Not that I feel it needs defending against the knuckleheads who are always attacking it, but– well, sheesh, I guess I do feel it needs defending!

Here’s one of the best (independent) rationales for the 100-point scoring system — independent, because it comes from someone who has nothing to gain from praising it. His name is  Neil Monnens, he publishes an online wine guide called the Wine Blue Book, and he was quoted in an interview in the blog Good Grape: A Wine Manifesto last week.

Wine Blue Book researches the scores that wines receive “from leading wine critics,” according to its FAQs. (I couldn’t find anything on the site that identifies who the critics are; if I missed it, sorry.) Then they come up with an average price to determine a “quality-price ratio.” In the Good Grape interview, Jeff Lefevere asked Monnens, “Since you and I last talked, have you seen an increase in the use of points as a scoring mechanism,” and here’s what Monnens replied:

Yes. Some folks continue to dismiss the 100 point system but they choose a 10 point system and then score wines 8.9 or 9.6 which just translates to an 89 and 96.  The 20 point system is the same but just 20% of the 100 points. The folks who dismiss the system advocate “trust your retailer” but since a retailer’s income is dependent on the wine the consumer purchases, I would rather trust the scores the critics provide since their income isn’t dependent on the consumers purchase.

I’m glad somebody’s finally talking some sense, besides me ; > The 100-point system isn’t any different from a 10-point system (as Monnens explained), or a 20-point system (which is actually what Wine Enthusiast’s is, since we don’t publish scores below 80 points), or a 5-star system (which is really the equivalent of 80, 85, 90, 95 and 100 points), or any other icon-based system you can think of. I think it’s also important to understand, as Monnens pointed out, that a critic’s income — mine, anyhow — doesn’t ride on the scores he gives. Believe me, I’ve given lousy scores to Wine Enthusiast’s advertisers and high scores to wineries that never advertise anywhere. So he’s right when he implies that a critic like me has far less incentive to inflate scores than does a wine merchant.

Not that the public shouldn’t trust their local wine merchant. If you can get a relationship going with a trusted one, it’s as valuable as having an outstanding physician, analyst or personal trainer: someone you entrust yourself to, and who you know won’t screw you. That’s a good person to have in your life. But so is, ahem, a good wine critic.

By the way, that dream job at Murphy-Goode is getting ready to announce their Top 10 applicants, on July 7. They’re already narrowed it down to the Top 50. If you haven’t watched the videos, which are posted on the website, you’re missing out on some really great entertainment. Some of these people are so clever and talented, it just takes your breath away.

Dept. of Oops!

“An Italian priest caught driving over the alcohol limit pleaded to police that it was only because of the Holy Wine he had drunk as part of the mass, Ansa news agency reported…the 41-year-old priest is set to appeal against the ruling, saying his alcohol consumption was not “voluntary” since it was part of the Catholic ritual…”

Officer, I swear it’s not my fault! I involuntarily had to drink 106 wines because it’s part of the ritual of being a wine critic! If you don’t let me go, you’re a, uhh, criticphobe!

Well, I didn’t really invent the Internet. But I did write an article in the May, 1997 issue of Wine Enthusiast — twelve years ago — that was pretty prescient in its predictive power. (And that is a 98-point alliterative triumph.)

I came across an old copy of the ‘zine last week. Re-reading my article, Wine on the Web, I was reminded of the heady excitement of the mid- 1990s when the wine industry and the Internet collided. But what really struck me was how many of the issues back then are still with us, unresolved and perhaps unresolvable.

By the second paragraph, I’d identified the key: “…vintners sense an opportunity to market their wines…”. I quoted the then-PR manager of St. Clement to explain why her winery had rushed to set up a Web page. “We didn’t have a goal,” she explained. “We just knew we had to be a part of it.” From there, I quoted Peter Granoff, an original founder of Virtual Vineyards (which went belly up; it’s now morphed into wine.com). “[M]ost wineries are still caught up in the Web for its own sake and are struggling to find out what to do.”

Peter, or that PR manager, could say precisely the same things today! It’s amazing that, as far as we’ve come, most California wineries remain well behind the digital curve and don’t seem to know what to do with the Internet, including social media (which didn’t exist in 1997). True, most wineries have a website. But most of them are boring, unfriendly, and not even up-to-date with new vintages (which you’d think would be easy to do with a computer). Wineries should be leading other businesses in forging ahead on the Internet, not dawdling behind.

I also wrote: “There are only two things a winery or wine company can do on the Net….marketing and sales. Although intimately related, they’re really quite different.” I called marketing a “soft activity,” meaning it did not directly make money. Concerning sales, I wrote: “this is the hard part of the transaction. It’s where the customer actually forks over a credit card number.”

Couldn’t have said it better today.

I quoted an electronic marketing expert: “The question today is whether the Web’s primary value to business will be as a revenue builder, a cost-cutting device, or a brand builder. I believe that brand-building will win out.” That woman was right. We’re seeing that brand building and customer loyalty are the end products of web sites, blogs and twitter, not sales in and of themselves, much less cutting costs.

