“Pinot could be excellent,” I wrote in my vintage diary on Sept. 2, 2010. At that point in the harvest–a crucial one, when a heat wave had just blasted Northern California–everything depended on two things: the weather moderating, allowing the grapes to ripen evenly and not shrivel, and the rain holding off.

In the event, the next several weeks provided some scares, but all was well. I had gone to Santa Barbara during the third week of September and found Pinot vintners there thoroughly unconcerned about the late harvest “because,” I wrote, “it’s not likely they’ll have any rain for months.” The Pinot harvest now started in earnest. I think the overall feeling among winemakers in California that year was best summed up by something Eric Hickey, who makes the wines at Laetitia, told me on Nov. 19: “The Pinot vintage actually looks pretty good considering it all.” He was referring to the merciless ups and downs of the year and, above all, the lateness.

Prognostications concerning vintages before all the grapes are even picked are dicey, especially in California, where we really don’t have disasters, but only shades of disaster. Some pundits who slammed 1989, for example, turned out to be short-sighted. I’ve always maintained that the only way you can finally pronounce on a vintage’s character is to taste a lot of wine from that year, then study your notes and arrive at the appropriate conclusions. That’s good research, but of course it often conflicts with the goal of reporting, which is to be the first one out there with the headline–and the more shocking and controversial, the better.

Well, I’ve now tasted about 110 Pinot Noirs from the 2010 vintage. That’s only a fraction of what I expect eventually to review; I reviewed about 675 Pinots in 2009. Still, 110 is enough to begin looking for trends. What have I found? So far, things are looking good. Not great; my highest scoring Pinot scored only 94 points. After that, three 93s, two 91s, seven 90s, and everything else between 89 all the way down to a miserable 80.

My top scorers came from everyplace: Russian River Valley, Santa Rita Hills, Anderson Valley, Carneros, Sonoma Coast, suggesting that there was a rather uniform quality overall to 2010 California Pinot Noir. Prices for the best Pinots were modest–at least, as modest as top Pinot can get, averaging out around $35-$40. When you think about it, Pinot Noir pricing has remained remarkably constrained compared to the unabashed gouging that top Cabernet houses are imposing on consumers. But then, that’s the law of supply and demand. There are very, very few Pinots that retail for more than $100, such as Williams Selyem’s Estate and Lynmar’s Quail Hill Old Vines, whereas there are dozens of Cabernets, mainly from Napa Valley, that sell for triple digits.

I expect there to be a lot more high scoring 2010 Pinots by the time all is said and done. Wineries hold the best ones back for two years or more, which means that the release of 2010s should start to pick up just about now, extending over the Spring and Summer into Winter, and then into 2013. There’s no reason why 2010 shouldn’t be stellar. It will also give us a glimpse into 2011, which was similar to 2010: chilly, damp and a nail biter until the bitter end.

The best thing about prognostications (a fancy word for “guess”) is that nobody can prove you’re wrong in advance, and by the time the future comes, it’s unlikely anyone will haul out your predictions and show how massively incorrect they were. So here we go: my prognostications about what we can expect next year in the world of wine.

The big news is that the wine industry will improve economically. The conventional wisdom of the last three-plus years is that wine at the high end has been slammed, as consumers, wary of spending too much, cut back on the amount they’re willing to pay for a bottle of wine. This has supposedly been good for companies like Bronco, Gallo, The Wine Group and others who can manufacture a sound bottle of wine and retail it for under ten bucks. But it’s been very hard on premium wineries. I’ve heard it time and time again, from owners and/or winemakers at these wineries, who tell me, off the record, that they’d be lying if they claimed everything was hunky dory.

But the U.S. economy seems to be recovering, and I have the feeling 2012 is going to be robust. I think the GDP will be up sharply, the housing market will show signs of life, the unemployment rate will go down, and personal income will rise, albeit modestly. We’ve seen, in the latest economic cycle, that consumers are spending like they haven’t spent in three years. They’re sick and tired of frugality. They haven’t treated themselves to very much since 2007, and they’re reading to start living again! That means a $12, $15, $18, maybe even a $20 bottle of wine.

