1.

I was not surprised to hear yesterday that someone is taking on the New World (Australia, Chile, California) for global wine dominance in the value tier. After all, we’re in a recessionary time when all the cards are being reshuffled and recut, and who knows who will emerge on top. Nor was it surprising to learn who the potential usurper is: France’s Languedoc-Roussillon! All the 2,700 winemakers in that huge district — which covers 35% of France’s vineyard acreage — will now be able “to label their wine for the first time with the grape variety, vintage and location.” That will enable them to compete in the New World, where consumers look for wines with varietal names, like Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. That’s why a top Languedoc official said, “It will help us a lot with the American market.”

That’s hundreds and hundreds of millions of bottles of wine, and a lot of it is going to cost under $10, giving stern competition to inexpensive California brands and New World imports.

Let’s back up and get philosophical. Since the recession began, we’ve assumed that the most expensive wines are in trouble. They are, but that doesn’t mean the bottom of the market is safe. You have only to look at Australia to see that. Nobody knows if and when the recession will lift and recovery return. But we know this: this announcement from the Languedoc-Roussillon is a shot across California’s bow, a warning signal that powerful interests in the European Union are moving in for their share of the loot.

2.

Announcing the first ever Wine Bloggers Conference on Wine Writing

The world already has a Wine Bloggers Conference and a Wine Writers Conference, but what we don’t have is a Wine Bloggers Conference on Wine Writing (or WBCoWW, pronounced “web-cow”). I’m not sure how this ended up falling between the cracks, but it did. Probably because everybody’s so darned busy blogging, tweeting and monetizing, not to mention going to conferences, that nobody noticed.

Why a Wine Bloggers Conference on Wine Writing? Why now? And why me? Answers:

1. Because it’s needed.
2. If not now, when?
3. It’s my karma, which was never all that great.

I doubt if we can get Meadowood again — too pricey, and besides, the proctologists have it booked the third week of July (I checked), which is the only time I can make it. Even if we could afford a little room, I wouldn’t want to be sharing that Meadowood campus at night on those dark, creepy paths with a bunch of probing ass doctors, especially if I’ve been drinking, which I will. There are several AAA-approved motels in the Vallejo/AmCan area we could probably afford. And speakers. We need speakers. 1WineDude, are you free the week of July 15? I know you’re crazy busy, and we’ll need to book you months in advance. Have your people get in touch with mine. Alder Yarrow, any chance you’ll chair the panel on “How to chair a panel”? There may be a syndication deal. I think I can get you Jancis Robinson, or, at least, a Jancis lookalike (I know one from San Francisco). Parker said nyah, nyah, but he didn’t say nyah, nyah, nyah your mother wears combat boots, so maybe he’ll come. (Memo to Morton Leslie: please prepare for me a draft of winery-media relations as they have developed from the late 18th century into the digital age.) There’s some hope the Coppolas will come. Every wine conference needs a little glamor, which is why God created Karen MacNeil.

For our breakout session I suggest a rousing game of Truth or Dare, libations to be provided by whichever winery underwrites web-cow with the most funding. In this game, players ask embarrassing questions of each other, and challenge each other to do embarrassing things. For example, Heather John might dare Charlie Olken to lapdance in a bikini with Eric Asimov while blind tasting without spilling a drop onto Eric’s khakis, and The Hosemaster (should he attend the festivities, which is not at all clear) might raise the ante by daring all the bloggers to rate CO’s performance on a 100-point scale, or else risk having Charlie lapdance on them. (Try not to visualize.) It’s great fun, and could give new meaning to the word “Gewurztraminer.” By this time we should all be relaxed and harmonized enough to attend our second panel, which Jim Laube has graciously agreed to come out of hiding and chair. (Memo to self: Does he still look like his old WS picture? Find out.) It is entitled, “What would happen to the 100-point system if all the 100-point critics in the world suddenly disappeared, the way all the women did in Philip Wylie’s 1951 novel, ‘The Disappearance’”? When Jim proposed this topic, I thought it was a little un-P.C., but it does win the award for the world’s longest panel title, and should garner lots of media coverage, especially in Cigar Aficienado. It also raises the issue of: If Tish were armed with weapons of mass destruction, would he use them and, if so, upon whom? My personal opinion is that the 100 point system will not die with the death of its critics, but will long outlive them; and, in fact, numerically rate their demises. As long as I’m still here to participate in the debate, I’m content.

First, I apologize to readers. This site was down most of yesterday, due to issues at my web hosting company.

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It’s already been widely reported that California’s 2009 grape harvest was the second largest ever — 4.9 million tons, more than any other harvest except 2005, which “crushed” all previous records. (To put this number into context, that is 44% more grapes than were crushed in 1988.) Conventional analysis suggests that high-end wineries will take a hit, since “[I]n the coastal areas, there really is too much [product] at this point,” according to the well-known grape broker, Bill Turrentine, who added, “high end wineries in Sonoma and Napa counties suffer [from] a glut of fine wines almost no one thinks they can afford to buy.”

