With so many important Cabernet Sauvignons and Bordeaux blends yet to be released from the 2009 vintage, it may be premature to make pronouncements about it. Still, I’m beginning to have my doubts.

As early as December 1, 2009, I wrote (in my vintage assessment for Wine Enthusiast), “The fuller-bodied reds from the North Coast, especially Cabernet Sauvignon, could be problematic.” The main problem was a major rainstorm on Oct. 12-13 that soaked Napa. That led to the classic question, “Did you pick before or after the rains?” As one Diamond Mountain winemaker put it, in an official press release, “The rain will define the harvest depending on which side of it you were on.” She warned that fruit picked after the rain would have “slightly lower sugars,” but don’t be misled by that word “slightly.” We’re talking about the difference between perfectly ripened grapes and less [or more] than perfectly ripened grapes, which really is the key for Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

My hunch, given how cool 2009 was–and it was a very cool season, the start of our notorious trio of “little ice age” vintages of 2009, 2010 and 2011–is that most Cabernet was not picked before the rains came, because it wasn’t ripe.

It is true that the rain was followed by a period of warm, sunny weather, the kind that, in theory, can dry out the vines and canopies and restore the grapes to health. But having rain followed by sun at that precarious time of the harvest is never as good as having no rain at all, which is why I used the word “problematic.” The problems include having grapes swollen with water, which would reduce their power and make them thin. This problem would be compounded by the size of the 2009 harvest, which was a large one, the biggest since 2005, and the second biggest of the decade.

And mold is also a very serious threat, especially for wineries that lack the professional staff to hand-sort out bad berries before they reach the fermentation tanks. Almost all wineries go through the motions of sorting, but few are wealthy enough to have the deep bench necessary to deal with a vintage like 2009. This is another reason why the top houses (which is to say, the most expensive wines) will have a leg up in 2009.

Still, as one North Coast vintner told me, “Big harvest + rain soaked quality isn’t a good combination.” Another winemaker, whom I respect a great deal, told me, “I just think 2009 was too cool over all. When you look at the great vintages in CA they tend to be the warmer ones.” This vintner allowed as to how 2009 might be good for coastal Pinot Noir (although he noted, and so did I, the early hype that accompanied it). But we’re not talking about Pinot Noir here.

I have now reviewed about 125 2009 Cabernet Sauvignons and, sad to say, my scores have not been impressive. Only a handful of 90-plusses. Thankfully, most of these wines aren’t terribly expensive, ranging from $18-$30. A typical one, which I won’t identify because my review has not yet been published, read: “A little sharp and aggressive in texture, giving it a rustic feel, but pretty rich in blackberries, currants and cedar, making it an easy Cab to drink now.” It is that aggressiveness that worries me. You want a nice Cabernet to feel smooth in the mouth, with gentle, warming tannins that glide like velvet across the palate. The slightest hint of coarseness can be jarring. Given how strong Cabernet’s tannins are, if the fruit doesn’t match it, the wines will taste and feel astringent. That’s my fear for 2009.

“They” being the anti-expert experts who want to convince us to trust their expertise in exposing “experts” as nothing more than a bunch of idiotic frauds who make a living pretending to be “experts” when, in fact, their expertise isn’t any greater than you, me, or the man behind that tree.

(This last is a reference to today’s bit of political trivia. It’s from the late, longtime Democratic Senator from Louisiana, Russell Long, who so memorably said, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree!” They’re still saying it in the august halls of the U.S. Congress.)

Back to the “expert” thing. This tirade against experts cites instances in which so-called “experts” got things wrong. Horribly, embarrassingly wrong, as in the instance cited in the headline: “Wine experts confused a $30 bottle with one worth $500.”

In our cynical, dubious, skeptical country, where the “experts” in finance, housing and other fields really did get everything wrong, there’s now a tendency to hate anyone who professes to have any expertise at all. This is a branch of the war on knowledge we see being waged by a certain span of the political/cultural spectrum. According to it, common sense is the only source of true knowledge; the more “book learning” one has, the less that person should be trusted (unless the book happens to be The Bible.)

Well, I’m not going to get all political here, but let’s examine the truth behind that startling “$30 bottle with one worth $500” headline, and then see if we can possibly get wine experts off the hook, despite them pulling such a boner.

The bizarre tasting occurred when a Frenchman, Frederic Brochet, put a middling Bordeaux into two bottles, one labeled cheaply and the other bearing a Grand Cru tier. When he presented the bottles to 57 “expert tasters,” they praised the Grand Cru and knocked the cheap bottle. (You can also read a version of this here.)

