Reading Men’s magazine’s list of the “Top 10 up-and-coming wine regions” and not seeing California on the list made me think, “Holy cow! California is no longer a new wine region but an old one!”

It startled me. I’m so used to thinking of everything in California as new: new cities, new citizens, new suburbs, new malls, new parks, new restaurants, new roads, new martini recipes, new ethnic cuisines, new ways of organizing society–the state itself is a State of Mind of Newness in all its exciting configurations, and has been for 150 years.

But California, evidently, is no longer considered a new wine region. Old, old, old! It’s the expletive word of American demographics. Nobody wants to be old in a youth-oriented culture, least of all a wine region whose appeal always has been that it is the refreshing alternative to stale Old Europe.

Can it be true? Is California really (what’s the opposite of up-and-coming?) a down-and-going wine region?

Let’s consider the facts. California’s wine industry dates from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. (I know purists will argue it’s older than that, but the point is moot.) From that perspective, it’s one of the newer wine regions, compared certainly to Europe. But really, California as an important and emerging wine region dates only to the 1960s and 1970s, when the boutique winery movement began. So California’s wine region really is as new as a freshly minted coin–certainly far younger than Austria, South and South West France, Portugal, Galicia, Jerez and Italy, all of which appear on the Men’s magazine list.

Even Israel, Argentina, South Africa and Chile are certainly no newer than California, in terms of a wine industry. So we have to ask the question from a different perspective: When Men’s refers to “up-and-coming” wine regions, they must be doing so reputationally, not historically. In other words, Men’s is suggesting that California has become a little boring, while these other regions are exciting.

Why would Men’s come to this conclusion? Let’s dig. The editor of the piece, Paul Casciato, is an editor for Reuters, the British news agency. He is a Brit. The English long have had “airs” against the California wine industry. Paul’s specific title is Lifestyle Editor. He covered, for instance, last Spring’s Royal Wedding of Wills and Kate, and has written about the decreasing weight of ladies’ handbags and how middle-aged people “are the most likely to look for love online,” so we can conclude that he is not a serious wine journalist.

This is not to imply that the ten regions on Paul’s list do not produce excellent wine. But readers should understand a possible back story here, which is that publishers and editors love asking their writers to come up with Top Ten lists. They do it all the time. (Just look at a women’s magazine, like Oprah.) Readers love Top Ten lists (or, at least, the publishers and editors think they do). Crafting a Top Ten list isn’t hard. You can make a game out of it, like the old Mad Libs word game:

First, write a sentence that begins: “Here are the Ten…

Then choose an adjective: sexiest, ugliest, most expensive, weirdest, worst, best, likeliest, stupidest, oldest, rarest, most fun, most unusual, cheapest, funniest, most shocking…etc.

followed by a noun [singular or collective]: wines, travel destinations, places to live, fashion accessories, colleges, sports, cities, politicians, breakfast foods, tropical resorts, talk show hosts, wine writers…etc.

Then make an arbitrary headline: HERE ARE THE TEN UGLIEST TALK SHOW HOSTS or HERE ARE THE TEN STUPIDEST WINE WRITERS, and bingo! You’ve got a cover story in Men’s magazine!

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Oakland Hills Firestorm. I’d like to take a few minutes to remember its victims. There’s actually a wine connection, which I’ll mention at the end.

Anyone who lived in Oakand or south Berkeley on that fateful day, Oct. 20, 1991, will never forget it. It’s seared into my memory, in a way that not even the Loma Prieta Earthquake, which had struck just two years previously, could match. I think that’s because the earthquake was over before you even knew it; it was only 15 seconds long. The Firestorm, by contrast, lasted for hour after hour after agonizing hour.

