My old friend David was complaining about wine yesterday. He doesn’t know much about it, despite my mentoring him for all these years, but he does know he’s looking for, and missing, “tannins.”

What does David mean when he talks about “tannins”?

He said he wants to feel something solid in his mouth when he sips a wine. Something grippy, structural. I told him that, if he didn’t mind spending $60 or $80 a bottle, there were some Barolos and Barbarescos I could recommend which would fulfill his tannin quotient. He replied that he buys Super-Tuscans, but even they seem too soft for him.

This set me to thinking. I probably use the word “soft” in my wine reviews more than any other adjective, except, possibly, for “dry.” (Maybe “fruity,” also.) Sometimes when I call a wine soft, it’s a compliment. But most of the time, it’s not. For example, I called an Esser 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon soft, but then I explained it “lacks structure, which makes it taste too sweet.” Sometimes, a wine without firm tannins and at least some decent acidity will taste sweet even it it’s technically dry.

This is the problem with so many California red wines. They’re too soft. That makes many of them taste alike, even when they’re made from varieties as different as Petite Sirah, Mourvedre, Syrah, Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel. We inherited from Old Europe the concept that different grape varieties should and do taste differently from each other. They’re grown in distinctive places to which they’re adapted their dna to thrive, and they express distinct qualities. I don’t suppose it has been easy, all these centuries, to mistake a Beaune Pinot Noir with a Saint-Estephe Cabernet Sauvignon (despite Harry Waugh’s wry “not since lunch” reply when asked if he’d ever confused Burgundy and Bordeaux).

But here in California it is very easy to confuse virtually any red variety for any other, with the possible exception of Pinot Noir. You’d think Sangiovese, that other “transparent” red wine, would show its telltale signature, but it doesn’t. Not when it’s made everywhere from Howell Mountain to Temecula, and the prevailing style is as I described an Andretti 2007: “Firm, chewy tannins and jammy black cherry flavors mark this dry red wine. It has nuances of currants and anise.” That could be almost anything, couldn’t it, even Pinot Noir.

Yet I must taste and review all the California wines that come my way and try to provide some help to readers. If so many things taste so similar, how do I distinguish between an 85 and a 92? My initial response would be “structure,” but that brings me back to David’s complaint about tannins. There are very few California wines that possess great structure. Even when I praise a wine’s structure, it must be seen as being relative: compared to most other wines, such and such a wine has a good structure. An example: of a J. Lohr 2006 Hilltop Cabernet Sauvignon, I wrote: “rich in tannic structure, with deep, complex flavors…” etc. Did I mean, then, to suggest it had the same tannin-acid structure that my colleague, Monica Larner, praised in Luciano Sandrone’s 2005 Cannubi Boschis, a Nebbiolo from Barolo? Of course not. But for a California Cabernet, and particularly one from Paso Robles, it showed good structure. This is what I mean when I stress that wine reviewing has to be done in context. Not “Is this a wine that can stand next to anything in the world” but “Is this a good example of its variety, region and winery?”

California grapegrowers and winemakers are aware of this problem of lack of structure, but some of them don’t seem to give a damn. They keep churning out soft wines that taste like melted dessert pastries, and I keep giving them low scores and wondering who in heaven’s name is buying this stuff. But check out this article from the current issue of Western Farm Press, which caters to the grower community. Researchers at Fresno State are tinkering with ways “to extract more anthocyanins, total phenols, tannins and color to improve wine quality,” which is to say, they’re developing “smaller berries [that] produce a higher skin-to-pulp ratio,” which in turn increases tannins, leading to better structure (as well as deeper flavors). Which giant wine company is Fresno State working with? Bronco. Good for Fred Franzia. He could probably sell anything he makes no matter what it is, so he deserves credit for trying to boost quality.

How much independence should a publisher give to an employee critic whose criticisms are hurting the publication?

That’s the big question raised by the case of a classical music critic in Cleveland, Donald Rosenberg, who was pressured by his editor to lay off his heavy criticism of the Cleveland Orchestra, which Rosenberg had been reviewing negatively for some time, according to this report in last Saturday’s New York Times.