I don’t see any major trends erupting in 2012, but hey, I missed sweet Moscato! The sweet red wine trend will pick up steam, but who cares? (No disrespect to anybody, but I’m into fine wine, not plonk.) I can guarantee you Chardonnay will continue to sell like crazy, and don’t look for lower levels of oak anytime soon (despite the oak-free phenomenon), because all those consumers with a sweet tooth (Moscato, reds) will find oaky California Chardonnay to their liking, with its sweet, simple vanilla and butterscotch flavors.

Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir remain red hot. I think the Cabernet market from $12-$18 will be particularly healthy, and for sure there are a lot of good wines at that price. There’s nothing going on in Pinot Noir below $18, but once you get up to $25-plus, your options increase. Pinot will be seen as a luxury wine, Cabernet as the everyday standard, and the reason that won’t change is inherent in the properties of the varieties themselves. You just can’t make a decent Pinot Noir unless the vineyard is in the right place and yields are kept low. That’s not true for Cabernet, which can be made decently from Temecula and Lodi to the Sierra Foothills and Mendocino County.

On the social media side, I don’t expect any great breakthroughs when it comes to wineries using Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. in 2012. An interesting article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle suggests that Twitter “can marginally help a candidate’s general message…but the jury is out as to whether tweets lead to votes.” Isn’t that what I’ve been saying here for years–that engaging, even heavily, in social media can help a winery marginally to get the message out, but the jury is still out on whether or not social media can lead to sales. I maintain that position. Wineries are in a good position to take advantage of the impending recovery, but they’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: by pounding the pavements, or hiring salesmen to do it for them. Advertising, for those who can afford it, helps, as does a proper alignment of quality and price.

My final prognostication is that I’ll still be here, blogging, writing and reviewing for Wine Enthusiast, and having fun running around California and, hopefully, staying out of trouble.

As I continue to read and enjoy Benjamin Lewin’s In Search of Pinot Noir, I remembered the fuss last March at the World of Pinot Noir when Adam Lee slipped Raj Parr a 15% Siduri Pinot Noir in a doctored bottle and Raj liked it, even though he [Raj] had earlier declared he would never buy a Pinot above 14% for RN74.

That memory was triggered by this passage, on page 371 (of 424 pages. I hate coming to the end of a good book!):

I do not believe that Pinot Noir is a variety that tolerates too much extraction, and especially too much alcohol. I become concerned about preservation of varietal typicity once alcohol goes into the high thirteen percents, and I’m reluctant to give much leeway to wines over 14% (admittedly with some notable exceptions, and it’s true I’ve been forced to move my limit up).

Interesting remarks, no? Benjamin’s rigid rule about Pinot Noir above 14% has some notable exceptions. Might that Siduri wine, at 15%, be one of them? We can’t know, of course, but for such a bright man as Benjamin, who is a Master of Wine, to admit that there are notable exceptions to his views on alcohol is really–when you think about it–to throw the whole notion of objectionable alcohol levels out the window.

I mean, a rule is a rule only if there are no exceptions. Two plus two equals four does not allow for the existence of two plus two equals five. Therefore, any critique of high alcohol in Pinot Noir must be seen for what it really is: not a criticism of alcohol levels per se, but a criticism of imbalance. And cannot any wine be unbalanced, at any alcohol level? Obviously the answer is yes. So we have to dispose of the notion that a high alcohol Pinot Noir cannot dazzle even such sophisticated palates as Raj Parr’s and Benjamin Lewin’s.

Let’s consider varietal typicity. This is a fairy dust concept that’s always lurking in the background of any high level discussion of wine. Its thrust is that every great wine (we’re not talking about bag-in-a-box stuff) is a truthful expression of its varietal type (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel), as filtered through the lens of terroir (however you define it). However, you are not likely to hear the phrase “varietal typicity” from anyone under the age of 45. This is because it’s really an antiquated concept, left over from the days of English dons who knew Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne and perhaps a little Sherry, Madeira and Port, but little else. After all, what else was there for them to know? Those wines defined the landscape.

