In 1989, I lost my job. I’d gone to grad school (S.F. State) to get my M.A. in Educational Technology, a weird hybrid of a major that the school designed because they understood that computers were going to be important, but they didn’t know which department should investigate their uses. So they stuck it in education. It was a silly major, and I never used a single thing I learned (BASIC?); but I did work on campus in the Career Center, so I learned a thing or two about college career counseling, and when it came time to get my first post-graduate job, it was as the director of the career planning and placement center at California College of Arts & Crafts (now California College of the Arts), here in Oakland.

As jobs go, it was a disaster. I struggled for the better part of three years to make it work, but ran into academic politics of the worst kind. I was hopeless at the backstabbing and maneuvering it takes to survive campus in-struggles, with the result that the school’s personnel director called me into her office one day and told me it was all over. Everything I’d gone to school for, and worked so hard to achieve, went down the toilet.

I was in shock. Fired from my first job! I thought I’d never recover from the blow. Went home, slept, drank, lost myself in a whirlwind of indulgence. I had no money, a mortgage and car payments to pay, the whole dreary mess. Needed a new job asap. But what? That’s when I told myself, “Self, you can’t go through another debacle. It’s pretty obvious you’re not cut out to be a suit-and-tie wearing, briefcase-toting bureaucrat. You’re a creative, fanciful, non-conforming independent sort, and you need to do something that allows you to express that part of yourself.”

As a career counselor, I’d often told my students, “When it comes to choosing a job, don’t just pick something you think will earn you money. You’re going to be working for the next 30, 40 years, and studies tell us that 70% of Americans hate their jobs. Do you really want to be doing something you hate until you’re 65? So find your passion, and get a job doing something you love.”

I asked myself, What do I love? Two things: writing and wine. I practically came out of my mother’s womb wanting to write. I can distinctly remember being 3 years old and doodling on pieces of paper, pretending I was writing in script. I couldn’t wait to write. I was an early, avid reader and an early, avid writer. I was writing poems and short stories by ten. So I knew I wanted to do something involving writing.

And I loved wine. Fell head over heels in love with it in the late Seventies. Went off the edge, around the bend, out of my mind in the pursuit of wine knowledge, way beyond what any normal person should do. So in that awful aftermath of getting fired, I decided to put the two things I loved together. Writing + wine = wine writer.

Fine, but how to make it happen? I did a lot of visualising (a method of thought projection and imagination that was popular in those days). I established a resumé by writing for our local free newsweekly, the East Bay Express, and for the Oakland Tribune as a stringer. I quickly developed writing skills: how to construct a story, come up with a strong lead, check facts, meet deadlines and word counts, work with editors. And then it was time to find an actual wine writing job. I think I’ve previously described here on my blog how I pestered Jim Gordon, at Wine Spectator, so mercilessly that he finally broke down and gave me an assignment. And the rest, as they say, is history.

If there are lessons to be learned by my experience — and I think there are — it’s that younger writers who want to make it in wine writing should do these things:

1. educate yourself as thoroughly as possible in wine.
2. work constantly on your writing skills.
3. believe in your dream.

Of course, things are a lot different now than they were when I started. Back in 1989, few people wanted to be wine writers, so the field was wide open. Today, everybody seems to want to be a wine writer. Another thing that’s different is the advent of the Internet. In 1989, you could only be a wine writer if somebody hired you to be one, because only publishers controlled the press. Today, anybody can blog. Self-publishing is an advantage, but it’s also a liability, because the very ease of digital publishing means that young wannabe wine writers might not discipline themselves with the severity needed to mold an unformed passion into honed talent. It’s always taken talent to make it as a wine writer. Still does.

Every so often, as the defender of Trust, Justice and California wine, I have to stand up for my state against the heathens who attack it. This can be dirty, hard work, but somebody has to do it.

There are certain templates in wine journalism that writers drag out when they’re on deadline and can’t figure out anything better to write about. One of these is to bash California wine for being (you know where this is going) too high in alcohol. Asimov, over at the Times, does it a lot. It’s a Pavlovian response, I suppose, because when these writers level that accusation, they get rewarded by all kinds of citations and agreements from elsewhere that burnish their halos as arbiters of good taste. The latest bashathon comes, unfortunately, not from a New Yawkah but from a Californian, a good writer named Jordan Mackay, the wine and spirits editor for a magazine I once wrote for, San Francisco. (The article is not yet available online.)

Let’s start with Jordan’s headline: “The fruit bomb resistance.” I was actually alerted to the article by my cousin Keith, who knows a little but not too much about wine. He’d saved it for me because, he explained, he found himself largely agreeing with it. After I read it, I told Keith that the article could have been written years ago, and, in fact, was, by Dr. Vino, in his blog, “Is the clock ticking on hedonistic fruit bombs?” People have been complaining about high alcohol in California wine for a decade if not longer, so the point is rather stale. (I also told Keith that, if he doesn’t like these high alcohol California wines, I can always stop bringing them to his house, an idea he didn’t seem to support.)

