If I’ve achieved any reputation at all with regard to California Sauvignon Blanc, it’s been as a debunker. It’s not my favorite variety.  Too often, I’ve found the wines lacking in any of several dimensions. On the expensive side, they’re overworked, with too much oak and lees, the result of a winemaker infatuation with white Bordeaux. On the inexpensive side, they’re insipid and sweet.

But about a year ago I began to notice a change, toward greater subtlely and complexity. My assumption was that this was due to two factors: a greater sensitivity on the part of winemakers that Sauvignon Blanc need not be merely a throwaway second wine, but one that shows real ambition; and cooler vintages. Of course, the precarious danger of the latter is unripeness, especially in the cat pee aromas and flavors I’m not supposed to use in my official Wine Enthusiast reviews, because they think that term is vulgar. But it sure does tell the truth, doesn’t it?

However, like I said, this past year has shown me some magnificent Sauvignon Blancs. Among them I would mention Mondavi’s 2009 To Kalon I Block (no surprise there),  Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars 2010, Dutton Estate’s 2010 Cohen Ranch, Rochioli’s 2011, Mayacamas’s 2010 from Mount Veeder, Cade’s 2010 Estate, Long Meadow Ranch’s 2011, Hand Made by Marketta’s 2009, Stonestreet’s 2010 from Alexander Valley, Hartwell’s 2010, and Twomey’s 20112, which bears a Napa-Sonoma appellation.

What I love about all these Sauvignon Blancs are three things: dryness, acidity and streamlined flavor. Dryness is so essential to Sauvignon Blanc, I don’t even know how to begin to describe it. The slightest hint of residual sugar is, to me, a cardinal sin in a wine like Sauv Blanc. Acidity also is vital. Of course, you want good acidity in any wine, but in Sauvignon Blanc, which is supposed to be racy, it’s especially important. And then there’s flavor. I don’t ask for much, but I do want my Sauvignon Blancs to be ripe enough to avoid excessive cat pee, not to mention the veggies.

All the wines I mentioned above succeed admirably in all these parameters. Still, the highest score I’ve given a Sauvignon Blanc this year is the Mondavi ‘09 To Kalon I-Block, which, at 93 points, is respectable, but way short of the massive scores I gave to Chardonnays such as Failla’s 2010 Estate, Dutton-Goldfield’s 2010 Dutton Ranch Rued Vineyard, Rochioli’s 2010 South River Vineyard, Lynmar’s 2010 Susanna’s Vineyard or Roar’s 2010 Sierra Mar Vineyard. Why?

In three words, I love richness. Yes, that makes me something of a slut. But mere richness, even with tons of new, flashy oak, doesn’t work for me. I’ve given horrible scores to wines of that ilk. The strange thing, which I confess I don’t entirely understand, is that there are certain foods, which I eat on a regular basis, that I would far prefer to pair with a 90 point Sauvignon Blanc than with a 96 point Chardonnay. Sushi comes to mind. So does bruschetta with goat cheese, which I prepare often, or a salad of bitter greens. Almost anything Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Ethiopian or Indian–all foods I eat a lot of in ethnically-diverse Oakland–goes better with a dry Sauvignon Blanc than a rich Chardonnay. Still, I give Chardonnay the nod.

Why?

Feel free to weigh in, because my mind is far from made up. I suppose a good part of the equation is because Chardonnay is more seductively appealing than Sauvignon Blanc. Like you, I have an eye for an attractive human being: Chardonnay is sexy. Sauvignon Blanc is the person at the party who’s intellectual, not hot. You want to go home with the Chardonnay and have pleasure. With the Sauvignon Blanc, you want to go out for drinks, or coffee, have a conversation, and see where it does.

Before I get too carried away, let me just say that I’m open on this topic of whether Chardonnay automatically is better than Sauvignon Blanc. I think it is–my scores reflect it–but I have enough self-examinative doubt to wonder.