This is not particularly good news for “cult” wines or those just below cult status that aspire to super-ultrapremium prices. For the last 1-1/2 years (which is to say, since the economy collapsed), I’ve been astounded by the quantity of $50 and above wines that continue to pour in to me for review. “Who are all these people, and how are they staying in business?” I asked myself. Now, there’s additional pressure on them: the grape and wine glut from 2009.

What wine and region comes to mind when someone is predicting difficulties for “high end wineries?” Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is the correct answer (those of you who guessed right win a free lifetime subscription to this blog). So let’s drill down and see just how much trouble N.V.C.S. is in.

Statewide, the ‘09 Cabernet crush (441,563 tons) was up 35% over 2008, which was not a small crop by historical measures. Of that, 55,000 tons, or about 12.5%, was grown in District 4, which is Napa County — more than any California region except for District 11 (the northern San Joaquin Valley, but we don’t care about Central Valley Cab, do we?). That means Napa Valley is going to be churning out an ocean of 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon, starting in about a year and continuing (for late releasers) through 2013.

In the just-issued, official “Grape Crush Report” (preliminary) for the 2009 California crop is a section that’s always worth reading: “Base Price Paid to Growers.” It essentially summarizes individual dollar deals from growers to producers who buy grapes. While there were some pretty cheap transactions ($350 a ton for District 4 Cabernet? I wonder where those grapes came from?), most of the grapes went for between $6,000-$11,000 a ton. The official “weighted average” for Napa Cabernet was only $4,743 per ton, but that average is skewed low by the cheap grapes, which will end up in inexpensive bottlings that have little impact on high-end Cab. By contrast, the weighted average for District 3 Pinot Noir (which includes Russian River Valley and Sonoma Coast) was just $3,039 — and we know how expensive those bottles are.

Now, my good friend, Pierce Carson, wrote in last week’s St. Helena Star that, due to “grape prices holding their own,” even this large harvest won’t significantly lower bottle prices. Pierce interviewed Vic Motto, a grape and wine finance guy whom reporters like me have turned to for many years as a source of information. Vic’s prediction was nonchalant. “(A recession) is never permanent. The wine we’re making today will be sold tomorrow — we’ll see what tomorrow brings.” He was, if anything, optimistic about Cabernet’s future.

I’m not so sure. I have a feeling deep down in my gut, as Turrentine seems also to, that these high prices cannot hold. And if cult Napa Cabernet begins to tumble (which, in fact, it already has), how long will it take before the downward pressure hits Sonoma County, Paso Robles, even Santa Barbara County?  “[T]he economics of the wine business are still much better than most industries,” Pierce quotes Motto as saying. That may be true, in the sense that owners (many of them wealthy to begin with) are able to tread water, so they’re not in the dire straits of, say, the auto industry. But what about consumers? They are in dire straits. Even a multi-millionaire owner can’t afford to absorb big losses year after year.

My feeling is that, by this summer, we’ll have a greater understanding of how much damage was, or wasn’t, caused to Napa Cabernet by the Recession and, now, 2009’s big crop. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn of more bankruptcies, more sales, more dumping at Costco or wherever. Also, consider the fickleness of the consumer, who’s always looking for the latest critical darling. As I look over my highest-scoring Napa Valley Cabs since last Fall, I see brands such as Hestan, Redmon, Napa Angel, Knights Bridge, Piña and Sabina. These are not exactly household names. In other words, there’s a whole new crop of new (or relatively new) producers chasing, or should we say threatening, the more traditional boutique brands. Is there room for everybody? Not in my opinion, and not in reality. As MSNBC online reported just yesterday, “Napa Valley is facing the worst wine downturn since the early 1980s. Premium wines priced between $50 and $125 were ‘a dead zone’ in 2009, according to Silicon Valley Bank’s annual wine market report…”. I can’t see that changing in 2010. Something’s gotta give.

And this just in:

Where will Hardy land? That’s been the question over the ultimate job destination of Mr. Wallace, who won Murphy-Goode’s Really Goode Job. We now know: “I am passing along a press release to your email that announces Michel-Schlumberger’s unique partnership with the winner of the Really Goode Job, Hardy Wallace. He is moving into our winery where he will be writing about his experience living at a winery in addition to his other pursuits…”. That’s the word from Jim Morris, who works for Schlumberger. Same job, different location. Is the pay still ten grand a month? Enquiring minds want to know!

And this too

I’ll be doing a really nice, different kind of wine tasting at Old Crow Tattoo, in my neighborhood, on Sat. Feb. 20, starting at 8 p.m. The address is 362 Grand Ave. Stop by. I’d love to see you!