Jordan early on in his tale posits the existence of “the long-standing rift between the high alcohol faction and the low alcohol camp…that has become increasingly wide.” But there is really no such “rift” in California. To suggest that there is is to set up a straw man and a false basis on which to advance one’s argument. Jordan, having identified himself with the “low alcohol camp,” now uses phrases such as “a world gone mad with its attraction to high alcohol wines” as a way to paint such wines as liked only by crazy people. He next points out how Alan Meadows, the Burghound, “has shown a willingness to criticize wines for over-ripeness and excessive alcohol,” as though such a “willingness” on the part of a professional critic were a kind of begrudged conversion from a position previously defended to a more rational conclusion–namely, one that Jordan agrees with. But good critics will criticize any wine for imbalance, including wines unbalanced with high alcohol. I do all the time. To use the phrase “show a willingness” is misleading. One shows a willingness to change one’s mind even though to do so may be painful. But I’ve never heard of a critic who pulled a 180 from admiring high alcohol wines to criticizing them. Parker likes high alcohol wines and consistently defends them, which is why, I think, Jordan refers to him as a “sneering” critic.

Jordan also trots out the old fable that a high alcohol wine “rarely exhibits any sense of the vineyard where its grapes were grown.” (As if a lower alcohol single vineyard wine is guaranteed to exhibit terroir.) Really? The Paul Hobbs 2007 Stagecoach Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon begs to differ. So does Janzen’s ‘07 Cloudy’s Vineyard Cabernet and, moving into other varieties, Melville’s 2009 Carrie’s Pinot Noir and Diatom’s 2009 Babcock Vineyard Chardonnay and others I could name. All these wines exceed 15% in alcohol. And that’s not even counting all the great wines with official alcohols of 14.9% but could well be, and in many cases are, into the 15s, given the Fed’s wide latitude in such matters. So I often wonder if these high alcohol bashers don’t make up their minds by simply looking at the label and thinking, “Hmm, if it’s 15-plus percent, it can’t be good.”

Most of my highest scoring wines are below 15% (assuming the labels are accurate). That’s true across the varietal board. But that’s precisely my point: when people like Jordan criticize California wines that are well into the 15s, they’re deliberately seeking out unbalanced high alcohol wines. Any wine region produces unbalanced wines. California has plenty of 15-plus wines that are hot and flabby, and when I review them, I knock them down. What gets me is the implication that all high alcohol California wines are unbalanced because some are unbalanced. And even worse is the implication that most California wines are high in alcohol except for the handful (Corison, ABC, etc.) Jordan approvingly cites. Most California wines are not high in alcohol. I suspect I taste a lot more California wines than Jordan, so I’m on firmer ground than he is when I declare that the majority of California wines are below 15%, including a majority of the great ones.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve always said you can’t bash wines just because the alcohol level is high. So when Jordan writes “…drinking a wine with a high level of alcohol…gets in the way of my enjoyment,” he’s putting down an entire class of California wines that have enjoyed the support of, not only consumers, but a majority of the world’s wine critics. It may be true that some people such as Rajat Parr (whom Jordan references, and also explains is his coauthor for Secrets of the Sommeliers) also bash high alcohol wines, but to cite Parr in such matters, as opposed to, say, Parker, is simply to bring a friendly but prejudiced witness to the stand to testify in your behalf. Rajat Parr is just another celebrity somm with a bias against California wines, as anyone who’s read Secrets of the Sommeliers knows only too well.

I figured I’d weigh in on Tom Wark’s impressive new survey on wine writers, which has garnered considerable attention. Its main bullet-point findings, as the press release on Business Wire says, are that “American wine writers are getting younger, are more female than in past years, are abandoning print for digital, don’t appreciate the work of publicists and marketers that court them and are very concerned about the economic difficulties that have effected the publishing industry.”

(You can find the entire PDF of the study here.)

It’s obviously good that wine writing is feminizing, as is everything else in America, as women now go to college in equal numbers to men and have equal (or nearly so) access in the workplace. All during my professional career here in California I’ve known and been surrounded by female wine writers, so this isn’t surprising to me. I think women bring a more humanizing touch to wine writing than do men, and about time. We’ve been talking a lot about the human touch lately here on the old blog, and that impetus is being stirred by the increased presence of women in my wine writing field.