A fellow named Jeremy Ball, whom I met at last March’s World of Pinot Noir (his company, Bottle Branding, was the official videographer), sent me this YouTube, in which Yours Truly makes a brief appearance.

I watched it, and then later, as I was walking Gus, I found myself thinking of something Francis Ford Coppola told me a few weeks ago, that in his humble opinion a winery can be considered great and important only if it’s been around for at least 50 years, and been making great wine all that time. (Of course, he was talking about his resurrection of the Inglenook brand.)

When I watched the video I saw lots of producers who make great wine–Paul Lato, for example–but their careers have been relatively brief in California. Then Brian Talley showed up, and I remembered that it was a younger Brian, blonde, handsome and sun-tanned, who picked me up at the San Luis Obispo airport 22 or 23 years ago for one of my first forays outside the Bay Area as a newbie wine writer. I was visiting his Talley Vineyards, already acquiring a high reputation at that point as the premier Pinot Noir producer along that stretch of the Central Coast.

It occurs to me that, by any reasonable definition, you’d have to call Talley an important winery, even though it doesn’t meet Mr. Coppola’s 50-year standard. Well, few wineries in California do, and even those that are that old might fail to meet the standard of importance for other reasons.

So here’s what I think a winery needs to be considered important. I’ll stick to Pinot Noir producers for now.

1. It should be “old” by the relative standards of both California in general and its region. Thus, for example, it’s impossible for (say) a Santa Lucia Highlands winery to be anywhere near as old as a Napa Valley winery. But it can be a S.L.H. veteran by local standards. Pisoni Vineyards, whose launch was only in 1998 but whose plantation, by Gary Pisoni, dates to 1982, meets that condition.

2. All during its existence it has to have been producing wines universally acknowledged as great. By this parameter, there are several important Pinot Noir producers in California: Rochioli, Williams Selyem, Joseph Swan, among a few others.

3. It should have led, and continue to lead, in terms of individuality of style and consistent expression of its terroir. Here, one thinks automatically of a winery like Calera, which has had its reputational ups and downs over the decades, but always has hewed tightly to its style–a balanced, earthy Pinot that’s now returning to fashion.

4. The wines should be ageworthy, although this of course is relative. All of the above wines are easily capable of more than a decade in a good cellar, providing the wine was sound to begin with.

Importance, or greatness, of reputation isn’t easy to achieve, nor should it be. Nowadays, there are wineries that attempt to buy reputational importance through a variety of manipulations: a significant investment of money upfront, association with famous names, pricing based on hubris, the buzz of the media. But no such winery should be called important by any self-respecting writer with any sense of history. Importance, greatness, call it what you will, can only be achieved the old-fashioned way: through the four parameters I outlined above.

Yesterday’s stunning news that more minority babies are being born in the U.S. than white babies, for the first time ever, has tremendous implications for the domestic wine industry. The problem, which in my opinion the wine industry has never wanted to admit much less deal with, is that wine is pretty much an upscale beverage for white people of European heritage. That’s worked well, in the past, but with these demographic changes (California already has more people of color than whites), a strategy that used to work seems destined to fail in the future.

I don’t see Latino or Hispanic people drinking wine, and the same goes for Asians and Blacks. African-Americans seem to prefer fortified drinks, like cognac, or beer, if they drink at all. The same goes for Latinos. Asian people don’t seem to drink very much wine either. Of course, as members of any one of these groups make money through the professions, they’re more likely to enjoy wine. But the explosion of minorities in America is mostly due to immigration and birth rates, and those two groups–immigrants and babies–tend not to be wine drinkers! Wine drinkers have always been, as the study says, the country’s “economic and political elites [who] remain essentially white and primarily male.” Of course, women buy a lot of wine, too, but they’re white women.

What should the wine industry be doing about it? To begin with, they need to stop being complacent. And let there be no doubt, there is a lot of complacency in California. Most people still get into the business for aspirational and lifestyle considerations. If they have a plan at all (which they don’t), it’s to sell their wine to people like them: white, well off, educated, living on the coasts or in the nation’s urban hubs. That is not a marketing strategy.