I learned about the bias of the big media establishment against West Coast news from that Firestorm. Although the New York-based television stations and eastern newspapers certainly covered it, they gave it short shrift. If a disaster of that magnitude had wiped out 3,000 homes in a densely populated New York or Washington, D.C. neighborhood, killing 25 people including firefighters, it would have been the biggest news story of the year. It would even have been a huge story if it had occurred in San Francisco or Los Angeles. But because it was in the East Bay–”just Oakland”–the national news media played it down.

I was on my way home from the gym that Sunday morning. At 11 a.m., it already was turning out to be one of the hottest, driest days of the year, with intense Diablo winds rushing from inland toward the sea. Such weather isn’t unusual in October. Walking east from Broadway, I smelled smoke, and the sky had a peculiar orange tinge. When I got home, I turned the T.V. on to see what was happening. The local stations had already interrupted programming and commercials and gone into nonstop coverage. I went up on the roof of my building, and that’s where I had my mind blown.

The East Bay Hills are just about a mile away, as the crow flies. They dominate the eastern view, rising to about 1,300 feet at their highest, which is a pretty good height considering that most of Oakland is at sea level. Most of the topmost part of the hills is semi-wild parkland, preserved forever as the East Bay Regional Park District, one of the greatest urban wilderness areas in America. But the lower elevations, right down to where the slopes hit the flatlands, were and are densely packed neighborhoods.

I knew the hills well, because I had run their fire trails for many years. So when I stood on my roof and saw a 2-mile wide wall of flame, a hundred feet high, filling the sky with black, roiling smoke, I was terrified. It was clear that a catastrophe of the first order was unfolding, right in the heart of Oakland.

I was glued to the television all afternoon. They reported that a house was being burnt down every 11 seconds! I also packed some things to go, in case I had to evacuate. (I didn’t.) There was a major freeway (the 580) between the fire and my house, but the fire already had jumped two other freeways (the 13 and the 24), and there was no reason it couldn’t leap over another. Not only were the Hills engulfed, but the fire was advancing on three fronts: toward downtown Berkeley, toward the Montclair Village section of Oakland, and, particularly horrifying, it was barreling straight through to Piedmont and Rock Ridge, from where it would easily have taken out my neighborhood, downtown Oakland.

Two months later I wrote an article for the East Bay Express on the fire. I interviewed Oakland firefighters who had battled it. They assured me that they’d had nothing to do with stopping that fire. Nothing at all. In fact, they’d had to retreat four times that afternoon, to save their lives. Miraculously, around 4 p.m. the winds changed, from the offshore Diablos to an onshore pattern. That not only pushed the flames back upon themselves, over areas denuded of fuel that had already burned; but the onshore winds are loaded with moisture from the ocean, and are cool. By evening, when the fire had largely ended, the temperature had gone down by as much as 20 degrees. By that time, about 25,000 firefighters from all over the country had gathered along the fire’s perimeter.

The Oakland Hills Firestorm of 1991 was the worst urban wildfire in the nation’s history, and remains so today. I pay my respects here to the families of the people who died–to the people who lost their homes and pets–and to the brave firefighters who risked all and in some cases paid the ultimate price to save us.

The wine connection was that I heard of a guy who had a big wine cellar. When he realized that his house was going to burn down and he had to get the hell out of there, he threw as many bottles of wine as he could into his swimming pool, hoping the water would protect them. It did–but it also peeled off all the labels!

California wine is just too expensive. It really is. Not all of it, to be sure. There’s a lot of expensive wine that’s worth the price. But there’s a ton of badly made, mediocre wine that will set you back an arm and a leg, and that’s a real drag.

Of course, nobody’s forced to buy overpriced wine, and I don’t have any sympathy at all for people who are so ignorant or devoid of taste that they willingly plonk down $30, $40 or more for a wine that I would score, at best, 84 points. That’s their problem, and if they like what they’re getting, fine. But I can tell you that when I give a low score to an expensive faulty wine, it makes me mad.

The first thing I wonder is, does the winery team even have the slightest clue their stuff is average, at best? If they know, then they’re engaging in very ugly, nefarious behavior–all the more awful when the wine is accompanied by glowing “winemaker notes” telling us how glorious and rare it is.