It’s also not surprising that writers “are abandoning print for digital,” although I’m not sure that “abandoning” is the word I’d use. When you abandon something it’s usually deliberate. Except for Mr. Suckling, who deliberately left Spectator to go online, I’m not aware of anyone else who voluntarily gave up a juicy print gig to go online. Instead, they get fired or laid off, and that’s when they go online. The other reason for so many wine writers going digital is obviously because it’s easy to do. The bar to entry is non-existent. But then, Tom explicitly acknowledges that in the study when he says, “To be blunt, it costs nothing to start a wine blog and reach a potentially large audience. This lowering of the bar where reaching an audience is concerned also is contributing to the increase in younger wine writers.”

There was actually very little in this study that surprised me, except for the part about wine writers not appreciating the work of publicists and marketers. It was said that 20 percent of wine writers with 20 years or more of experience found information from wine publicists “rarely useful,” while that number jumped to 40 percent for those with 5 years or less of experience. Later, only 19 percent said they found information from publicists “extremely” or “very” useful. Eighty-one percent found it only “somewhat” or “rarely” useful. This led Tom to speculate that for most wine writers, “The typical view is that [publicists] are responsible for ‘spin,’ a form of communication considered only slightly more reliable than outright lies.”

There’s much more on this topic in the study’s 36 pages, and it makes for interesting reading. Meanwhile, I’d like to get in a word or two on the subject of publicists before we get it go. While it’s true, by definition, that a publicist is explicitly paid by an employer to tout or “spin” the company’s products, it’s also true that a good publicist can be extraordinarily helpful to a harried wine writer. I’ll speak from my own experience in California, but I’m sure it’s true for veterans in New York or New South Wales or Chateauneuf-du-Pape. If I were giving advice to younger wine writers, I’d tell them to not be dismissive of publicists. They’re willing to work with you. They “know where the bodies are buried,” so to speak, and can often point a writer in the direction of a hot lead. Publicists know how to work “off the record,” and when a writer cultivates good relationships with publicists, it will make him or her a better, more informed, more linked in writer. And when you get to know publicists, you’ll find them (I want to say this carefully and respectfully) grateful for the least tidbit you can provide their client. It’s not like you have to give them a front page story or a fantastic review in order to get help. If you did, the  better publicists would stop respecting you. They understand that quid doesn’t necessarily lead to quo. Publicists understand that writers have ethical constraints, and they respect our boundaries. Many’s the time I’ve rejected a publicist’s original pitch, only to engage in a conversation that resulted in a story I really liked. In fact, dare I say it, older writers are more sensitive to both the trappings and the allures of publicists than are younger writers.

So, if I were to add a question for the next time Tom launches the wine writers survey, it would be something like, “How do you work with publicists in such a way as to enhance your job?” In other words, don’t just bash them.  Writers, get to know your publicists. Befriend them. Form relationships (that magic word again!) that are based on mutual trust and respect. You won’t regret it.

* * *

I want to wish everyone the happiest, healthiest, safest Thanksgiving ever. See you next Monday!

“What will the consequences be of immersing yourself in a world that is isolated from the person standing next to you?”

That’s the question Tim Folger, a National Geographic writer, asks in his article, Revealed World, in the magazine’s Sept. 2010 issue. Check it out here; the picture alone is worth the price of admission.

Look closely at that picture. It represents the way an artificially-enhanced person might see things just five years from now. Little bits and pieces of digital information, attached to, overlaid upon and cluttering the visual field Mother Nature originally equipped our eyeballs to perceive. Humankind has, traditionally, distinguished reality from fantasy by consensus agreement. If a crowd of people are on that Washington, D.C. street corner, and 99 of them agree that Peregrine Espresso is right there on the corner, but the hundredth person says, No, Peregrine Espresso is no longer there, now it’s turned into a Martian spaceport, then we can all agree that 99 of us are right, and that hundredth monkey is wrong, if not outright crazy. Right? End of story.

But what happens if the underlying reality–that D.C. streetcorner–becomes so chopped up and splintered into individual links and informational matrixes that carry our brains forward into the future and backward into the past that it no longer has anything to do with the reality that the person standing next to us perceives? That’s the backdrop of Folger’s question.

Keep in mind, in this brave new perception of the future, in which we’ll be seeing these things through contact lenses or even retinal implants, what you see will necessarily be different from what I see. Far different, because your links will not be mine, and vice versa. You might learn that there are 50 of your Twitter followers in the area; I might have none (and at the present rate of my Twitter usage, that’s quite likely to be the case). Never mind that, with all this information being shoveled into our heads, there’s barely enough time or energy left over for either of us to even acknowledge the other’s existence. That’s would be a tragic denouement to the human condition. But the problem is compounded by each of us actually perceiving profoundly differing aspects of the visual field. We may be standing next to each other, but we might as well be on different continents.

What all this has to do with wine criticism is pretty obvious. It takes us further down the road from cohesion to anarchy. When we’re all looking at the same thing, but seeing different things, we will no longer have the luxury of knowing that there are templates we can agree on. The First Growths got famous because sooner or later everybody agreed they were better than the Fifth Growths. But that occurred during an era when general agreement was possible. With the cultural fracturing we’re now witnessing–technological, political, religious, personal–it will be harder than ever for all of us to agree on anything, including which wines are of the first rank and which aren’t.