If you don’t believe me, then you haven’t been to Napa Valley, Santa Barbara, the Russian River Valley, the Monterey Peninsula or other regions in California’s wine country lately. They’re all beautiful places, like movie sets, with gorgeous scenery, fancy restaurants, chichi shops, trendy bars, and designer clothes. They’re also overwhelmingly white. About the only people of color you see in wine country are Mexican immigrants who work in the fields or clean white people’s houses. At fancy wine events, there’s a smattering of Asians, but I think you could count them on the fingers of two hands at an event like Premier Napa Valley. As for African-Americans, you’d never know that America even had any, if you limited your explorations to wine country.

I point out these inconvenient truths not to embarrass or confront the wine industry, but to make the point that it’s going to have to figure out how to get everyone to drink wine, if it wants to stay viable in 10, 20, 30 years. Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence that anyone’s really thinking about this. Look at the advertisements in wine magazines, and ask yourself if there’s anything there that would entice a person of color to buy wine.

There was so much hope in the air on May 16-17, 1990, exactly 22 years ago, at the International Colloquium on Rhône Varietals, which I was privileged to cover as my first major feature story when I became a professional wine writer.

Syrah and its fellow Rhône grapes and wines, Mourvedre and Grenache, weren’t widely planted in California, and certainly weren’t known by a large segment of the wine-drinking community. But experts understood the importance of those grapes in the Rhône Valley, and adherents were tinkering with them right here in California, and up into Washington State.

The three-day conference, which was held at Meadowood, in the Napa Valley, was organized by Richard Keehn, then proprietor of McDowell Valley Vineyards, which at the time was an important outpost of Rhône-style wines; Bruce Neyers, the then president of Joseph Phelps Vineyards, and, on the French side, Gerard Pierrefeu, president of the Comité Interprofessionel des Vins, and a high ranking member of the A.O.C. organization.

I was contributing short articles at that time to another wine magazine, when the phone rang one day. It was my editor. He had an emergency. The writer who had been assigned to go to the conference had fallen ill; my editor wanted to know if I could substitute in his place. When is it? I asked. Tomorrow. Well, I knew I could do a good job and that if I did, it would advance me in the esteem of my editor and publisher. So I went, and I did a good job.

The first thing a writer should do, on going to something like that conference, is sniff the air. I don’t mean literally, I mean that metaphorically. Take the pulse of the occasion; feel it out. Is there tension? Follow it. Tension means conflict, which translates to good, strong writing–if you can capture that lightning in a can.

And I felt plenty of tension. This was 1990, mind you. If I can characterize the psychology on both sides–the Californians and the French–it was this: the Californians wanted to learn (steal) as much as they could from the French, about everything from rootstocks and weed control to pruning and maceration times. The French? They felt they had nothing whatsoever to learn from the upstart Californians–rien! But they had been hearing things across the pond, rumors that these Californians were rich, ambitious, and coming on strong–and that they had great weather all the time. That was scary. After all, it hadn’t been that long since the Paris Tasting had scandalized tout France. So the French came over to see what the heck was going on.

They were a haughty, supercilious lot, those Frenchmen. I think they came prepared to do war. Pierrefeu later wrote that he had expected “hostile behavior” to ensue; that’s how heated was the potential for explosion.

Mercifully, no explosions occurred. People in general behaved themselves quite well. The point of all this is, however, a sad one. Expectations among the Californians (Randall Grahm, Bob Lindquist, Craig Williams, Kevin Hamel, John Buechsenstein, Fred and Matt Cline, John MacReady and Lou Preston) were enormous. These were men who had staked their claims, not on Cabernet Sauvignon, but on Syrah as the red wine of the future. (Well, Craig was also making top Cabernets at Phelps, so I should exclude him from that generalization.) They were as sure as sure can be that Syrah (and maybe even Chateauneuf-style blends) was the Next Big Thing. It was their excitement I sniffed in the air alongside the hauteur of the French. I tried to capture that sensation in my article.