I first have to point out that the coverage of M. Brochet’s experiment that I’ve been able to find on the Internet is very spotty. It seems like there was an original article, and all subsequent ones borrowed from it, with the result that the conclusion is like a game of telephone, in which the original, authentic message gets hopelessly garbled by the end. For example, it’s not clear who Brochet’s “expert” wine tasters were, nor is it clear how many of the 57 “experts” screwed up. However, I’ll accept the premise that a bunch of tasters, who knew a thing or two about wine, were deceived.

There should be absolutely nothing alarming or scandalous about this. It shouldn’t even be surprising. If the point is to aver that “experts” can be wrong, then let us accept that as obvious, and move on. If the point is to ridicule the concept of expertise, then the authors of the various articles are going too far. There really is such a thing as expertise: in wine, in finance, in science. People with a resentment toward educated authority are really skating on very thin ice, because they put themselves in the position of being ideological Luddites, and yet when they are in serious need of expertise (for example, medical, or a good plumber, or expert firefighters, who were in short supply in Gov. Perry’s Texas during the recent wildfires due to budget cuts), suddenly their mistrust of experts disappears, proving the old adage: Where you stand depends on where you sit.

When it comes to wine expertise, some people know a whole lot more than most other people. They can make mistakes, especially when being subverted at the hands of a deceiver like M. Brochet (who seems analagous to Descartes’s evil spirit, which made him believe what was untrue). But in general, the average wine person looking for advice is wise to trust a wine expert with a proven track record.

Just because an unidentified group of “experts” got a tasting wrong doesn’t mean that every expert wine evaluation should be mistrusted. That is a very stupid, drastic conclusion to draw, the kind a thinking person should avoid. I believe in objective knowledge, in study and in expertise. I like to think I possess some wine expertise. I might or might not have been fooled had I participated in M. Brochet’s tasting. So what if I were? It would have meant nothing.

As a guy with more than a little interest in the marketing side of the wine biz, I’ve always been fascinated by how an unknown winery becomes famous–how a famous winery stays famous–and how, and whether, a winery that’s lost its glitter can regain it.

The best way for an unknown winery to get famous is for wildfire to strike. That’s the metaphor Heidi Barrett once used in explaining to me Screaming Eagle’s vault to stardom. It just kind of happened, a combination of word of mouth, good reviews and mysterious luck. That’s very rare, of course, so lately I’ve seen wineries using all sorts of tricks to become known: donating a portion to charity, appealing to mommies, unusual packaging, hiring celebrity consultants, ownership by some washed up athlete or rock star, etc. etc. blah blah. (Not saying that a winery that donates to charity is necessarily doing so to get famous. But it can’t hurt.) However, no matter what the approach, it’s very hard to go from nowhere to the top. I’d say one in a thousand new brands can do it.

How a famous winery stays famous may be the easiest question to answer. It’s simple: continue to out-do yourself in quality. No tricks, no shortcuts, no smoke and mirrors. Shafer and Williams Selyem (to name a few) stay on top year after year, because they take nothing for granted, and spare no expense. On the other hand, a brand like Gary Farrell (sadly) seems to be content to drift along on past laurels. It may work for a while, but not forever. Only long enough for people to catch on.

Which brings us to the final challenge: How can a winery that’s lost its glitter ever regain it? Is it even possible? Here, we venture into the realm of metaphysics. The short answer is that it’s next to impossible. I can think of very few brands that were up, then down, then went back up again. Davis Bynum may be trying to resurrect itself, in its Tom Klein era, after a long period of obscurity following its glory days. We’ll see how Bill Foley’s properties–Chalk Hill, Sebastiani, Firestone–fare, and the answer will provide insight into Foley’s real motive: whether he’s interested in boosting quality, or just stringing these brands along while he can. (As far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out.) There are a number of interesting properties that were never famous to begin with, but were well-regarded, and who haven’t exactly slipped, but just never really shined. Turnbull Wine Cellars is one: they’ve been in a twlight zone for years, neither culty nor roadkill. I keep waiting for them to make a move.

I was thinking about all this yesterday due to an article, “Sometimes a brand isn’t worth saving. Here’s how to tell,” that appeared in the interesting daily business blog, Fast Company. Although it’s not about wine companies, but more about consumer goods brands like Dove, K-Y Jelly and Sierra Mist, its conclusions are applicable to wineries as well. The author asks five questions whose answers provide hints to a company’s viability.

1. Can its value proposition be redefined? For a winery, this means making the product relevant to the greatest number of people possible. If a winery already is doing this, all it has to do is remain relevant (cf. my remark above about continuing to out-do quality.) Relevance in wine these days means either affordability or a high price-quality ratio (e.g., Williams Selyem Pinot Noirs are not particularly affordable, but they give huge quality and pleasure for the price, so people are willing to pay it). But unfortunately, from where I sit, most wineries seem unable to define their value proposition. They don’t know what they stand for. There’s a lot of whistling past the graveyard.