Will you miss living in such a world? I will. It would be a democracy,  but it wouldn’t be a happy place, or make much sense. I like and depend on the fact that some wines are meritoriously superior to others, and I enjoy being part of the conversation that decides which is which. I will admit to taking some small pleasure in the thought that my opinion carries perhaps more weight than someone else’s. Having standards may smack of elitism, but it’s fundamental to the sound ordering of the world.

But which world? Which brings me back to Folger’s question. “What will the consequences be of immersing yourself in a world that is isolated from the person standing next to you?” This is a question we should really be asking in a more serious way than we so far have, and that blogging has rushed to the fore. It may be that having the need to ask it means that it’s already too late to forestall the consequences. The horse may have left the barn.

I’m about a third of my way through Rex Pickett’s new book, Vertical, the followup to Sideways. It’s a fun read, frolicksome, raucous and ribald, with Jack and Miles drinking their way once again across wine country, and getting into their usual predicaments.

Knowing Rex just a little, and having heard his personal story, I’m struck by the way his own life is reflected in the pages of Vertical. There are repeated references to things that happened to Miles in Sideways, but since Miles is Rex (in a manner of speaking), I also find myself wondering what in Vertical actually happened to Rex, as opposed to what fictitiously happened to Miles. This all puts Vertical on a meta level, which increases its complexity and enjoyment.

And then it hit me that nothing happens in a vacuum. We know we’re in an age where wine writing itself is changing–moving away from the dreary old academic top-down voice-of-God approach, and toward a more personal, confessional, intimate and humane kind of writing. People don’t want to hear Suckling asking some cult proprietor what cooper he bought his Tronçais oak barrels from. People want instead some glimpse into the writer’s life, which means the writer’s new task is opening up, not just preaching and declaring “I give this wine 92 points.” This is because people understand that the art and craft of wine writing and criticism isn’t as simple as was once thought. It occurs on, and arises from, every level a human being can experience, and so, if readers are to take the words of a wine writer seriously, they expect to know about all the levels that exist within him. They expect to see, in other words, inside the Black Box, to witness the wheels turning, the moving parts, what really makes the writer tick. The day of the anonymous wine critic, who seals himself off from the public like Greta (“I want to be let alone”) Garbo in her New York days, are over. The public wants wine writers who are transparent, whose lives intersect with theirs. And that means wine writers who are not afraid to reveal their fallibilities, imbecilities and insecurities.

Well, that pretty much describes Miles. Or is it Rex? Neither is a wine critic–yet–but I’m told that, by the end of Vertical, Miles does become a wine critic; and already, in the book’s early pages, he’s pronouncing verdicts on certain Pinot Noirs that might have leaped straight out from the Wine Enthusiast’s Buying Guide. Miles is, therefore, the very modern picture of a wine critic. When you read his words on wine, you are experiencing them on a higher level than merely their objective, definitional meaning. Because you know who Miles is, his words take on additional dimensions. They’re freighted with the knowledge we humans have of each other that cannot be put into words.

In my own writing, I find myself moving toward this new standard. Of course, it’s hard to achieve much in the way of personal writing in a 40 word review, but short reviews are in many respects just an adjunct to the wine writer’s more serious efforts–the way, say, sculpture was for Picasso. In my long-form writing, I find myself striving toward something infinitely more powerful, personal and particular than I used to. I have a story coming up in next February’s issue of Wine Enthusiast, on Winemaker Dives, that illustrates this new style. It was one of the more challenging assignments I ever had, filled with logistical and stylistic speedbumps, but I think the hard work paid off.

Which leads to a big question, one I constantly ask myself: in moving toward this new style, am I abandoning expertise? In tackling a more personal and muscular style, am I undermining my authority as an objective “expert”? Is wine writing, in short, a zero sum game, in which you’re either amusing, or serious, but never both? (As in Heisenbergian mechanics, where you can know the position or velocity of a particle, but not both.)

I don’t think so. At its highest form of expression, wine writing combines the intensely personal with the deeply knowledgeable. That’s what I aspire to. It’s what the age seems to want, as Rex Pickett intuited at least by the time he wrote Sideways. Miles, nor I, may be a hero; anti-hero is more to the point; but we are intensely human, get drunk, do and say stupid things, worry, take things personally, try our best, are idealistic, love great wine, work hard at understanding wine, and when we write, we take everything we’re thinking and feeling and remembering and put it into words, exposing it to all the world; and, in the end, all we can hope is that people like it.

* * *

It was 47 years ago today that President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. I cried for him and for the country then, and I will always wonder how things would have been different had that gifted and humane man been allowed to serve out his terms in office.