I’m on the deck of Bien Nacido Vineyards’s little red house, looking west over the lower part of the vineyard, now bare of grapes except for some late harvest Pinot Blanc remaining to be picked. The sun will shortly set; the day’s last light is golden, giving this part of the Santa Maria Valley a spacious luster I’d never noticed before. We speak often of climate and soil in discussions of terroir, but rarely of light: how the rays of the sun arch out above the landscape, how the sky glows during the daylight hours, the energy of light pervading the environment, suffusing it in life. The sky over Bien Nacido is big, very big—horizon to horizon big, the kind of expanse you imagine in Texas, or the Canadian tundra. The light seems to come from everywhere, down from the sky, up from the ground, dripping like honey off the mountains. Light in this valley comes early and stays late this far south, where the days are longer than up north, where I live. The light is quite literally alive.

The ball of the sun reddens and sinks. Directly to the west, out beyond the Bettaravia flats and Santa Maria City, is the Pacific. Today was warm, even for Santa Barbara County this time of the year, with the temperature in the mid-70s, but already at this hour the land is giving up the heat, fast, and in the growing chill I fancy I can feel the cold ocean. I smell the ice in the Gulf of Alaska, like a sharp pinch in the nostrils. You have to get further south than this, to Malibu, before you have a sense of the tropics. In the Santa Maria Valley, the elements remind you this is Central, not Southern, California.

Staying the night in a winery house alone, in the midst of a vineyard, is an occupational necessity for a wine writer, but also a rare gift. Most people never get the opportunity. It’s very quiet, as you’d expect (a particular treat for an inner city denizen like me). After dark, the workers all go home, and you’re alone, all by yourself, in the country. (Well, Gus is with me, so I’m not really alone.) One time when I was here, I tried to imagine being a grapevine. The quietude does that. Being a citified wine critic, there’s always the danger of losing your connection to and appreciation of what wine really is: an agricultural product. I’ve known a lot of vineyard managers over the years, and I never quite feel like we’re living on the same plane. They dwell in a realm of seasons and insects and mold and wild critters and weather and grape prices and buyer contracts. A writer must know a little about a lot of different things, but not a lot about anything. Conversations between writers and true expects, like growers, are truncated, but you try to come away knowing a little more than you knew before.

A word, too, about drinking while you’re staying in a winery guest house. I always bring a few emergency bottles with me when I travel. You never know if the place you’re staying will have any. I’ve stayed in winery guest houses where I was surprised to find nothing. Not that I expect freebies, but…hence my emergency stashes. This time I brought a Byron Pinot (to honor Santa Maria Valley) and a Mer Soleil Chardonnay, because that’s a style I like. I enjoy getting high when I’m alone in a winery guest house. Not drunk: there’s a difference between high, which is a pleasant buzz, and sloshed. I haven’t been drunk in many years, because my body tells me when to stop. It would be perverse to stay the night in the middle of a vineyard and not enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Later, Bien Nacido’s great vineyard manager, Chris Hammell, stopped by. We drained a bottle of Ojai Syrah (from Melville Vineyard) and talked about viticulture for a little while, before discovering that he’s a student of Brazilian Ju-Jitsu while I of course have my history of Japanese karate-do. That was pretty much it. The next few hours were all about fighting, senseis and all that stuff, not wine. No disrespect to wine, but just because you’re both in the industry doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you can talk about. Wine unites us in humanity; drinking together opens that union to wherever it wants to go.

I’ll be bringing Gus with me today on the 5 hour drive down to Bien Nacido Vineyard, the first leg of my Santa Barbara trip. This will be Gus’s longest voyage yet, and I can only hope his car sickness issues have been resolved.

If I recall correctly, my first visit to Santa Barbara, for the purposes of writing about its wine industry, was to the Fess Parker Winery. It was a thrill to meet Fess himself. As a little kid, he’d been one of my heroes as Davy Crockett. I made my mom buy me a coonskin cap (as did millions of other little American boys). That fad, which mercifully didn’t last too long, probably sent the native raccoon population dangerously close to extinction. How Fess Parker went from being a T.V. and movie star to a winery proprietor, I never did find out. I think on that first trip I also visited with Richard Sanford–at the Sanford & Benedict Vineyard? Memory fails.

I like Santa Barbara, as a place and as an appellation. Perhaps because they developed their wine industry more slowly than the North Coast, their AVAs make a lot more sense than, say, Sonoma’s. There are only four of them: the Santa Maria Valley, the Santa Ynez Valley, Happy Canyon and the Santa Rita Hills. The latter used to be part of the Santa Ynez Valley, but wiser heads prevailed in determining that it should be its own appellation on the basis of weather patterns. The Valley is one of only two wine valleys in California (Santa Maria is the other) that lies east-west rather than southeast-northwest (as, for example, are Napa Valley and Alexander Valley). This so-called “transverse” orientation allows chilly maritime air to funnel in from the coast, at Lompoc, spilling over the Santa Rita Hills and cooling them down. By the time you get to the 101 Freeway, the coastal influence has dropped considerably; and at Happy Canyon, it’s virtually non-existent, although there must be a little of it, because otherwise Happy Canyon would be as hot as the Mojave Desert.