2. Is the category growing, or does it demonstrate growth potential? The author used the example of K-Y Jelly, which started as a surgical lubricant, then hit the big time when manufacturer Johnson & Johnson realized people were using it for a sexual lubricant. Sex being a “growing category,” J&J hitched their wagon to an ascending star. What wine categories are growing? There’s that silly Moscato thing, but unless you were already onto it, it’s too late now. What’s growing is what’s always grown: Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon (in California). Only they have to be affordable. That’s still where the action is. Pinot Noir is growing, but there’s no such thing as affordable, good Pinot Noir–a contradiction in terms. I wouldn’t enter this Pinot Noir market unless I knew I could get 100 points from Heimoff.

3. Is it [the brand] on trend? Hummer is so off trend, it’s not even funny. So is fur, although it’s trying to make a comeback. Luxury brands in general seem off trend–not in tune with today’s penchant for value and modesty.  “Natural” is on trend, but I don’t think “natural” is enough to sell a wine. There may be enough consumers into “natural” for Sierra Mist, or some natural form of cosmetic, to make it, but there aren’t enough wine consumers who will buy on a “natural” basis alone. What’s “trendy” in wine is wine itself: drinking it, serving it at dinner parties. So overall, wine is a good business to get into. But the winery needs a solid plan.

4. Is its revenue sizable? This means that a brand that’s doing well should attempt to do even better, using its revenues as leverage. Gallo does this better than anyone. They have the smartest product development team in the business; if there’s an unmet niche out there, they’ll fill it–and if someone beats them to it, they’ll do it better, for less money. Of course, regular wineries can’t do that. But what a regular winery can do is make their product so vital to the consumer that the consumer believes he or she can’t do without it. Two Buck Chuck did that. It’s doable and replicable for other wineries–I don’t mean retailing a bottle for $2, but finding something special and being the first one out there to do it.

5. Is it [the product] strategically useful for developing the company’s competencies? This is a lot harder for a wine company to accomplish than for, say, Procter & Gamble, which moved into health and beauty products based on Oil of Olay’s succcess. But what a winery can do is identify its most successful product, then figure out a way to spin something else off from it. Robert Mondavi famously did this with Mondavi Woodbridge. Before you say that was a failure, let me remind you that Woodbridge was not a failure: the collapse of RMW was due to going public, which in turn drove the Board to make many other mistakes, chiefly an unsupportable expansion. Woodbridge was actually a success. I don’t think it caused product confusion with the parent winery. So piggybacking on a proven commodity can be a good tactic, provided it’s done right.

However, as the author says, “As it turns out, not all brands are worth reinventing.” There are an awful lot of wine brands in California alone that don’t seem to have what it takes to stand the test of time. I wish them well–but I believe in five years we’ll see dozens of brands, extant today, that will be non-existing in the year 2016, and deserve to be.

Of all the things I’ve done over the last 30 years to understand wine–reading countless books, tasting 100,000 wines, interviewing hundreds of winemakers and growers–nothing has so “filled me with the spirit” of wine as when I wrote my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River, which was published in 2005 (but reissued, with a new introduction, last year by University of California Press).

That effort took the better part of two years. I saturated myself in wine, not literally, of course (I just had an image of me taking a bath in Pinot Noir), but in the sense that, for almost every day in 2003-2004, I awoke on a day that began precisely where the previous one had left off: immersed in this book. I thought about it constantly, edited myself all the time, dreamed about it at night, worked out the conceptual structure as I drove my car, came up with new ideas in the shower, and spent every minute I could traveling along the Russian River, by every conceivable mode of transportation, having adventures and meeting people, exploring vineyards, eating and drinking on the river, and even, on one unhappy but memorable occasion, almost drowning in water so cold in winter snowmelt, it gave me a case of hypothermia that permanently discombobulated my internal thermostat. I was trapped in whitewater rapids, hanging on for dear life to a “strainer,” a fallen tree whose gnarled limbs looked ominously like wizened fingers, clutched in a death grip to which I clung lest the angry current sweep me away.

In retrospect, it was the perfect metaphor for the way I conducted my research: when someone says they plunged themselves into their work, I can say I did it literally! One of the things I was proudest of in that book was that it contained no wine reviews. I might have filled it with formal notes, but decided not to, because I wanted to write a book that would stand the test of time and be interesting and relevant to future readers. And there’s nothing staler or duller than old wine reviews.