We are no longer in the eighteenth or even the nineteenth centuries, of course (good lord, it just occurred to me that we’re not even in the twentieth century anymore, which is where I spent the greater part of my existence). The concept of “varietal typicity” has much less meaning than it used to. Maybe it has none. Have you ever heard a young blogger use the term? When you taste a lot of wines from all over the place, you soon realize that “varietal typicity” in, say, Pinot Noir is as elusive as human typicity in the population of Oakland, which is one of the most ethnically diverse cities on Earth. It would be as improper to claim that Burgundy represents “varietal typicity” in Pinot Noir as to claim that true “human typicity” is found only in the white population of Oakland!

I don’t suppose anyone would mistake a Williams Selyem Russian River Valley Pinot Noir for Burgundy (all the newly released 2009s are officially around 14%, although it wouldn’t surprise me to learn the alcohol had been lowered by Bob Cabral). Such is their “extraction” (to use Benjamin Lewin’s word) that Burgundy would need a year like 2003 to approach those fruit levels (Jancis Robinson called it “a rum vintage”). Therefore, from a classical point of view, Williams Selyem’s Pinot Noirs lack varietal typicity. Yet they are indisputably very great wines. There are, of course, California Pinot Noirs that are too extracted and hot–Benziger’s 2008 San Remo Vineyard is one such, and if I had unlimited time I would go through my database and undoubtedly find many others. These wines are the poster children for Benjamin’s criticism.

But surely it is wrong to tar an entire region on the basis of irregular wines. If that were a valid criterion, we would write off Burgundy and Bordeaux in a single stroke, since there are unbalanced wines flowing from both. I therefore return to Benjamin’s spectacular dual confession: (…some notable exceptions, and it’s true I’ve been forced to move my limit up) to point out that rigid expressions of alcohol level in wine are more akin to ideology than to objectively experiencing reality and judging it fairly. And I thank Benjamin for being so candid about his evolving views.

I‘ve been enjoying Benjamin Lewin’s new book, In Search of Pinot Noir [Vendange Press, 2011], which covers the Pinot grape and wine around the world. It’s really one of the best wine books of the year. Lewin, an M.W. who writes in an accessible style, is largely free of cant. He doesn’t repeat stale old chestnuts, the way so many wine writers do, if he doesn’t believe them for a fact, which makes his reportage credible, and he obviously knows his stuff.

In his section on California, Lewin makes a point that cannot be emphasized enough. Because California’s top Pinot Noirs are produced in such tiny quantities, “A system of managed scarcity” prevents most people from ever tasting them, “unless you are in the magic circle of aficionados…And if you can only taste the generic appellation wines because the best wines are never available… how can you appreciate their potential quality…? Does this [difficulty], Lewin asks, rhetorically, hold back recognition of the full potential of the [California] regions?”

My answer is a full-fledged Yes. We’ve all heard and read the critique that California Pinot Noir is flawed, compared to the best of Burgundy and Oregon. Too fruity. Too high in alcohol. Too oaky. But I would argue that a lot of the people who make these charges simply have not had the opportunity to taste California Pinot at its top levels, which is to say the single vineyard or best barrel bottlings from the best wineries. I would scarcely dare to pronounce on the quality of, say, the Portuguese red wines of Alentejano, Alentejo or Bairrada, which my Wine Enthusiast colleague, Roger Voss, recently gave high scores to, because I haven’t had enough of them. But I wonder how it is that a wine writer not actually living in California (or visiting here frequently), and who lacks full access to the top Pinot Noirs tasted on a consistent basis, can make sweeping generalizations and expect to be taken seriously.

I guess you can just fly into California once a year, arrange a whirlwind tasting, and render a verdict.

Lewin, on the other hand, has plenty of opportunity to taste California Pinot Noir, presumably through his duties writing for the World of Fine Wine and Decanter, and that’s why I say his writing is largely cant free. He displays an even-handedness concerning California, even though it’s pretty clear that he is, at heart, a Bugundian. He gives more four-star ratings to the likes of Chambertin than he does for anything in California; but his ratings for Williams Selyem, Sea Smoke and Au Bon Climat, to mention but a few, are quite similar to mine [albeit that I use numbers, not stars), which means that Lewin is right on the money, as far as I’m concerned!

