I’m going to write a piece on the Atlas Peak AVA in the January, 2011, edition of Wine Enthusiast, so I’m not about to spill the beans here! But I do want to segue into a topic I was reminded of during my drive around the mountain, yesterday, when my host was Jan Krupp, one of the partners in Stagecoach Vineyard.

He was talking about how the growers and winemakers on Atlas Peak want to be better known, since the general feeling (with which I agree) is that Napa Valley’s other mountain AVAs — Diamond, Veeder, Spring and Howell — are more famous and esteemed than Atlas Peak. Although there are some pretty good historic reasons why that is so (and I’ll write about them in January), it set me thinking about AVAs, their reputations, and the role the media plays in establishing the latter.

If you think about it, AVAs, or appellations, are basically political entities. Yes, they’re supposed to be based on real soil and climate patterns, and, yes, the U.S. Treasury Department, which has the responsibility of okaying them, makes petitioners jump through a lot of hoops to prove their case.

But what many people don’t know are all the compromises involved,  especially over precisely where the boundary lines are. I’ve never heard of an AVA application to Treasury that didn’t take years of wrangling over who would and who wouldn’t be included. And, as those of us know who’ve covered California for a while, some of the AVA lines make no sense at all. Jan Krupp, from a high point on his property, pointed out one of the Atlas Peak boundary lines to the west, and it seemed to go right through the middle of a field. Nothing at all to suggest why one side is Atlas Peak and, an inch away, you’re entitled only to “Napa Valley.”

So I wonder. Since Atlas Peak is an official AVA (since 1992), do we assume that there is something called “Atlas Peak terroir” simply because it’s an appellation? And do we media hounds then go out seeking that “Atlas Peak-ness” and, lo and behold, “find” something we dub “Atlas Peak terroir” ? Because, after all, if that’s the way things work, it’s pretty bass-ackwards, IMHO.

We stole, err, borrowed our AVA system from the French, who have had a lot longer to figure out appellations that are small and compact and really do make sense. I have no doubt that there’s a Côte-Rotie terroir. I believe there’s a Chambolle-Musigny terroir. Ditto for Pauillac. But then you have a day like I did, traversing up and down the mountain, looking at it from various perspectives, and you appreciate how complicated things really are up there. Different elevations, exposures, different soil patterns and, as Kan Krupp informed me, different weather patterns. When you throw in, on top of that, that some growers are less diligent than others, and some winemakers pay less attention to detail, you can see that defining “Atlas Peak terroir” is not as easy as it seems.

And yet, that’s never stopped wine writers from trying! As I will, when I write my article. For those of you who don’t have the pleasure of being employed as a wine writer, you should know (I’ll probably be killed for revealing this) that we take a sacred oath on entering the profession: “I swear to Tchelistcheff that I will discover terroir within every single appellation, and will faithfully write about it.”

I’d love to hear from some of my fellow wine writers: Do we sometimes write about appellations as if they’re God-given and must therefore possess some inherent truth of terroir? Is there more of a marketing angle to appellations than a natural one? Or do appellations actually have singular personalities that we can all agree upon?

Most of the time we talk about high-scoring wines and why they got those numbers. Today I want to talk about the poops in the room, because I’ve been tasting a lot of them lately. Don’t know why August is turning out to be such a Monthus Horribilis, but it is.

Not everything, of course. Since the first of the month, I’ve had awesome wines from Chateau St. Jean, Etude, Gainey, Rusack, Justin, Cakebread and others, and the new sparklers from Schramsberg were, well, schwonderful, schmarvelous.

But there have been an awful lot of 80s, 81s and 82s, which under Wine Enthusiast’s system means “acceptable…simple with discussable deficiencies,” and with some of those low 80s, I was tempted to use our coup de grâce, 22, put them out of their misery and bury them.

What makes for an 80, 81 or 82? Most of them bore a California appellation. That tells me (a) the wines contained a lot of Central Valley grapes or juice, seldom a good thing, or (b) the wines were bulked out from producers who didn’t want to bottle the stuff on their own. That’s not a good thing, either.

The low scorers included Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, but there were as many Chardonnays as all the rest put together. My most common complaint: too fruit juicy. One of my favorite breakfast drinks is an orange-pineapple-mango juice blend I get at Whole Foods. I love it as fruit juice, but as wine, it doesn’t work. Too simple and sweet, and that’s the problem with too many Chardonnays these days. (I could say the same about some Sauvignon Blancs.)