We all know what happened. Syrah was not the Next Big Thing. In fact, some of the wineries represented at Meadowood began a decline when Syrah tanked, or failed to take off. They simply put their money on the wrong horse.

Still, I look at the International Colloquium on Rhône Varietals as a milestone in the history of California wine. It wasn’t as dramatic as The French Paradox episode on Sixty Minutes, or as impactful as the phylloxera epidemic (both of those events also occurred in the 1990s). But symbolically, it placed California on an equal footing with some of the greatest names in French wine, and it did so on a California stage. The French, despite themselves, by their very presence acknowledged that they had to treat the Californians as equals.

The 2010 vintage was one of the most peculiar I ever saw. (2011 was too.) It was, in short, cold. Californians aren’t used to chilly summers, and neither are grapes. The resulting wines were problematic.

That the harvest was problematic is testified by numerous statements from winemakers. Hidden Ridge, a fine winery that straddles the Mayacamas on the Napa-Sonoma border, declassified the entire vintage. A Napa vintner, who did not want to be identified, called the valley’s Cabernets “weak,” the problems being “high pH, low acid and a lack of concentration,” which is not a formula for success. I had a discussion, on Nov. 5 of that year, with the winemaker and assistant winemaker at Merryvale that boiled down to this question: how disastrous was 2010? Their conclusion was that, just because the Cabernets are “minty” and “herbal” doesn’t necessarily mean the wines are not of high quality.

That’s an interesting assertion. It harkens back to the notion that a vin de terroir will display its nobility even in a poor vintage. I suppose that’s true; and for sure, a wine like Lafite generally will perform better than its neighbors in a poor vintage, all other things being equal. Still, faced with the choice of drinking a mediocre noble wine and a rich common wine, I’d probably choose the latter.

Back to 2010: In my Vintage Diary I quoted the Santa Rosa Press Democrat newspaper, in late October, with this nightmare statement: “2010 was the worst grape harvest in recent memory, with financial losses possibly setting new records in the county…Many growers are still assessing their financial losses from crop damage that began with a mid-season mold outbreak and worsened with an August heat wave that scorched grapes and ruined entire fields…Last weekend’s rain added to an already miserable season. It spawned mold…Damaged fruit was left hanging on the vine.”

This awful scenario was repeated up and down the coast. Pinot Noir in particular suffered from mold. Now, when I do reviews, I’m not supposed to use the word “mold,” because I don’t have the ability to send wines to a laboratory and have them properly tested. But I can tell you that dozens and dozens of 2010 Pinots smell moldy to me. Keep in mind, I could quote certain Pinot Noir winemakers, some of them very famous, who told me, in the Fall of 2010, how fine their Pinot grapes were; but you’d rightfully mistrust those statements as being biased, because they are. The proof is in the smell.

Having said that, the best Pinot Noir houses produced some mighty good wines. This had to have been the result of careful selection, thereby diminishing case quantities from what was already a short harvest. Some of my personal favorite 2010 Pinot Noirs include Rochioli West Block, Foxen Block UU Bien Nacido, Siduri Hirsch (that must have given Adam Lee some anxious moments), most of Lynmar’s Pinots, and an interesting Sandhi Sanford & Benedict.

And Cabernet? Not looking good. I was shocked, just now, to go over every 2010 Cab I’ve tasted so far and discover that I’ve given only one of them 90 points. Everything else was in the 80s. I don’t think that would have been true of any previous Cabernet vintage, at this point, 17 months after the harvest. Of course, most of the top tier Cabernets haven’t been released yet, so there’s hope, but I think we’ll look back at 2010 and conclude it wasn’t a good year for Cabernet, either.