If I only tasted the basic appellation Pinot Noirs from California–those available at supermarkets and distributor tastings–no doubt my opinion of Cali Pinot would be lower than it is. I too would probably criticize them. And in fact, I do criticize even some of the expensive, hard to get Pinot Noirs for obvious faults: over-extraction, too much oak, too much alcohol and (more rarely noted by critics, although it should be), bizarre acidity that has been added in a heavy-handed way.

But fortunately, I get to taste almost all the rare Pinot Noirs in California, and believe me, there are some spectacular wines out there, which is why I feel on firm ground stating how world class they are, and how ignorant the anti-California critics are–using “ignorant” in the sense of not possessing the necessary information to come to an informed judgment. Maybe the next time a critic bashes California Pinot, he or she should tell us precisely how many he’s tasted over, say, the last year, and exactly which ones. That at least would put some context into his remarks.

All of the 2009 Pinot Noirs aren’t out yet. I’d say about three-quarters are, enough to stand back and look at this vintage more objectively than we were able to at the time, when there was so much hype.

It was a mild summer–some would say cool–which delayed ripening, especially of the seeds. By Fall, the grapes were increasing in sugar, but remained physiologically unripe. Vintners began to worry that the rains would arrive before they could pick their Pinot Noir, but that turned out not to be the case. The rains did arrive, bigtime, in the second week of October, but by then, nearly all of the Pinot had been picked.

I’ve now tasted about 500 2009 Pinot Noirs (from California, of course), and after reviewing my notes, I can say with certainty that 2009 was in fact a great Pinot Noir vintage. I’m talking about the top houses, of course. In general it is completely impossible to get a good Pinot Noir for less than $20, or even $30. However, that doesn’t mean that all expensive Pinot Noir is worth it. Pinot Noir of all varieties is the hardest to get right because it’s the most delicate and transparent of grapes and wines. Anything that went wrong is immediately apparent, usually in the nose. You don’t even have to taste a poorly made Pinot Noir to recognize its faults, which include unripeness (in the form of green tannins and vegetal notes), heaviness of texture or just plain thinness of fruit. Fortunately, residual sugar, of the kind sometimes seen in fuller bodied red wines like Zinfandel and Merlot, is rarely a problem in Pinot Noir.

It’s more difficult to say which region prevailed in 2009 because the numbers are so lopsided. There’s reason to believe Anderson Valley did well, but there are so few wines from there compared to, say, the Russian River Valley that it’s apples and oranges. Most of my top-scoring Pinots are from Sonoma County, and specifically from the Russian River Valley and Sonoma Coast appellations, although a clutch of Copains from the Anderson Valley blew me away. They clocked in at 13.7% of alcohol by volume, which is another key to the success of the vintage: alcohol levels were down by as much as a half percent in many wines. The Williams Selyems hovered around 14%. Merry Edwards ranged from 13.9% to 14.5%, while a stunning Failla Keefer Ranch was 13.9% and Dutton-Goldfield’s Freestone Hill Vineyard was just 13.5%. Yes, there were outliers, such as Roessler’s Hein Family Vineyard, from Anderson Valley, that measured a full 15%. But these high alcohol wines were the exception rather than the rule in 2009.

It goes without saying that acidity in these 2009s also was beautiful. One never knows if the acidity in a California wine is entirely natural or whether it has been added, but this is of little importance to consumers, unless the acidity has been clumsily handled. That is sometimes the case when a Pinot Noir tastes overly sharp or tart.

Making predictions concerning the ageability of the top Pinot Noirs is always risky, for several reasons. Many of the wineries, or vineyards, are so new that they have no historical records to rely on. Six years seems a safe bet for most California Pinot Noir, but vertical tastings at, for example, Hanzell and Williams Selyem suggest that a balanced Pinot will last and improve in the bottle for twice as long as that, if not a full 15 years. I doubt, however, if more than a handful of people who buy these wines has the slightest intention of cellaring them for that long, which is why winemakers are making their Pinot Noirs to be approachable when young.