For years there’s been talk of adding a fifth AVA, Los Alamos, which sits kind of inbetween Santa Maria Valley and Santa Rita Hills. If they ever do that, I’m going to have to figure out what makes Los Alamos special, if anything. The American system of appellations always provides wine writers with endless fodder for intellectual speculation. Appellations are elusive things. At first, you think they make sense, and then, the more you look into them, the less sense they make. I wrote about the expanded Russian River Valley the other day, and that elicited several comments, among which was one from Charlie Olken, whose blog is always a good read. He said that the Russian River Valley is a really cumbersome appellation–too big, too varied–a view with which I largely agree. But there are plenty of other equally cumbersome appellations and nobody ever complains about them. The Santa Cruz Mountains doesn’t really make a lot of sense, because they grow their Pinot Noir on cooler west-facing slopes and the Cabernet Sauvignon on warmer east-facing slopes, and where’s the unity in that? Napa Valley is a crazy mixed up appellation, making terroir sense only in the most general way. (The real terroir of Napa Valley is money. Money, more than weather or soil, is what primarily influences all the wines of Napa Valley.) Then we have other nonsensical AVAs: San Francisco Bay, Sonoma Coast, Northern Sonoma.

But Santa Barbara County has got it about right. I imagine there will be opportunities for further subdivisions one of these days. Maybe the Santa Rita Hills can be broken up into northern and southern sections. They may decide to carve something out of the northern Santa Ynez Valley, in the Foxen Canyon area. But in these matters of appellations, my advice always is to go slow. No use rushing into legal things you’ll regret later.

Some of the things I’ll be doing in Santa Barbara, in addition to my big blind tasting on Thursday, will be seeing friends, both new and old. Among them are Nicholas Miller, Andrew Murray, Paul Lato, Chad Melville, John Falcone, Ryan Devolet, Dieter Cronje, Dan Gainey, Greg Brewer and Pierre LaBarge. If I run into Jim Clendenen, that will be the cherry on top of the whipped cream on the chocolate cake.

I’m unable to participate in Rusty Eddy’s class on Winery P.R. at U.C. Davis this year, because I have to be–no, make that want to be in Santa Barbara on Dec. 2, but I promised Rusty I’d give the class some promo, so here it is: It’s this Friday, from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. You can sign up online here, for a cost of $190. Worth it!

Participants in the class, at which I’ve guest lectured for years, are winery P.R. people, or those who want to be. They’re looking, I suppose, for any additional insight in how to be better at their jobs. Four or five years ago, there was barely a mention of social media in the class. Instead, attendees wanted to know about stuff like how to prepare a press kit, write a press release, and how to pitch an article to a wine writer. They also wanted to know about the 100 point system and the more arcane aspects of wine criticism.

All of a sudden, around 2008, it began to shift. Suddenly, blogs, Twitter and Facebook were all the rage. It was as profound a paradigm shift as you could ask for.

I wonder what the students will want to know about this year. My own feeling–and that’s all it is, a feeling, because I have no empirical evidence to support it–is that the social media thing may have peaked when it comes to winery P.R. I just don’t sense the excitement, the breakthrough gee-whiz breathlessness that accompanied social media 2008-2010. In that little window of time, social media seemed to be the be-all and end-all of winery P.R. and marketing, the magic bullet that would overturn traditional forms of publicity and replace it with an online revolution in which anyone could participate, more or less for free. Heady stuff, for a winery on a budget.

Looking back now, during this winter of economic and social discontent, it’s hard to believe how naive everyone was. Did people really believe that social media could sell out a warehouse of SKUs, with a single keystroke? They did. But that’s what happens when you have stardust in your eyes: you don’t see things clearly.

Yes, there always were voices of reason arguing that social media was but a single arrow in the quiver, and possibly not even the one that went the furthest or sank the deepest. But those voices were all but drowned out by competing views that social media had changed everything, was destroying traditional P.R., and would reward those who hopped on its bandwagon while punishing everyone who stayed off.

Be honest now. Does anyone still make that claim?

I think a couple things combined to make social media less of a star than it purported to be. One was inherent in the concept itself: social media is merely a way for people to mass-communicate. That’s good, but what does it have to do with selling wine? Not much. People said social media would replace other sorts of sales techniques with peer-to-peer recommendations. Actually, that happened all too well. The peer-to-peer space is shared by an expanding universe of sources. A million peer-to-peer networks result in a million different wines being recommended, each for about 15 nanoseconds of fame.