That doesn’t mean the top houses won’t produce splendid Cabs. I would think the best will come from the warmer regions. East Oakville, for example, could reward; ditto for Pritchard Hill, Calistoga, and St. Helena. Yountville might be compromised, and the mountains, including Spring, Diamond and Veeder. I’ll try to resurrect this post in two years and see if my prognostications bear any resemblance to reality.

I’m always faintly amused, but bothered, when someone representing a winery thanks me for being a “supporter.” It happens with some frequency. I’ll give a wine a good review, or mention it favorably in an article, and next thing you know I’m getting a signed “thank you” card in the mail, or an email, or a phone call, telling me how much they appreciate my support, often “over the years.”

I say this amuses me, because it suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the wine critic. We’re not here to “support” anyone, we’re here to say what we think of any given wine. But I also say this thankfulness bothers me, because I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I was consciously “supporting” any particular winery. That could lead to serious misreadings of situations. For instance, what if I give high scores to a winery that advertises in Wine Enthusiast? I don’t ever consider whether or not a winery advertises when I conduct my reviews (which are single blind in any case), but I am aware that the wine industry sees my reviews and may arrive at different conclusions–especially if a representative of that winery (owner, winemaker, P.R. person) is going around saying what a great supporter Steve is of their winery.

I can understand the instinct to thank someone for a good deed. It’s part of etiquette and politeness, so I don’t want to tell people to never thank me. When others have written something nice about me, I’ll often thank them. But the difference between someone writing something nice about me, and me reviewing a wine, is stark. In the former case, the person went out of his way to single me out for praise. He didn’t have to, but he took the time to give me a compliment. That’s deserving of thanks.

In the latter case, I’m not singling anyone out for praise nor am I going out of my way. I’m just reviewing their wine because they sent it to me. If it happens to score 95 points, it’s not because I have any warm, personal feelings toward that winery or winemaker (although I might). It’s because the wine is excellent. It speaks for itself; I, as the critic, am simply there to recognize its excellence. Therefore, when somebody calls me up to thank me, I have a standard response: Don’t thank me, thank your winemaker, or your viticulturalist; preferably both. Thank yourself! You’re the ones who did something worthy of thanks. I’m just the messenger.

There is a subtle but profound difference between a genuine supporter and a messenger who happens to give the wine a glowing review. A genuine supporter can be a consumer with nothing to gain by praising the wine–he or she simply loves it and wants to let their friends know. That is the purest form of support: grass roots word-of-mouth.

Then there are paid genuine supporters. This may be a P.R. or marketing person. She’s a “genuine” supporter in that she really does want the winery to do well, but there are agendas here that are not as transparent as they ought to be. This type of supporter is known as an “internal source.” [See these graphics for more explanation of brand advocacy and sourcing.

We wine writers have to be extremely wary about firewalls. In one of the graphics in the article I just cited, they talk about “external sources,” people not employed by the winery, but “Domaine experts with authority, reputation and social rank.” The best external source for brand promotion is the wine critic. This is the old “argument from authority,” and there’s nothing new about it; humankind always has turned to recognized experts in any field (knowledge of God, of healing plants, of books and, yes, of wine). Just because the technology nowadays of computers, the Internet and social media has changed doesn’t mean that the basic form and content of the argument from authority is any different from what it’s ever been.

The wariness we critics have to maintain stems from statements like this one: “With 90 percent of purchases subject to social influence, it’s no surprise that savvy marketers are looking to leverage social influencers to increase sales and awareness.” It’s fine if a savvy marketer (I am starting to hate that word “savvy”) wants to “leverage” a Heimoff review in any way she truthfully can to boost the brand’s reputation and sales. That’s her job. Mine is to protect my reputation for integrity by thwarting any and all efforts to make it look like I personally am endorsing any brand. I’m not.

Like you, I honored my mother yesterday. Gertrude died 6-1/2 years ago, at the age of 90, after a brief bout with cancer. I was with her when she passed, in the hospital. It was just the two of us, at 6:03 a.m. Something very mystical and inexplicable happened to me at the instant of her death, that I will always remember, but which I will not write about here.