I love it. The 2009 Bordeaux vintage is “spectacular,” “brilliant,” “superb, rich, powerful, sexy beasts,” “sublime.” As a result, the wines “won’t be cheap.”

In advertising this is known as “selling the sizzle.” In modern kulturspeak it’s “creating buzz.” And no one, anywhere, is better at creating buzz than those maestros of the art, the Bordeaux wine trade.

The quotes above are taken straight from an email press release I received yesterday from Berry Bros. & Rudd, the British wine merchant. BBR knows something about creating vintage anticipation. After all, that’s their job. Can you imagine if, here in California, Gavin Newsom’s PlumpJack wine stores told customers to “turn off the heating and sell the car to save up and sign up with us for the rollercoaster ride that will be Bordeaux 2009,” only substituting “Napa Valley 2009” for “Bordeaux 2009”? Dah Mayor would be laughed out of office, chased by angry mobs with pitchforks for taunting them in their economic misery.

How does Bored Dough get away with it?

It’s not just wine merchants who are spinning 2009, it’s the Bordealais themselves. “Nature has been extremely generous, it is sumptuous,” said Denis Dubourdieu, director of the Bordeaux Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences, adding, “you have to go back to the climatology of the 40s to find, perhaps, comparable conditions.” Remarks like this are bloody chum to the sharks who swim in Wine Spectator’s online site. “…the talk is already starting. Comparing the vintage to 1947?” someone wrote.

Over at the Wall Street Journal, when their writer, Will Lyons, recently reported on the ‘09s, he wrote, “Bordeaux does hyperbole well.” Indeed, they do. Of course, few people have actually tasted the wines at this point. But who cares? When they do, they’ll be dazzled. I guarantee it.

How many times have the Bordelais trumpeted a vintage of the century? About every 4 or 5 years, if not more frequently than that. And the market continues to let them get away with it.

Well, I’m not blaming Bordeaux. They know how to brand and market themselves; nothing wrong with that. Why can’t we in California play the same game?

To some extent, we have. I’ve written about the great 2005 Cabernets and the 2007 Pinot Noirs. So have other wine writers. But for some reason, California’s vintage assessments don’t have the weight or importance that Bordeaux’s have. Why is that? Is California somehow a victim of its once-proclaimed boast that “Every year is a vintage year”? Yes, once upon a time that was California’s mantra, its proud declaration to the world that shoppers need not fear buying a California wine from any year, because they’re all great. Of course, that’s not exactly true — especially since California’s winegrowing areas have spread far beyond Napa Valley, and even within Napa itself viticulture has crept up off the valley floor into the mountains. But maybe there’s still a residue of that “every year a vintage year” mantra, which robs proclamations of vintage greatness of their power.

But I think it’s more than that. Bordeaux has bragged about vintages of the century for so long, and so implausibly, that we kind of expect it of them. It’s part of the Bordeaux personality: oversized, glitzy, shamelessly self-promoting, egotistical, supremely confident if not arrogant. (California by contrast is self-doubting, introspective, ironic.) If Bordeaux did not boast, it wouldn’t be Bored Dough. And we — collectors, consumers, just-plain vanilla wine folks — wouldn’t line up to taste the sublime 2009s, if somebody just gives us the opportunity.

Two articles recently caught my eye. Although they were not apparently related, I saw an underlying connection that speaks, perhaps, to the future of social media.

The first, on the front page of last Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle, was headlined “Cafe asks customers to turn off laptops and start talking.” It seems there’s a coffee shop right here in Oakland whose owner “is asking customers to leave their laptops at home and actually speak to each other.” Anyone who’s ever been in a free wi-fi environment like Starbucks is familiar with the situation: people hunkered down at tables, nursing a $3 latte for hours while surfing the web. “I don’t have anything against technology,” said the cafe’s owner, a young, hip-looking guy with a goatee (i.e. not some dinosaur Boomer who “doesn’t get it”), “but it’s not the same as looking someone in the eye and pressing the flesh.”

I’ve expressed some negative feelings in this blog over the last year about the way laptops and other personal digital devices, like cell phones, are intruding into the social contract. That contract is an old one, understood pretty much by everyone, and it relates to how we behave in shared social situations. In a crowded elevator, for example, most people will be silent and avoid making eye contact with strangers. On an airplane flight, passengers understand the concept of personal space, which includes audio space: don’t let your arms stick over into your neighbor’s area, don’t make unnecessary noise, etc.

What technology is doing to us is destroying the traditional social contract. Now, that person next to you in the elevator is just as likely to be yakking into a Bluetooth. The other day at my gym, a woman was screaming at the top of her lungs into her cell phone for a good half-hour, while the rest of us had to endure her drama. With laptops in cafes, it’s just the opposite: where ten years ago patrons might have been debating about politics, gossiping, or playing chess, today they’re absorbed in their own little worlds. They might as well be on the Space Shuttle as in a crowded room with other human beings. “It’s now socially acceptable to text during dinner parties or stand alone at a party and check email,” the Chronicle article acidly observed.