Rosenberg sued his paper, The Plain Dealer, alleging he’d been reassigned to lesser roles and ordered not to review the Cleveland Orchestra anymore. The newspaper and its editor, Susan Goldberg, defended themselves in court, with the latter testifying that a “hefty chunk of the community was saying that Don Rosenberg was biased and unfair and that he was compromising our integrity.”

Both sides had expert witnesses testifying on their behalf. A jury last week ruled for The Plain Dealer, effectively throwing out Rosenberg’s complaint, which also included a charge of age discrimination. Rosenberg remains employed at the newspaper, but only as a music reporter (not a critic) and a dance critic.

As I read this, all kinds of questions popped up in my mind. What would happen if lots of readers of Wine Enthusiast started complaining about my reviews? Would my publisher reply, “Steve has every right in the world to express his opinion — that’s what we pay him to do” ? Or would he be concerned about a subscriber (and possible advertiser) backlash, and conclude that it was in the company’s best interests to rein me in?

Fortunately, the above has not occurred, and isn’t likely to. My magazine gives me wide latitude to tell the truth as I see it. I’m sure some of my reviews make my publisher, Adam Strum, wince; but he understands and respects the importance of employing unbiased editors, whose rectitude and incorruptibility in reviewing reflects well upon Wine Enthusiast.

For me, the most interesting and troublesome issue in the Rosenberg case is this: If The Plain Dealer thought highly enough of Rosenberg to hire him in the first place and then keep him onboard for years, how could they now question his objectivity, just because some people complained? It does look like management caved to outside pressure. The editor said (I’m quoting from the Times) that “Mr. Rosenberg had a closed mind about [the orchestra’s music director].”

“A closed mind.” Wow. Think about that. When I criticize certain table wines for having too much residual sugar, does that mean I have “a closed mind”? What about a wine I give a low score to because it smells like it came from the inside of a cat’s bladder? Is my mind “closed” to the pleasures of cat pee? For that matter, what about an eleven-year old Chardonnay that’s dead? Is my mind “closed” to dead Chard? You see where this is going: toward a slippery slope. Any negative critique of any kind can be attributed to “a closed mind.” But what does a publication hire a critic for, if not to praise things he likes and blast things he doesn’t? And shouldn’t a scrupulous editor stand by her critic?

I think The Plain Dealer caved in to outside pressure, but obviously, eight jurors who actually heard the case disagreed. What do you think?

I had a little extra cash in my checking account (woo hoo!) and decided to invest it in something that pays more than 0.2% interest. But where? Everything is so weird these days. So I met with Henry, the investment guy, at my bank, and he wanted to put me into a high tech mutual fund. I asked him why he didn’t diversify my investments by going someplace beyond stocks. Bonds? Nope, he said; as soon as interest rates go up, bonds will go down. Gold? He shook his head. Gold is really high now; not the right time. I thought, what else is out of the box? And then I thought, I’ve been reporting and blogging on Chinese wine for years — how the market over there is exploding, how all the California wineries want to be there. So how about investing in something related to Chinese wine?

Henry stared at me like I’d reported being abducted by aliens. Chinese wine? I babbled a few words about two billion middle class Chinese people with western-style aspirations and disposable income. He pecked out a few keystrokes on his computer. “Hmm,” he murmured. “___ is up 16 percent just today.” It was some Chinese wine company whose name I didn’t get. Sixteen percent in one day! “You see, that’s what I’m talking about,” I told Henry. He was suitably impressed, vowed to get “his investment department” looking into Chinese wine. I told him I’d do the same with my investment department (total employees: 1). We parked my cash in a temporary money market until we figured out what to do next.

So I go home and Google “Chinese wine stocks.” Stumble across a company called Legacy Wine & Spirits, with offices in Beijing and Tianjin and a North American branch in Quebec. Find an online article that says Legacy “has a goal of being the largest wine importer, wholesale [sic] and retailer with a chain of wine stores throughout China Wine [sic],” but the article is poorly written, filled with misspellings, grammatical mistakes and run-on sentences. I note that it’s on the website of a penny-stock company. I go to Charles Schwab; Legacy’s stock has been mired at about 24 cents for most of this year. In early 2008 it hit $1.10, but fell off the cliff during the recession and may not have hit the ground yet. So would Legacy be a good buy?