If the winery team is unaware they’re sending out plonk, they should be fired. I was having this conversation yesterday with someone who works in marketing for a big winery. I wondered how it’s possible to have to sell something you know isn’t very good, and still keep your soul. Yes, your “soul,” meaning–not what some religious people say–but your integrity, conscience, love of truth. If your job is to sell something you know, in your heart of hearts, isn’t good, but you spend your time trying to convince people it is, then you’ve lost something you used to treasure when you were young. I can only imagine the rationalization that people engage in to dull the pain. I suppose a fat paycheck helps to narcotize.

I shouldn’t let my blood pressure be affected by a bad bottle of $50 wine, but I can’t help it. I think, “What in the world is wrong with you [meaning the producer]? What were you thinking?” The other thought that always follows is, how can this winery remain in business? Sometimes, when I review a bad expensive wine, I’ll go into Wine Enthusiast’s database (which you can access for free) and look at the winery’s track record. More often than not, these wineries have been producing dismal stuff, at inflated prices, year after year after year. How is this possible? Who buys it? Don’t they know that a 16% Syrah that tastes like sugared asparagus is a total ripoff? That a $36 Petite Sirah that tastes like melted jam is a joke? That a $55 Cabernet with nothing but caramelized oak is an insult? That it’s insane to pay  $50 for a Port-style wine (in a half-bottle, at that) that’s thin and lacking in anything but sugar? That if you fork out $30 for a Chardonnay that tastes like buttered popcorn, you should have your head examined? These are all real examples from this past week, although obviously I’m not going to name names. And if I went back over the last year, I could write a book called “500 wines you should hate because they’re not only boring, but they’re trying to rob you blind.”

It all leads to a final question. Let’s say I blind taste a wine, think it’s pretty dumb and simple, but that I could imagine drinking it in a paper cup at a party some Saturday night and not actually throwing up. I give it 83 points. Then I see it costs $6 retail. I still think it’s a pretty boring wine, and I won’t adjust the score, but I will soften my language to suggest it might be a good buy for someone who’s looking to get off cheap. That kind of wine doesn’t make me angry. I’ll think, “Okay, I wouldn’t buy it, but at least the producer doesn’t have hubris, and millions of Americans will benefit from this cheap wine.” But those expensive ones really piss me off.

When you’ve been a critic for a while, as I have, it’s a lesson in humility. You realize that a lot of people must like stuff that you find execrable, because these wineries just keep on cranking it out. That makes me realize it’s just my opinion. But I know what I know, and I believe that what I think I know is true. There’s an awful lot of bad California wine out there that’s absurdly priced, and I wonder how long it can go on.

I’m still very much enjoying and learning from Rajat Parr’s new book, “Secrets of the Sommeliers” (co-written with Jordan Mackay), although I could live without his constant swipes against California wines.

Parr is at his best when writing, of course, about his beloved Burgundy. Whenever I read good writing about Burgundy it turns me on, for the explanation of this region surely is one of the most rigorously intellectual in all of winedom. Who among us doesn’t remember the first times he was taken, through the written word, on a tour of the famous slopes of the Cotes d’Or, by a writer who knew what he was talking about? In my case, my first tour guide was Alexis Lichine who, although a Bordelaise (he owned a couple of chateaux), knew Burgundy in his blood. I must have spent dozens of hours close-reading the Burgundy sections of his immortal “New Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits”, memorizing the appellations controlées, studying the map, understanding the millennial history, and wishing I could have the opportunity “to perceive the difference between a…Charmes-Chambertin and the contiguous Clos de Beze,” which, sadly, didn’t happen nearly enough.

It was those tiny, mystical differences between vineyards and parts of vineyards so close to each other that inflamed my mind. I took it as part of God’s plan for an ordered Earth that it should be so–that the Pinot Noir grape (and to a lesser extent the Chardonnay) grown in Burgundy should express itself in so complex a tapestry, in what is really a fairly compact region.