With the reds, it was a different story. They were so thin, there was nothing going on, except alcohol, tannins and acidity. Not a good recipe for a wine. I figure this was due to overcropping in inferior vineyards, where the vines are stretched to give so much fruit, the berries just can’t develop much flavor. This also is suggested when you look at the high production numbers on some of these wines.

At average costs for all these wines at $7-$12, I guess the wine companies that put them out make their profit at this tier; and that profit, I suppose, helps defray the cost of producing higher-quality wine. But it’s dreary to have to review these dullards, and it’s always a challenge trying to figure out how to frame my text, without causing anyone undue discomfort. Sometimes I want to write, “Run! Get away quickly! Flee from this monstrosity!” but of course I can’t say that. So I’ve developed code words: “everyday,” “easy,” “useful,” and so on. Another thing I’ve been tempted to say is, “This is the kind of wine you drink in a paper cup at somebody’s party.” Would that be an insult? Probably the producer would consider it so, but I’ve had wines in paper cups at parties and didn’t feel at all insulted or lessened as a human being or a wine lover. If I had a great time at the party, I didn’t care what the wine was, and if I had a lousy time, it wouldn’t have mattered if the wine were ‘47 Cheval Blanc, served from Marie Antoinette’s slipper.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sommeliers, because last week I went to that big TopSomm 2010 thing in San Francisco, and then somebody sent me the book on sommeliers I blogged about yesterday. Somms and I both have the same job, on the surface: we both taste a lot of wine, and then make judgments about them. But on closer examination, our jobs are very different. I suspect I taste a lot more common and bad wine than most somms. The way I see it, part of my job is to find the silk purses among the sows’ ears that I can happily recommend to readers, who don’t want to have to spend $40, $50 or more for a decent bottle of wine. That’s what makes going through a month like August worth it.

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.

I don’t drink a lot of sherry these days because I don’t have the time, and I regret that. Earlier this week, I drank — not tasted, but actually drank and thoroughly enjoyed — a sherry, and I’ll tell you about it in a moment, but first, some thoughts on why sherry isn’t very popular in the U.S., and why it should be. (I mean real sherry from Spain’s Jerez region.)

Back in the 1980s, when I was in grad school and had the opportunity to drink pretty much whatever I wanted, I drank a lot of sherry. I don’t remember why, because even then sherry was pretty obscure and unpopular. I think it was probably because the wine experts I was reading — Broadbent, Hugh Johnson, Alexis Lichine and others — loved it, so I figured it was something I should know about. I’d pay $6, $7 for finos and amontillados and manzanillas, the drier styles. At first I was puzzled by the strange, exotically oxidized taste that flor yeast gave to the wines. I remember a place in downtown San Francisco that used to serve sherry by the glass and I’d go there and have little tapas — salty Serrano ham, almonds, smoked salmon, ceviche, prawns. And it didn’t take me long to fall in love. The dryness, the way the acidity was so ultra-clean, that yeasty sourness that was so utterly unlike anything else I’d ever had. But then I turned into a hard-working wine writer, and sherry became, alas, a lesser part of my life.

A few weeks ago I had a Palmina Equipo Navazos La Bota de Fino #15, at RN74, and even though the meal had its problems, the wine was so good, I had two glasses. I wondered why more Americans don’t love dry sherry. I guess the taste is too weird for them; it does take some sophistication to appreciate; you have to make yourself learn to like it, and, when it comes to wine, Americans don’t want to make themselves do anything. They want the wine to come to them — flatter them, seduce them while they lay back and let it go to work on them. (I’m not getting too explicit here, am I?) Sherry doesn’t seduce anybody. It’s aloof, austere, proud, like a drag queen on stilettos. Sherry says, “Hey, I don’t care if you love me or hate me. Whatever.” Sherry is an acquired taste. But if you get a hankering for sherry, it turns into an addiction.

That’s why more people should fall in love with sherry. The wine bloggers in particular are in a good place to suggest it to their readers, Twitter followers and Facebook friends. There are plenty of inexpensive supermarket sherries from the likes of Hartley & Gibson, Lustau and the famous Tio Pepe that are well under $17, and are terrific. From that price range, you can work your way up. And by the way, the sherry process, including the magical solera system, is fascinating in itself, and is a basic part of any wine education.