Back to Google. Who is Legacy, anyway? I find their website. Fancy home page, with a coat of arms and a big, Old English “L” on a golden crest. Quotes about wine’s goodness from Clifton Fadiman, Ernest Hemingway and Anonymous. (Clifton Fadiman? Is there anyone in China who’s heard of Clifton Fadiman?) I click on the “Wine” link to see what Legacy sells. Looks like only one brand: Hacienda. Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. I know Hacienda, or used to; a vague memory of a Sonoma County winery comes to mind. They made pretty good wine, didn’t they? I look up my scores on Wine Enthusiast’s database. The last Hacienda wine I reviewed was six years ago. It was a Sauvignon Blanc with a California appellation that I gave 83 points to. My other scores over the years ranged from 82 points to 85 points.

Not very encouraging. But is Hacienda making better wine now? After all, things might have improved. Back to Legacy’s website. After a little historical background about Count Haraszthy and Buena Vista (which supposedly have something to do with Hacienda), I read the following: “In 1992, the Franzia family (Bronco Wine Company) purchased the rights to the Hacienda label and cased goods inventory.” Then there’s a list of medals and honors Hacienda wines have earned, including a Bronze medal for their Viognier at the 2006 West Coast Wine Competition and a Bronze for their Claire de Lune White Zinfandel at the 2008 California State Fair. There are “Wine & Food Pairings” recommendations: click on “Valpolicella” (does Hacienda make a Valpolicella they export to China? Is that legal?), and the reccos are, among others, meatloaf, turkey burgers and lentil patties. “Chardonnay” turns up about 100 recommended pairings, ranging from turkey burgers (again) to raw oysters (with an oaky Chardonnay? I don’t think so) and Challah and Potato Kugel (for, I suppose, all those Chinese Hasidic Jews).

O.K., so now I‘m confused. Freddy Franzia is betting that the future of Chinese wine consumption lies in the Chinese equivalent of Two-Buck Chuck, and that Chinese wine consumers are basically ignoramuses who think that anything from California with a French name (Claire de Lune) and a fancy crest must be good. But how do you square that with the perception we get here in California that China’s rising middle class wants good wine? Maybe China is so big that they want both Two-Buck Chuck and Lafite. Just like here, only with eight times the population. But how does this help me decide whether or not to invest in Chinese wine, and what stock to buy?

Clearly, this is going to be harder than I thought.

As most of you know, I went to the Wine Bloggers Conference in June, up in Walla Walla Washington. The sponsors, a great group of guys who work out of a Colorado outfit called Zephyr Adventures, have been doing followup polling. Yesterday they sent an email blast summarizing their polling of the wineries who sponsored the conference. They got 16 replies.

The wineries seemed very happy with the conference and their sponsorship of it. Fourteen of the 16 said they were glad they signed up. When asked why they sponsored the conference, 14 said they wanted “to connect with bloggers who will remember my product or company name for possible future posts.”

The Zephyr guys concluded their email this way: “Our tip to bloggers? Remember the sponsors at each conference you attended. Write about their wines if you come across them at a later time. Contact the wineries and other companies, tell them who you are, and ask questions! The sponsors will love you for it.”

What I find so interesting about this concerns the concept of advertising, and particularly of wine magazines, such as Wine Enthusiast, that accept advertising in its pages. I’ve read much criticism of magazines accepting advertising, both in the comments made to this blog over the years and in other blogs. The implication from some blogging quarters has been that any magazine that accepts advertising cannot be pure — that it has to be suffering a conflict of interest, because how can it rate wines objectively from wineries whose ads support it?

I have repeatedly defended wine magazines for accepting advertising, and tried to explain that doing so does not cross any red lines — at least, I can vouch for that at Wine Enthusiast. But I still have the feeling that that suspicion exists out there in some parts of the blogosphere. So now, I find it funny that even the Wine Bloggers Conference is conceding that it depends to some degree on winery sponsors (and a sponsorship is really just another form of paid advertising, when you think about it). It’s interesting, also, that the Zephyr guys are suggesting to bloggers that they write about the sponsors’ wines.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing this practice. In the world of business, where nobody can afford to launch a product or service that doesn’t make money, you have to make certain concessions to your advertisers. You don’t have to promise to review their wines favorably, or to give them extra attention if they haven’t done anything to merit it. But I see nothing wrong with giving your advertisers a little love from time to time. If you’re writing a regional roundup and have the choice of including winery “A” or “B”, if “A” is an advertiser, “B” is not, and all other things are equal, why not include “A” in the article? Again, that doesn’t mean that if winery “C” is doing the best job there is, you don’t include them just because they’re not an advertiser. You do. The key phrase is “all things being equal.”