In my article I also quoted Granoff as saying it didn’t make sense for mass-produced wines, which are readily available in supermarkets, to sell direct over the Internet. “Why would you buy it on the Net and pay the extra cost of shipping, and then have to wait to get it?” The same is true today. Instead, he and others told me, it would be smaller wineries that would benefit from DTC sales. (Of course, this was well before the Granholm v. Heald 2005 Supreme Court decision.) Let’s hope that day is near when all 50 states allow shipping of wine. That will be the salvation of many small family wineries that otherwise may not make it.

I quoted de Toqueville: “Time has not shaped it into perfect form…and it is almost impossible to discern what will pass away…and what will survive.” He was speaking of America in the 1830s, but we could use those exact words about the Internet right now.

Dept. of Oops

The Associated Press is reporting that “A man suspected of breaking into a Maine restaurant will have to get used to jailhouse food after workers at the eatery discovered lobsters and wine missing – and the suspect asleep on a bench. Police said [name withheld] broke into the Portland Lobster Co. through a rear window and stuffed his pockets with cash before chowing down on the better part of 11 prepared lobsters worth about $300. He washed it all down with a white wine…”

Same thing happens to me when I eat 11 lobsters. I just wanna close my eyezzzzz and drifffftt… By the way, I went to the Portland Lobster Co.’s website to see what white wines they have. I hope the thief washed his crustaceans down with the J. Lohr Chardonnay because that’s what I would have picked.

And you thought “Sonoma Coast” was too big

The TTB in its wisdom announced its latest Frankenstein AVA yesterday. Quote from the PDF: “The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) published a final rule in the Federal Register establishing the Upper Mississippi River Valley viticultural area.  This viticultural area consists of 29,914-square miles…”

In other words, just your typical tiny little appellation.

Thirty-thousand square miles! That’s 175 miles on each side. Here’s the truly pathetic part of the press release: “We designate viticultural areas to allow vintners to better describe the origin of their wines and to allow consumers to better identify wines they may purchase.” Yes, it’s truly helpful to the consumer to know that the wine hails from somewhere in the upper Midwest.

Your wine comes from someplace in here

I liked Eric Asimov’s mea culpa last week when he wrote about how he had mistaken a Syrah for a Pinot Noir, in the company of people he was having dinner with at a restaurant. Of course, it’s always gracious to acknowledge one’s faux pas with a dash of self-deprecating humor, and Eric did, claiming that one of his missions “is to do away with the aura of omniscience that so often adorns wine writers.” Well, there’s nothing like getting the variety wrong, in public, to take that aura of omniscience and pulverize it to smithereens.

It does happen to the best of us. Harry Waugh’s famous, and similarly self-deprecating, remark that he hadn’t confused a Burgundy for a Bordeaux “since lunch” comes to mind. Now, Eric put up a little fig leaf to hide his nakedness when he said that, after all, it hadn’t been a light, silky wine he’d confused for Pinot Noir, it had been a Copain Syrah — Copain’s style being dense, dark wines. Here’s where the psychology comes in. Eric knew he’d ordered Copain off the wine list. His brain was expecting a broodingly ripe, dark Pinot Noir, so when he tasted the Syrah, that same brain censored, in essence, the wine’s “Syrah-ness” (pepper? violets? crushed blackberries? meat?) and hallucinated instead a “Pinot Noir-ness” that was in accordance with Eric’s expectations.

Remember all the debate in the blogosphere last summer about whether wine tasting is “subjective” or “objective”? I should think that this settles the matter. It’s “subjective” because the brain can never be entirely neutral. Somebody once said that Andy Warhol’s films of the 1960s, such as Sleep or Empire State Building, were the only authentically neutral films because they had absolutely no point of view. But that’s not true. Their point of view was precisely that they had no point of view. And the reason they had no point of view was because Andy Warhol had decided to simply point his camera at something, and then leave it running while he read magazines or went to the bathroom. His films therefore did have a point of view: boredom, banality, unconventionality.

The most extreme example of a wine taster having no point of view with regard to the wine is the Master of Wine tasting blind. This is supposedly the classically objective way to critique a wine. The mind as a camera, capturing incoming information, with the brain functioning as a computer, analyzing it in a completely detached way, then printing out data in the form of a review. But does anyone really believe a person can function like Frank Herbert’s mentats, in Dune, which Wikipedia defines as “humans trained to mimic computers: human minds developed to staggering heights of cognitive and analytical ability…the embodiment of logic and reason”? Can’t be done, and that’s the overarching reason why wine reviewers must approach their jobs with humility and even a bit of apology. As Eric discovered, mistaking a Syrah for a Pinot Noir comes with the territory.

Okay, so what happens when that “aura of omniscience” is stripped away from a wine writer? It’s not exactly a case of “the emperor has no clothes.” But it does mean that wine writers not only have to review to the best of their ability, they also have to be great historians, students of popular culture, with an aptitude for science and geology and — above all — transcendent writers.

This emperor is missing some clothing!