The sherry I had recently was during a dinner at our Wine Enthusiast editorial meetings. The bottle was being passed around, and I more or less saw “sherry” on the label and poured myself a glass, being very thirsty that warm night. The first thing I noticed was how dark it was, an amber brown. I thought it might be sweet, but it wasn’t. It was bone dry and exquisite. It was Lustau’s non-vintage Almacenista Palo Cortado de Jerez, and the retail price was $42 last year, when my colleague, Mike Schachner, reviewed it in Wine Enthusiast. He gave it 94 points, and wrote:

A beautiful style of elevated Sherry that’s worth every cent if fine Sherry is to your liking. The nose is pure toffee, roasted nuts, apricot and mellow quince, while the key flavor is dried orange and the nuances hinted at by the aromas all reappear. Muscular but in perfect shape, with a finish as smooth as glass

Nice description. I especially like that “if fine Sherry is to your liking,” which tells me Mike understands these wines are not for everybody. I can’t exaggerate the beauty and thrill of this wine. I would have given it an even higher score than Mike, but maybe that’s because I drank it right after my go-cart race on the indoor track at Grand Prix New York, and I was sweaty and filled with adrenaline. That wine, with its 19% alcohol, was just the brace I needed.

If there’s one wine I wish I could drink more of, it’s sherry, especially a thriller like the Lustau.

I’m sorry I’ve been so unavailable here the last few days. Our meetings at Wine Enthusiast in New York were relentless, lasting from early morning until after dinner, and I frankly just didn’t have the time or energy to get online.

Of course there were upsides. It was great to see my colleagues, and I got to drink a lot of things I usually don’t — Cahors,Chateau Climens yum yum, old Port, Burgundy, Champagne, Alsace, German TBA, although somehow, Bordeaux and Italian wines escaped my attention, although there must have been some around.

Planning for a year’s worth of article — scores of them, big and small — up to a year in advance is tricky. You can’t know what’s going to be hot or newsworthy in 2011 or, by contrast, what will be so 2010. Our primary target — he and she for whom we write — is “the consumer,” a beast as mythical as the unicorn. We want to please and inform the consumer, but who exactly is he or she? He isn’t one person, of course, but many. Our circulation is way up these days, into six figures, and we aim to double it by this time next year, so it’s hard to know precisely what all those readers will want. Will Malbec remain hot or will it be something else? Will value still be important or will consumers be willing to spend again? What kinds of food trends will there be? What cocktails and beers will everyone be talking about? Which raises the question: Are we writers leaders who tell readers what the new trends are, or do our readers lead us to new trends, wines, foods, styles?

It’s a little of both, of course, especially these days. Wine (and food) writing is now a two-way street, as the conversation moves online. Wine Enthusiast, like every other print pub, is trying to figure out exactly what this online revolution is — and if we can help lead it. And we think we can.

For me, it’s always nice to get to New York and see my old friends and colleagues, but I do miss California when I’m away. Easterners still love to bash Cali — fruits and nuts, too casual, not hip enough or fast-talking enough, not so quick with the wisecracks, too mellow and laid back — but I always detect a little jealousy behind the put-downs. I don’t have to remind anyone of California’s virtues, do I? The weather, the views, our vibrant cities, wine country, mountains, seas, forests. Some people still like to put down our wines as too this, too that, too whatever. I just smile. Consumers like them, and that’s what counts.

As for next year’s magazine, I have some unbelievably great stories planned. They’ll take me all over the state. I can’t wait to dig in and write them, and I’ll still be blogging five days a week, bringing my adventures to you.

One thing we reviewers talked about in New York was critical consistency in rating wines. Roger Voss, our chief European editor, got off a good one in that regard. We were talking about MWs and how seriously they tend to take blind tasting and replicability, and Roger, who knows many MWs, said, “First, they learn the rules of blind tasting, and then they break them.” I think I know what he meant. I’ve heard the same said of artists. Picasso, for example, first learned how to draw and paint in the classic style, and once he mastered that, he threw the classic style away and invented his own style, which became the new classic. Picasso broke every rule in the book. Is it a stretch to compare wine critics to artists? You tell me.