Does this mean that newsletters that don’t accept advertising, such as Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, have the moral edge over magazines that do? Nope. At some level, readers have to buy in to the discernment, good taste and honesty of any wine critic, regardless of how he publishes his content. They also have to buy into his or her expertise.

The wineries who sponsored the conference did so for exactly the right reasons: They wanted to be remembered by bloggers, and they hoped to be written about, in what I assume would be a positive light. What’s wrong with that? Any winery these days that doesn’t get out of the cellar and try to connect with as many people as possible is in trouble. I salute the wineries that sponsored the WBC; it’s the ones that didn’t I wonder about. I think that WBC 2011 should be flooded with winery sponsors. And since it’s on the East Coast this time (Charlottesville VA), this would give non-California wineries an opportunity to show bloggers what they can do.

Bottom line: advertising, or paid sponsorship, is not a dirty word. It’s a fact of life. And people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I read yesterday’s opinion piece in the New York Times on the topic of living rooms and went immediately back in my mind to The Bronx of my childhood, when we lived at 760 Grand Concourse and our neighbors in 6L were Dave and Elsie Buch.

Elsie had a living room, only nobody was allowed in. In fact, it was separated from the rest of their 4-room apartment by one of those movie theatre thingies where a red velvet rope hangs between upright brass posts. I was in that apartment a lot because the Buch’s daughter, Ellen, was one of my best friends, but God help you if you crossed that rope line and ventured into the Sanctum Sanctorum of Elsie’s living room, where the white sofa was encased in clear plastic, and the side tables had alabaster statues of Michaelangelo’s David for lamps.

In the Times article, the author, Joan DeJean, writes of rooms meant “to serve as proof of status and wealth…formal display spaces,” as opposed to “less grand rooms…intended for everyday life.” DeJean traces the evolution, in Europe, of formal display spaces and finds that they began to disappear in homes by the time of the French Revolution. But she notes that “Even today in some homes…[m]any living rooms are still display spaces — designed to showcase, for example, a collection of architect-designed furniture that is hardly intended for casual use.” I doubt if DeJean knew Elsie Buch, but she sounds like she did when she asks, “Why is it that the one room whose name honors everyday life is so often a place where we do as little living as possible?”

Which brings me, of course, to the topic of wine, and specifically to trophy bottles. Go on, admit it, you’ve owned the wine equivalent of Elsie’s roped off living room. What was it? A cult Cabernet? A Bordeaux with some age? Vintage Champagne? You know what I’m talking about. No matter how democratic (with a small “d”) and egalitarian you claim to be, you too have possessed a bottle so special, so fancy, you never would have dared to open it for an everyday occasion, a casual meal.

The funny thing about Elsie’s living room is that in all the years they lived there, I can’t remember a time when it was actually used. Elsie didn’t throw clever little cocktail parties — this was The Bronx, friends, not the Upper West Side; the closest the Buches got to throwing parties was when the menfolk, my father included, gathered, on Friday nights, for gin rummy games, and those certainly were not played in the living room. Perhaps Elsie formally entertained someone, sometime, in it, but never to my knowledge. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that for years on end nobody went into Elsie’s living room, except maybe to dust it.

Certain wines are like that, or, rather, certain people have that attitude about certain wines. That display bottle in your cellar — when are you finally going to open it? The longer you wait, the harder it gets, because there’s more at stake as it gets older and older. Could you possibly just open it any old night with your significant other, and drink it with Chinese or pizza while watching Mad Men? You could — just as Elsie might have let us kids play in her living room. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Something in her psyche didn’t permit her. That living room made her feel special, better than she was — as if she weren’t just a housewife in The Bronx, but the chatelaine of a grand mansion.

Don’t we all feel like that? A part of us wants to be more — more elevated in status,  more worthy, more associated with greatness than our ordinary lives permit us to be. That explains a lot of the quirks of human behavior — including why we have trophy wines we keep roped off from ordinary life, waiting for an extraordinary moment to open them, a moment that, sometimes, never comes.