. They took him to Esquin’s (later Draper & Esquin’s), the city’s finest wine shop (long since shut). They introduced him to Milt and Barbara Eisele, and served to him “an entirely new name to me [Harry wrote], a Schramsberg, elegant, distinguished and very good indeed.” That was only one of the vinous revelations Harry discovered on that trip. He tasted Louis M. Martini Cabernets from 1955, 1952, 1951 and 1947 (preferring the latter), and three white wines made from another winery Harry never heard of, Hanzell. He tasted the Mendocino wines of John Parducci, and met Dr. Richard Peterson, then Beaulieu’s winemaster (and father of Heidi Peterson Barrett), who served him a Tchelistcheff 1968 Pinot Noir, which he (Harry) called “a huge rich wine…I would like to lay my hands on a case of this.” The Rhodeses also took Harry to meet a rising star vintner, Robert Mondavi…to Buena Vista, in Sonoma Valley…to Mayacamas, where he was hosted by Bob and Noni Travers and declared their 1967 Cabernet “another for my collection.”

I could go on and on, but the important point is that, when Harry went back to Europe, he talked up California wine to “the right people,” at a time when the smart money in London (and, by extension, Paris and Bordeaux) thought California produced nothing but movie stars and plonk.

The Rhodeses were to host Harry several more times on subsequent visits, and in his books Harry always referred to “the Rhodeses splendid kindness to me.” Years later, on yet another visit, they took him to “an extremely popular restaurant called Mustard’s,” and introduced him to yet another generation of boutique winemakers: the Trefethens, Cakebreads, Joe Phelps, Ric Forman from Sterling, Freemark Abbey, Dominus. And once again, Harry wrote about these wines, and connoisseurs the world over learned about Napa Valley, and the excellence of its wines, from an enthusiastic Harry, who probably would not have understood without Belle and Barney Rhodes to guide him.

It was my great privilege to travel for a week with Harry through Washington State, when he was already nearly 90 years old and a little shaky, and the state wine commission asked me to help him (he had come entirely alone). I feel connected to much in the past through reading Harry Waugh’s books and from actually having known him. Nobody should dwell on the past for very long, but it’s worth remembering, from time to time, that we didn’t just get here automatically, like Athena springing from Zeus’s brow. People, like Belle and Barney Rhodes and Harry Waugh, make things happen.

I’ve railed and ranted before at every attack on wine that’s hidden behind the excuse of “preventing alcoholism.” (See some of my stuff about the Marin Institute.) I usually think there’s a hidden agenda coming from a neo-prohibitionist lobby that wouldn’t mind outlawing alcohol all over again — a disaster last time we tried it, and it would be just as disastrous if we did it again, for the same reasons why the “war on drugs” has been a disaster.

But I digress. Yesterday, I came across this blog, written by a psychologist, Sarah Allen Benton, and entited The Great Wine Myth. After my first read-through, I thought, “There they go again, the anti-wine fanatics. Why do they get so upset that some of us like wine?” But then I read it a second time, and a third.

I’ll give Ms. Benton this: she’s got a point, although she’s also wide of the mark in some respects. I’ll get to her point in a minute, but first: Where I disagree with her is when she says there’s a problem with people who feel they’re being compelled to drink wine against their will, even though they don’t want to. For example, she writes, “I am hearing from those struggling with alcohol problems, that their friends are encouraging them to drink wine with them at their homes or at restaurants-ignoring the fact that their individual has a drinking problem. During dinner parties, glasses are filled and re-filled without guests even noticing or being able to keep track.”

Well, a couple things. First of all, I don’t see why these dinner party guests who don’t want to drink can’t just tell their host, “No thank you, I’d much prefer a nice cold glass of water,” or something like that. Nobody’s twisting anybody’s arm to drink at a party or in a restaurant. And not keeping track? If you know you can’t handle more than a glass, then you need help if you’re downing five. Of course, if the person who’s constantly refilling their guest’s glass knows that the guest has a drinking problem, then that person is a total idiot — and the guest might want to rethink the friendship. Friends don’t make friends who are alcoholics drink.

I also don’t quite get it when Benton writes about patients who complain that “every social function that they attend revolves around drinking, particularly wine and that they feel like they won’t fit in if they are not drinking.” Again, what ever happened to self-control? Isn’t it possible for these people to politely decline wine? I don’t know anybody who would resent or feel weird about a friend who didn’t feel like drinking alcohol at a social function. I have alcoholics in my family (more than one), and when we get together, the rest of us drink all we want to, the alcoholics don’t, and nobody blames anyone for anything. The lines are clearly drawn, and if there’s mutual respect and understanding, there’s no problem.

But Benton makes some good points. Her title, “The Great Wine Myth,” alludes to the fact that there probably is a tendency among some people to think that wine is somehow different from beer or hard liquor — that it’s cleaner, or healthier, or more refined than, say, a shot of cheap Scotch or malt liquor. Wine may be more refined in a cultural sense, but Benton’s point is that alcohol is alcohol, regardless of if “you are sipping on Chardonnay or chugging a 40-ounce beer in a paper bag.” That’s true. I myself drink more than most people would consider healthy. So do lots of people I know in the wine industry. I’m aware of the deleterious effects of alcohol, including calories. That’s why I hit the gym regularly, eat right and take good care of my body. And I would never, ever insist that a guest in my home drink wine, unless they were eager to do so.

So, bottom line: You wrote a generally fair essay, Ms. Benton. You made some good points. People should be incredibly sensitive to their guests’ needs and limitations. It’s called politeness, and it’s a human value as old as time.