Not at my dinner parties!

The second article was sent to me by Ron Washam, the famous Hosemaster of Wine. It is an excerpt from a new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” by a Harpers Magazine writer, Jason Lanier. Lanier deconstructs many myths surrounding social media in a way I strongly agree with. His underlying message is that social media is not only not bringing us closer and making us better, more dextrous communicators, but in fact is achieving exactly the opposite. “I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished,” Lanier writes, in a devastatingly pinpoint j’accuse whose truth is hard to deny. Lanier also demolishes one of the more persistent myths of social media: that its “hive mind” nature, in which thousands or millions of individual human minds are collectivized digitally, is somehow superior to a mere “organic human.” This is the assumption made by those entrepreneurs (and I’ve recently written about them) who are launching all these new “people’s wine tastings,” in which the collective wisdom of the crowd is said to be more trustworthy than the judgment of an individual expert. “The most tiresome claim of the reigning digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than antediluvian paid experts,” Lanier writes. Tiresome, indeed.

The connection between the two articles is that there is a backlash setting in against social media. In the first case, real people, such as the cafe owner, are starting to understand how divisive technology can be (and it’s interesting that their customers are beginning to agree with them). In the second case, academics are questioning the metaphysics of social media, not just analyzing it, but peering into its destructive potential. So we have two prongs moving together in a pincer movement: normal people on the ground and the philosophers of the academy. That is now movements form, and generate momentum.

The contradictions in the U.S. Bordeaux market as a result of the economic crisis could hardly be more glaring than when viewed through the lens of these two dueling headlines:

Bordeaux wine industry rallies to survive in US

and

Global Market Explodes with Huge Prices for DRC, Lafite, Pétrus, Harlan, and More as Hart Davis Hart Sells 100% of Lots for $3.5 Million

The first, from Yahoo News, reports that the American market for Classified Growths is so disastrous that “Some vintners have taken the unprecedented step of buying back their own wine.” Among these are such celebrated names as Chateaux Gruaud Larose, Greysac and even — Sacre bleu! — “the iconic Petrus.” The chateaux resorted to this desperate act to protect their wines’ image, “which can be destroyed by heavy discounting” expected when supply far exceeds demand. (All these moves followed ripple-effect like after Diageo, through its U.S. importer Chateau & Estates, “began aggressively liquidating tens of millions of dollars’ worth of [Bordeaux] stock at 40 to 60 percent discounts.”)

I don’t know if ever before in the history of Bordeaux the chateaux have bought back their wines from distributors in order to protect prices. I have read Eddie Penning-Rowsell’s “The Wines of Bordeaux” and seen nothing there of the kind. Can you imagine if, here in the States, Harlan, Colgin, Araujo and Screaming Eagle had to re-purchase their own wines after they already were somewhere in the market? (Never mind that most of them never see the distributor chain.) It would be shocking.

But how to reconcile this sad reality with that second headline, which comes via a press release from the Chicago wine auction house, Hart Davis Hart?

“Global Market Explodes with Huge Prices for DRC, Lafite, Pétrus…”

Drilling down into the details, “Eager bidders participated from 41 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, as well as Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, South Korea and the United Kingdom.”

These seemingly opposite truths are, in fact, completely compatible. The kind of person who pays $71,700 for 6 magnums of 1982 Pétrus is not feeling any pain. And, rest assured, there still are plenty of such multi-millionaires. They are the bankers, high tech magnates, international businessmen and inherited-wealth crowd who are largely immune to the vagaries of the economy. The people who are hurting — who have turned with a vengeance away from buying Classified Growth Bordeaux in this country — are the ordinary middle and upper-middle classes who, in normal times, thought nothing of buying some Gruaud Larose to stash while drinking their Sonoma Cabs and Paso Robles Zins. Heck, even I used to buy Gruaud in the 1980s.

So Bordeaux is in free fall, at least here in the U.S., and “The 2007 [vintage] is basically unsellable,” a French importer-distributor told Yahoo News.

The Bordelais have apparently decided to try to do something about their declining sales. This article describes how “Bordeaux [is] courting new drinkers online and in person” by such tactics as a consumer-friendly website, enjoybordeaux.com, and “Bordeaux ‘MatchMaking’ events – tastings where people with similar wine preferences meet each other and try new wines” [see bordeauxmatchmaking.com].

If that smacks of stooping to conquer — a bit unglamorous and Madison Avenue-y for prestigious Bordeaux — well, it is; but desperate times call for desperate means. Look at it this way: At least we haven’t heard of Lafite, Latour, etc. hiring Social Media Managers! (Paging Monsieur Hardy Wallace. Please report to the Médoc.)