Gertrude came to enjoy wine as she aged, especially after she moved to California. Her son–me–was, of course, making his living as a wine writer, so there was never any shortage of wine. She preferred Chardonnay, preferably a little sweet and oaky. That was something; I don’t think she’d ever tasted a decent wine in her life before she was 75. What wine she’d had was the occasional icky-sweet sip of Manischevitz, usually for a Jewish holiday. In that she was no different from my other family members of that generation. They didn’t know about wine, didn’t care about it, probably thought it was exotic and snobby; goyisch. The only reason they schlepped out the Manischevitz was because taking a little wine is part of the Jewish tradition, especially Passover.

Mom did like her Bloody Marys, though, although she was never a big drinker when I was growing up. Too much to get done, what with raising the kids, keeping the household running and, by the way, returning to school, in her 40s, to get her teaching credential and becoming the only mom I knew, of the vast hoards of Baby Boomer kids running around the Bronx, who worked for a living. (I know, being a mom is work. In that case, Gertrude had two jobs.) I was proud of her for that.

But like I said, after she moved to California, around 1994, she started drinking more. She had come from a dry culture to a wet one, and responded accordingly. When in Rome… I never saw her drunk, but I would watch her take a third glass of wine at a family gathering, growing more animated, her eyes sparkling a little more than usual, and it made me happy. In many respects, Gertrude’s wine journey paralleled that of America’s. As wine became more and more an accepted part of the culture in the 1990s, it became a more accepted part of Gertrude’s life, too. I remember the first time she asked me to bring “a couple of extra bottles” for her the next time I visited, so she could have something cold in the fridge for when she had “the girls” over to her apartment, which was in a nice retirement community.

Mom in 2004. See her little Kerry-Edwards button.

My father, Jack, who died 30 years ago, had been a purchasing agent for a major defense plant, on Long Island. Every Christmas, he would come home laden with bottles of scotch, gin, vodka, peppermint schnapps and cognac, gifts from clients who wished to let him know how grateful they were for him buying their company’s wares. He never brought home wine. But Jack wasn’t a big drinker, either, so he’d throw all those bottles of liquor in the closet. When I was 17, and about to leave home for the first time to go to college, I determined to see what getting drunk was all about, since, I figured, that’s what college students do, so I might as well get in some target practice. I purloined a bottle of Jack’s booze–what it was I have long since forgotten; could it have have been rye?–and, with my friend Charlie, my bad boy pal from down the block, I got blind-eyed drunk. I remember stumbling home, around midnight, with my parents already in bed. I was crashing into things, knocking stuff over, making a lot of noise. But my parents didn’t wake up.

During my freshman year in college, I drank way too much. I was away from home for the first time, free, liberated, ready to be the wild party boy I’d never been before. My crowd drank a lot of cheap stuff: Thunderbird, Ripple, Bali Hai. On some days we were drinking by 10 a.m. This period did not last long, however, because I realized, in some vestigial way, that I was drinking too much–that I probably had a propensity for addiction–that I’d better cut it down. I did. Ever since, I’ve understood that I have to control my alcohol intake. I never drink during the day, not even a glass of wine with lunch. Lord knows I make up for it at night, but I don’t think I drink too much. It’s very important for people in this industry to control themselves.

Looking back over all my relatives, on both sides of the family, I don’t think anyone ever had a drinking problem. My mother’s brothers, who were from Oklahoma and Texas, were southern gentlemen who loved their “bourbon and branch water,” but I never saw them get drunk, either. I myself drink hardly any hard liquor. I do love a dry vodka martini; the taste of gin does not agree with me. I’ll have beer on a very hot day, which doesn’t occur much in the Bay Area.

So how did I honor my mother yesterday? With Champagne, of course; but that was only the outward form. I honored her with memory.