Parr takes us over much the same territory as did Lichine, albeit in language not quite so poetic. Reading Parr on, say, Vosne-Romanée, the old fire returned to light up my brain. The old passion was rekindled, as it was when, in 1982, I bought (for $30!) my Lichine “Encyclopedia.” But I reflect also that there’s a huge difference between then and now, in terms of how I apply the knowledge of Burgundy to the situation of Pinot Noir here in California.

It was the particular French genius for (or obsession with?) classification that provided the underpinnings of my fascination with Burgundy, and in the 1980s there was no reason why I, or anybody else, would have been blamed for believing that California too would someday be organized into communes and villages and premier and grand crus. They might not be called by those words, but we would someday have identified the precise slopes where our Vosnes and Cortons and Chambolle-Musignys grew, and even the tenderloins within them in which our Bonnes-Mares and La Taches displayed exquisite grandness.

That is what I thought in the 1980s, at any rate. Today, it’s a very different story. We have superb Pinot Noir regions scattered for hundreds of miles, from the Anderson Valley down to the Santa Rita Hills, from Fort Ross to the Santa Cruz Mountains, from Carneros to the Santa Lucia Highlands. Far from having a single range of hills to understand, we have multiple valleys, even whole mountain ranges that have just begun to be poked and prodded. We have, too, a vastly greater range of clones, rootstocks, farming techniques, barrel regimens and winemaking practices available than the Burgundian vignerons ever did, each of which minimizes the contributions of terroir, making them harder to discern. I could go on and on about all the reasons why classifying California Pinot Noir, at least in the way it’s done in Burgundy, will never be done.

Does that leave me disappointed? No. My expectations from the 1980s have turned out not to be achievable, but then, I had many fantasies back then that never panned out. There is, though, a definite satisfaction in knowing that, although things here are much more complicated than I, or anybody else, thought, still, we as a state have reached the point where I can taste masterpieces like Merry Edwards’ 2007 Meredith Estate, Lynmar’s ‘07 Five Sisters, Byron’s ‘08 Nielson, Samsara’s ‘08 Las Hermanas, and appreciate them for what they are, even though they don’t seem to be arranged into any sort of coherent order (and even despite Rajat Parr’s back-handed compliments).

And who’s to say that the dream is truly dead? It won’t be my generation that finally and fully explains Pinot Noir in California. It won’t be the Millennials, because even if they have writing careers of thirty years or more, vintners and growers still will be scratching away in our appellations like chickens looking for a tasty grub. I think we may be able to make sense of some of our AVAs sooner than others–the Santa Lucias seem more logical than, say, the Sonoma Coast. Westside Road may someday be plotted out in a more or less thorough way. We may have some clearer understanding of the Santa Rosa Road corridor in the Santa Rita Hills, brief as that place’s viticultural history is.

But much work remains to be done, and one thing wine writers will have to be careful of is not to jump to unwarranted conclusions, just because they sound good and are easily repeated. In a day and age of instant truthiness, spread virally over the Internet, writers should avoid parroting something that somebody else said. That’s not how the Burgundians understood their land. It took them a thousand years, and from what I’ve read of their history, they were in no hurry. Neither should we be.

A good cause to support…

My friend, David Le, is hosting a fundraiser for Big Brothers and Big Sisters of the Bay Area. It’s on Sat., Oct. 16, at his Garden Hortica garden center in Oakland, 668 Seventh Street, near Jack London Square.

Although California winemakers had been making so-called “Bordeaux blends” for years — Inglenook and Martini pioneered mixing Merlot or Cabernet Franc in with Cabernet Sauvignon, and Joseph Phelps’ Insignia was a blend from its first vintage, in 1974 — it wasn’t until 1988 that a group of Napa Valley vintners decided the blends needed a collective identity.