Another reason the social media revolution failed was because of the Recession. Funny how an event that seemed historic at the time can be vaporized by another event that has truly Historic with-a-capital-H ramifications: namely, the collapse of the global economy. Maybe, just maybe social media could have been more helpful for wineries, if there hadn’t been a meltdown and people actually had the disposable income to buy wine. But that’s a hypothetical situation we can dispense with.

Everything feels like it’s in stasis these days. Black Friday and Cyber Monday aside, nobody’s buying, nobody’s spending, nobody’s hiring, nobody’s lending. If I were a young grad student wanting to move into winery P.R. and attending Rusty’s class, I think my first question to his guests (Sara Schneider from Sunset and Paul Mabray from VinTank) would be: Now that we’ve seen the limitations of social media for winery P.R., what traditional approaches do you believe will work? If I had to answer that question, I’d say that in addition to (not in place of) social media, a winery should have someone representing it who is ultra-skilled at captivating the media. That person might come from internal P.R. or external P.R., or it might be someone like Robert Mondavi, Gary Pisoni or Jayson Woodbridge, none of whom needed P.R. agents at all because they were such dynamic geniuses on their own. Of course, not everyone has that level of flash, which is why God invented public relations. As to the exact form of P.R. that works, impossible to say. It depends on the winery situation. If there were a formula, everyone would know it by now. Obviously, there isn’t.

Anyhow, like I wrote, I’ll be in beautiful Santa Barbara this week, reporting for Wine Enthusiast, doing a big blind tasting of local wines and, hopefully, coming up with interesting posts for my blog!

I’m not a particularly sentimental guy, although I do frequently cry at the schmaltzy endings of Hawaii Five-0, but this being Thanksgiving, it occurred to me to look at my past and be thankful for the people who helped me. Here, I’ll limit it to my career as a wine writer.

To begin with, I am very grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to be a paid writer. For that, I have to thank the man who fired me from my last “straight” job as director of the Career Planning and Placement Center at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Neil Hoffman. He and his Deans were fools and knaves, and while I didn’t deserve to get fired for doing my job correctly, in retrospect it was the proverbial silver lining on the cloud. I needed to find a new career, fast, and, being that I was a career counselor who frequently advised students to do something they loved, rather than merely something that made money, I decided to follow my own advice. I loved two things: writing and wine. So I put them together and became a wine writer.

Thank you, President Hoffman!

I thank, also, Jim Gordon, now the editor of Wines & Vines but back then editor of Wine Spectator, who gambled on a newbie by taking me on as that magazine’s lead freelancer. (Actually, it wasn’t much of a gamble. I was good, and Jim knew it.) And I thank my current publisher, Adam Strum, for taking me on when I left the Spectator. Adam has been a loyal and fair employer to me, and he has shown a wise hand in shepherding Wine Enthusiast to the dominating position it holds today.

Thank you Adam!

I’m thankful to the great editors I’ve been lucky to have over the years, Mr. Tim Moriarty particularly coming to mind. Editors can be a pain in the neck (because they’re always making you rewrite stuff when you were hoping you were done with it), but the stuff always comes out better; and editors probably think writers are a pain in the neck, so we’re even.

I thank also the members of the wine industry, who have been so kind to me for such a long time: the winemakers (to name any but not all would be invidious), the owners, the cellar rats, the members of the P.R. community whose praises I have sung loudly and often. You all have made my work a pleasure, and you are the reason why the wine industry is the best to work in, in all of America.

I’m thankful to the high tech industry for making my work so much easier. When I started, I used to type my articles out on a typewriter (if you’re under 25, look up “typewriter” in the dictionary. If you don’t know what a dictionary is, Google it). Then I’d have to mail my articles to Jim Gordon through the U.S. Postal Service!!! It sounds tedious and bizarre, but back then, it was the only way we knew, and so it seemed natural. Who knows how reporters in the year 2061 will send copy to their editors?

I’m grateful that my health has been such as to allow me to do the often strenuous work involved in being an active wine writer, and that includes tasting. Tasting is a laborious, physical routine that requires stamina and a sound constitution. One of the reasons I’m such a gym bunny is that it’s really important for me to stay trim and fit if I want to do my job well.

I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made among other wine writers, some of whom are no longer with us. (R.I.P. David Jones.) Only another wine writer knows what this job is like–the good, the bad, the ugly and the absurd. I’ve had plenty of yucks with my colleagues (including my fellow writers at Wine Enthusiast), and that has helped to keep me sane (if I am).

I’m thankful that wine has become such a popular thing in America. Never thought that would happen, but it did. Way to go, America!

Have a great Thanksgiving!