Juicy is a word I used over and over to describe the ‘09 Pinots. From the Santa Rita Hills to the North Coast, they exhibit a ripe, fat, fleshy texture and overt fruit flavors, mainly of black and red cherries, sometimes tart like cranberries, sometimes sweet like cola, depending on vineyard and other variables. The color of the wines was paler than I’ve seen in prior years, suggesting the delicacy that comes from a cool vintage and lower alcohol. It’s hard to pick out one wine and say it’s the quintessential 2009 Pinot Noir, but I’ll go out on that limb and choose the Lioco Hirsch Vneyard (94 points, $60, 13.5%, 335 cases). A lovely wine that lends the lie to the allegation that California is unable to produce delicate, delicious, ageworthy Pinot Noir.

It’s easy to make a splash in the wine biz in California if you have a few hundred million in spare change to invest in a fabulous winery designed by a famous architect, then hire a famous consulting winemaker, put out a $150 Cabernet that goes on to be the top lot at the Napa Valley Auction or Premier Napa Valley, and then hire a top of the line P.R. firm to spread the word about your fabulosity.

It’s hard to make a splash when your “winery” is a dumpy little wooden barn on “the wrong side of the hill”, you have no budget for P.R. or much of anything else, and you don’t even make Cabernet. But it can be done, and for proof you need look no further than Joseph Swan Vineyards.

I’ve been a Swan fan forever. I began tasting their wines (not for review, for sheer enjoyment) in the 1980s. I still remember a dinner at Chez Panisse at which Swan’s winemaker (and Joe Swan’s son-in-law), Rod Berglund, brought down a bunch of old wines for a tasting, for which Alice Waters prepared a magnificent meal (lamb, if I recall correctly). Those wines had aged perfectly even though some of them were 20 years old. (I covered the winery extensively in my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River.)

I reviewed a bunch of their latest releases yesterday and was again reminded just how good and authentic Swan wines are. Few wineries in California have such a good track record across so many varieties. I’ve given consistent high scores to Swan Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Syrah, Viognier, Chardonnay and even to a Tannat I loved last year. Can you name another winery that performs so well in so many kinds of wine? Off the top of my head, I can’t. The reason, I think, is because Swan is very careful to source their grapes only from the coolest parts of the Russian River Valley, and the best vineyards. It’s also because Rod is a hell of a winemaker. His Pinot Noirs are probably his best wines; I gave his the 2007 Trenton Estate 97 points, and at $52 it’s less than a lot of Pinots that aren’t even as good. You could call it Burgundian because it has such great acidity and a mushroomy thing going on that’s obviously pure terroir, but I think I’m going to stop referencing wines as “Burgundian” because, after all, the correct word to use is “Russian River Valley-an” or “Trentonian” or some other word that’s about our terroir, not theirs.

So kudos to Joseph Swan Vineyards and Rod Berglund. They’re still going strong after all these years.

* * *

I’m headed up to Napa later this morning to hang with Jayson Woodbridge, the owner/winemaker at Hundred Acre, Layer Cake and Cherry Pie. I want to see how his vintage is coming along (and to see him, too. Fascinating guy). We chatted briefly on the phone the other day and he was excited. Now, vintners are always “excited” about the latest vintage, or so they claim when talking with ink-stained wretches like me. I think they’d find something positive to say if an asteroid hit Napa Valley right in the middle of harvest. “The Asteroid Vintage of the Century!” But I agree with Jayson’s take. The rainfall of the first and second weeks of October was a drag and everybody was scared witless by as much as 4 inches that drenched Sonoma and Napa. But they’re dancing in the cellars over the weather that followed: two weeks of absolutely gorgeous, drop dead beautiful weather, dry, sunny and warm. No big heat at all, just mild, breezy conditions that will dry out the ground and the leaves and grapes still on the vine. I think this could be a tough vintage for the coolest coastal locations (Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, for example), where growers could experience mold and unripeness, in addition to severely short crops. But the star of the vintage might just well be Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and Meritages, although the best will be produced in miniscule quantities because of this low-yielding year.