The founding wineries included Lyeth, Flora Springs, Franciscan and Dry Creek Vineyard. “Back then, you’d see a wine labeled ‘red’ or ‘table wine,’ and since consumers weren’t very knowledgeable, they assumed it would be inferior. We needed a categorization that felt right,” Kim Stare Wallace, Dry Creek Vineyard’s second-generation owner, said.

The wineries launched a nationwide competition to come up with a name; the winner would get a case of wine from each member winery, on an annual basis, for the rest of his or her life. I entered that contest, but did not win. Instead, a young man who was the wine buyer for an East Bay supermarket won by coming up with the term “Meritage,” and the wineries eventually formed themselves into the Meritage Association.

The Association has always had marketing issues, always struggled to make “Meritage” a universally-accepted term in the on-premise, off-premise, critical and consumer communities. Some of the original member wineries have since quit the Association; some important wineries that make Bordeaux blends never joined; and although the 250 members today are scattered across six countries, including Israel and Mexico, most of them remain located in California.

The Association’s president is Kim Stare Wallace. Its treasurer is Bill Smart, a likeable young guy who is Dry Creek’s communications director. I ran into Bill at the Wine Bloggers Conference last week, where he reminded me that the Association is engaged in a renewed P.R. push to increase its visibility. Here’s a brief Q&A:

Steve: Why do you need a special word for Bordeaux blends? Why not just educate the public about blending in general, and that any wine with less than 75% of the varietal can’t be named after a grape?

Bill: Well, it’s a valid point if you’re saying “Meritage is a dead term, so why have it?” But the reason there’s no credibility there is because we haven’t been consistent with marketing and messaging. Why is Rhone Rangers and ZAP what they are? Because they do a really good job of promoting. And we feel this category is worth promoting.

How are you promoting Meritage?

In 2011, our dream is to have the first ever consumer tasting of Meritage. It will be in San Francisco. We’ll partner with Wine 2.0, and it will benefit the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Our hope is to get 50 wineries pouring.

Why wouldn’t they all come?

Well, there’s an extreme amount of apathy, because most members have less than 250 cases [of Meritage], so it’s not a focus. They focus on their 5,000 cases of Sauvignon Blanc [or whatever] they have to sell.

How come so many wineries that make Bordeaux blends won’t join the Meritage Association?

You know, it’s the old explanation, “I have a proprietary red wine and I don’t need ‘Meritage’ to promote it. I already have enough credibility, so I don’t need you.” I always reply, “Well, you can throw ‘Meritage’ on the back of your wine label. It’s not that big a deal.”

[This is Steve again, opining.] I have mixed feelings about “Meritage” and its usefulness or lack thereof. I am, of course, entirely in favor of Bordeaux blends, red and white, if that’s what a winemaker wants to do. And I do understand that some education has to be given to consumers, who might expect to see a varietal name on every bottle of wine. The object, I think, is to explain that Bordeaux itself — which everybody’s heard of — is never a varietal wine, but always a combination of certain varietals. You could tell people, “This is a blend using the noble Bordeaux varieties,” and I suspect they’d be impressed. So why saddle consumers with yet another complicated word to remember and understand, when they’re already overwhelmed with wine minutiae?

On the other hand (there’s the Gemini in me), it does seem reasonable to make the case that these Bordeaux blends should be independently categorized. A categorization is always a justification for existence; the justification, in this case, is that a winemaker might be tempted to make a varietally-labeled Cabernet Sauvignon (i.e., containing at least 75% of that grape) merely in order to put Cabernet Sauvignon on the label, and not necessarily because it makes the best, most rewarding and complete wine. Meritage adherents thus are in a position to argue that they have freed themselves from the addiction to varietal labels. That’s a simple message to deliver, and one the public would understand.