The culture of wine always has appealed to me at least as much as its science, or even as much as tasting. By “culture” I mean the places, the natural formations (rivers, cliffs, mountains, fields, marshes, streams, landslides, forests, wildflowers, gullies, estuaries) that are indigenous to every wine region. The animals too: snakes, deer, wildcats, winery dogs and cats. And the people! The wine industry is never devoid of characters, that’s for sure. There’s a context to every wine that’s important to comprehend, if you’re to fully experience a wine in its fullness. To drink a glass of Robert Mondavi Tokalon Fume Blanc in that vineyard, with Tim Mondavi: that’s context. To witness the Rochioli Vineyard, the source of so many great wines I’ve had over the years, at various times of the year–in the full bloom of harvest, completely underwater during a ferocious winter storm–to have climbed up its bank, as the gravelly dirt slid out from under my feet, is to have given my next experience of a Rochioli wine added depth and imagery. To have known the Rochiolis, Joe, Jr. and Tom, further compounds my appreciation of their wines. To have been present at the creation of Williams Selyem’s estate vineyard [formerly Litton Estate], as the bulldozers broke ground and pulled mountains of rocks out–to have been there the day an arborist warned Bob Cabral he’d better pull out some century-old trees before a storm blew them down on somebody’s head, only to have Bob decide that, No, he couldn’t do it, and instead to persuade his boss to save the trees, with all the expense that implied–and then, years later, to have tasted the Estate Pinot Noir and be able to give it 100 points–and, after that, to see the magnificent new winery building erected on the very spot that had been a wasteland of mud and stone, just seven years earlier–that is context. That is continuity. That is experiencing a wine in its fullness. I have griped before, and often, about how I wish certain winemakers would not insist on having me come to the winery to taste their wine (hello Dalla Valle, Alban, Staglin, Screaming Eagle and all you others!), instead of sending it to me at home, like most wineries do. But the truth is, I totally understand. They wish for me to know their wine in the very context I have described, and I can’t blame them for that. Were I a winemaker, I’d probably do the same thing.

Regular readers of this space will have noticed a rare lacuna last Friday when, for only the second time ever, I failed to post a new blog (and thank you Adam Lee for inquiring if I had died). There was a simple reason for my failure: I had a horrendous hangover.

I felt terribly guilty, because I know people come here every day for something new. But to tell you the truth, there was nothing to be done about it. The hangover was so evil that I couldn’t bear to even look at the computer. Just the thought of sitting there at my desk, pecking out sentences, sickened me. I might have struggled, I suppose, to crank something out, but I just couldn’t: it was a physical and mental impossibility.

What happened was, on Thursday night a group of us hit up a couple bars in San Francisco. Okay, not a couple; four. We started at a rather pickuppy W Hotel, down by Yerba Buena Park, then walked over to a rockin’, sockin’ John Collins, in Minna Alley, a few blocks away, where the average age was about 20. Then it was a cab to Bourban and Branch, on O’Farrell, in what I supposed they now call the Haut Tenderloin (but, please, don’t call it Lower Russian Hill!). Finally, around midnight, it was up Market Street to Martuni’s, where the Mission and the Castro come together in one big, glorious explosion of alternative lifestyle (and a piano bar, to boot). Great fun was had by all–but not before yours truly mixed a lot of wine with a lot of vodka martinis (dry, with olives), with all too predictable results.

I mean, I knew I’d be hurting Friday morning. I just didn’t know how badly. But, as is customary with these foreshadowings, I decided to throw caution to the winds and have fun. Let tomorrow take care of itself, I figured.

And why not? We still have, in this country, a certain Puritan mindset, in which pleasure, especially when associated with mood-altering things, is seen as slightly sinful. It’s all right, people say, to have a glass or two of wine at dinner. But to get rip-roaring drunk, the way we did on Thursday night, is supposedly a no-no.

Screw that! I got drunk on Thursday, and I loved every minute of it. I had fun, hung out with great people, laughed a lot, got serious at times (but never maudlin), and it made me happy. And, let’s face it, happiness is in short supply these days, with the economy scaring the bejesus out of everyone. (Even if you pretend or don’t know the Eurozone crisis doesn’t exist, it’s going to slap you silly you anyway.) It’s enough to make you not want to get out of bed in the morning.

So sometimes, you just have to carpe the old diem and say, “Let’s eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” (This is actually a conflation of two phrases from the Old Testament: Isaiah 22:13 and Ecclesiastes 8:15.) That, kids, is your Bible lesson for today. I don’t think they had bars back in Biblical times, but if they did, I bet the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs would have hit them up every once in a while, drinking and singing and praising the Lord for blessing them with the fruit of the vine (or the potato, if they’d had vodka).