Bubbles. By their very nature, they get big, and then, Splat! They burst. Dom-com stocks were bubbles. The housing market was a bubble. The Dow Jones of the last few years was a bubble. What did they have in common, and what does a bubble have to do with wine?

What they had in common was values so high, they were unsustainable. The Dow peaked at just below 14,000 in October, 2007, by far its highest ever. Now it’s scraping 9,000. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the newspapers reported two days ago that home prices, after rising to ridiculous levels, plunged in December to 31% lower than they were a year go, with the end nowhere in sight.

Now consider expensive California wine. These wines, led by Cabernet, are like the real estate market: Just as the number of million-dollar homes soared between 2001 and 2008, so too has the number of expensive wines. Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, recently analyzed the housing market in this gloomy article he wrote for the online periodical, RGE Monitor. Briefly, the economic downturn will force Baby Boomers to sell their homes over the next few years, downsizing to smaller homes and condos, or even renting. That will dump even more homes on the market than there already are, what with all the foreclosures, and that in turn will force housing prices even lower. Sounds like a death spiral. There were simply too many big, expensive homes built in the first place, and then easy credit led to a dash to buy. It was an unsustainable bubble, and now it’s burst.

Sounds to me like the expensive wine market. Just as there were too many pricey houses and not enough people who could afford them, so too there are too many pricey bottles, and not enough people able to buy them. I went over Wine Enthusiast’s database and counted 336 wines I’ve reviewed since 2004 that retailed for at least $80. Broken down by the year I tasted them, they were:

2004 and earlier: 1
2005: 67
2006: 98
2007: 71
2008: 99

So the number of expensive wines (judging by my unscientific count) appears to be growing, with the over-$80 segment up 47 percent in 4 years. That tells me it’s over-heated, just like home prices were.

When supply exceeds demand, there’s no getting around the economic consequence: prices must fall. That popping sound you hear is the cult wine bubble bursting. Who survives the shakeout? We’ll just have to wait and see. Not everybody will.

As part of this blog’s continuing battle against neoprohibitionism — which I define as the use of fearmongering tactics to discourage even the moderate consumption of alcohol — I bring to your attention this misleading commentary from something called the Athlete Resource Center, written by a guy named Dominic. You can read it yourself, but basically, it warns athletes to completely shun any alcohol at all, if they want to avoid the following problems:

- inability to synthesize proteins
- loss of memory
- mood swings
- sleeping disorders
- dehydration

“Your coach wouldn’t be too happy if you can’t remember plays, or even participate due to poor grades, because of your alcohol use,” the column warns jocks.

What’s so objectionable about this “advice” is that it utterly fails to distinguish between the moderate use of alcohol, and an excessive consumption that can, in fact, lead to the above problems. Nor does the article refer, even obliquely, to the well-established health benefits of moderate wine consumption. This is not a message that’s credible to athletes or anyone else. Reasonable people will realize that a little wine or beer at dinner is not going to cause anyone to forget a play the next day, or “hinder you from absorbing and utilizing nutrients you need,” or cause “dire consequences on your individual performance, as well as on other team members.” This hyperbole is reminiscent of the old Harry Anslinger scare tactics about marijuana, when he was the nation’s drug czar back in the 1930s. Here is a gory description he wrote about a young “marijuana addict”:

“With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze…he was pitifully crazed. The boy said that he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called ‘muggles,’ a childish name for marijuana.”

I have always considered myself an athlete. I was a longtime competitive runner, earned my black belt in traditional Japanese karate (Wadokai), and continue to enjoy weightlifting and heavy aerobics. Being in peak physical and mental shape has always been a centerpiece of my life, and so has been the enjoyment of wine. Far from wine interfering with my athletic pursuits, it has balanced them. I completely reject the notion that the moderate use of alcohol is in any way a conflict with the athletic life.

The writer, Dominic, seems to be a smart, caring and thoughtful guy. If you go to his Reading List, you’ll find some great books there. I did email Dominic to ask why he doesn’t allow even the moderate use of alcohol, and his answer was, in part: You are correct, I do not make any distinction between moderate and excessive alcohol use.  However, moderate use has been shown to negatively impact athletic performance. Then he resorts to the slippery slope argument: Also realize that for many athletes, and non-athletes, there is no such thing as moderate use.  One drink becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes ten. To me, this is like the Mormons saying that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to marriage between men and dogs. I mean, come on. Here’s a partial list of famous ex-athletes who own vineyards and/or make wine: Tom Seaver, Joe Montana, Mario Andretti, Peggy Fleming, Greg Norman, Mike Ditka and Larry Bird. I don’t know if they drank during their performance days, but I don’t believe any of them would be selling dope to active members of their former teams.

More Obama fallout: Happy days are NOT here again

[From the Danbury, CT New Times] The New Milford Republican Town Committee has announced that their wine and beer tasting, scheduled for today (Friday), is POSTPONED until January. Any ticket holder may request a refund by calling Katy Francis at (860) 354-7137.

Dept. of Oops!

Idiot tries breaking wine bottle with head and fails