It is so difficult to answer this question, despite the temptations of doing so, precisely because, as H. Warner Allen wrote, in his 1932 classic, The Romance of Wine: “Great wines are possessed of an individual personality, an originality of character, which varies, not merely from one district, vineyard or vintage year to another, but also from one bottle to another bottle of the same wine.” Another way of phrasing this is to say that there are no great vintages, only great bottles (and a free subscription to this blog to whomever comes up with the person who first said that).

For Cabernet in California, let’s first consider district. The grape needs moderate to full warmth to ripen. Plant it too close to the coast, and the thick-skinned grapes will never mature. The resulting wine will have a green character, of the sort that used to be called the Monterey veggies. On the other hand, if you plant Cabernet in too warm an area — the Central Valley, say — the grapes will lack sufficient acidity, and also the bunches will likely contain some raisined fruit, which will give the wine a pruny taste.

So you need something in the middle. Look at this map of California’s wine districts

and draw a diagonal line, running northwest to southeast, starting from Lake County and parallel to the coast. You’ll see how it goes through Napa Valley, then hits a little piece of Solano County and slices through Livermore Valley. Then it runs through a couple of counties that are not colored or named on the map; they are, respectively, Santa Clara and San Benito. After that, the line crosses the southeastern tip of Monterey County, crosses the eastern part of San Luis Obispo County, and trails off in the far eastern part of Santa Barbara County, where the coast turns inland in the Transverse Range.

That is California’s Cabernet line. All things being equal, that’s where the great Cabs grow.

Not all things are equal, though. The reason Napa Valley makes the best Cabernet Sauvignon is because things got started a lot earlier there, and a lot more money flowed in. What about Sonoma County? You’ll notice it lies west of the Cabernet line, making it, in general, too cool for Cabernet, although the Alexander Valley, and especially the western ridges of the Mayacamas Mountains, can be fine. The problem with Lake County is twofold: it got started a lot later (not really until the 1990s), and, being more landlocked and further from any coastal influence at all, Lake may prove ultimately to be too hot for Cabernet. We’ll have to see. As for that little piece of Solano County, it has its own AVA, Suisun Valley. There’s no reason Suisun shouldn’t be making good Cabernet, since its climate isn’t that different from Napa’s. Maybe some day, it will.

Livermore should be making better Cabernet. It has a long history; the reasons why it’s not probably have more to do with political, cultural and economic factors than terroir. Then we come to Santa Clara. You might not know it, but this county used to have the reputation for making the finest Cabernet Sauvignon in California — before it turned into Silicon Valley and subdivisions. (And by the way, most of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA is not in Santa Cruz County!) San Benito probably could make good Cabernet somewhere, but nobody I know of is trying. In the southern part of Monterey County, the Hames Valley and San Lucas AVAs are trying to grow better Cabernet, but once again, the amount of money a Monterey Cabernet can bring is not high enough for growers and vintners to invest a lot into the wine; and one of the things that makes a great Cabernet (or a great anything) is investment.

Then we come to San Luis Obispo. I’ve heard that people in the eastern, warmer part of the county are trying to grow good Cabernet, but none of it has crossed my desk so far. Finally, the Cabernet line crosses that eastern part of Santa Barbara County, the region that just got its own AVA, Happy Canyon. I’ve blogged about it before. The people promoting it are making a huge deal about its Cabernet potential, and I will admit I’ve had a couple of really good Cabernets from down there. They’re not as rich as Napa, more like a Graves, with a certain blackcurrant, mineral and herb essence. As a critic, I’m perfectly happy to let Happy Canyon prove itself (and believe me, there’s lots of money there).

When you consider all the above, you realize that California still is a young winegrowing place. They’ve had a thousand years, or whatever, in Bordeaux to figure it out. In most of the areas where, theoretically, Cabernet could thrive in California, we’ve had a few decades, and even in Napa Valley, just 150 years, more or less, which is a drop in the historical bucket.

Well, I said we’d start with district in determining what makes great Cabernet Sauvignon. And that discussion has eaten up this whole post. I’ll have more to say about other Cabernet factors in the future.