While I was in New York, I had chats with several people who are going for their Master Sommelier and/or Master of Wine certifications. Being curious about what is entailed in these endeavors (neither of which I would ever attempt, nor do I desire to do so), I asked them about how they go about it. One of them said he’s drilled heavily by the M.S. examiners on the legal or technical aspects of wine, such as what percentage of [whatever] varieties are required to label a wine, in every wine country on earth, by an appellation of origin. I’m pretty good at that here in the U.S., but Greece? South Africa? Switzerland? Croatia? Wow. “What is the main variety of Amyndaio and what percent of it is required for the appellation?” (Answers: Xynómavro, 100%). The guy told he he studies off flash cards every chance he gets (even when he’s driving. Memo to self: Stay off the roads when this cat is out there!). I am incredibly impressed by, and respectful of, such prodigious feats of memory as are required to earn these high honors. I couldn’t do it. I have the memory of a doorknob. Going through security yesterday morning at JFK, I left my carry-on bag at the X-ray machine. Just put on my shoes and started walking away, when my companion reminded me, telling me I would have ended up with TSA shutting down the terminal if I didn’t retrieve it. In my defense, my companion was a beautiful woman and I was temporarily mesmerized…but I digress. The point is that my memory isn’t what it used to be, and if an M.S. can memorize megabits of information, I take my hat off to him or her. But I found my mind wandering back to my favorite wine writers, the likes of H. Warner Allen, Professor Saintsbury, even more modern types like Michael Broadbent and Gerald Asher, and I thought, “I don’t know if any of them could have told you the technical details of Hermitage, how many liters per hectare or whatever the metric equivalents are, how long Chianti Classico has to be aged, or even, in the case of a late 19th century or early 20th century writer, what the grape varieties were in Cheval Blanc, but what they wrote was classic and beautiful and wonderful.” Their words live forever, not in some flash book that’s here today and gone tomorrow, and their descriptions get the essence of the wines across more eloquently than anything I would imagine an M.S. or M.W. could ever write. There are exceptions, of course, but an M.S. or M.W., however impressive an achievement it is, is essentially a career move, like an M.B.A., rather than an amateur pursuit of knowledge. Amateur: from Latin via Old French: a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training.

I told the guy [a kid, really, just 24] I’d like to send him my copy of Notes on a Cellar-book, a third edition and one of the pride and joys of my wine library. (I made him promise not to spill coffee or wine on it!] I honestly don’t know if he’ll read it or, if he does, like it. It is not scintillating reading, if you’re into John Grisham. It was for me: when I first read in, in the 1980s, it was breathlessly. I knew who Professor Saintsbury was, but I also was familiar with his milieu [Oxford 1865, university don, highly educated, not aristocratic but of the intellectual English aristocracy], a time I could have related to.  He was a hedonist and a gourmand, and aside and apart from his expertise in French and English literature [with particular expertise in Dryden and Balzac], he turned to wine every chance he got. When I say “turned to” I mean it was with a passion and adoration most of us can only wonder at. Professor Saintsbury was not wealthy, but was lucky enough to live at time when claret, Port, Champagne, Hermitage and Burgundy didn’t cost an arm and a leg; and besides, he was an amusing conversationalist who frequently was invited to dine with wealthier men than he, who gladly pulled out 40 year old Lafite, 60 year old Yquem and 70 year old Vougeot. We should all be so lucky! (Memo to young bloggers: learn the gentle art of conversation, please. Ask others about themselves, instead of telling them about you.)

At any rate, my young M.S.-studying friend said to please send him the book, so I will, and I hope he enjoys it. More than that, I hope he reads it and goes “Wow.” Books and the well sculpted word can have a mystical impact on readers and can change attitudes forever. I hope my friend gets his M.S. and that his career path takes him where he wants to go and, maybe if he’s really lucky, to places he didn’t even know existed. But more than that, I hope he finds instilled in himself an aspiration for writing something far beyond “The Onomasía Proléfseos Anotéras Piótitos appellation is in Ioánnina Prefecture, its main wine is Zítsa, and 100% Debîna is required, with a maximum yield of 1,000 kilograms per stremma.”

Sleep deprived, recovering from a surfeit of wine and food, I fly home to sunny California in a few hours to refuel and refresh myself after a long, grinding but glorious few days in the events prior to, during and after Wine Enthusiast’s Wine Star Awards ceremony, held last Monday night at the 42nd Street Public Library in midtown Manhattan (which was having eerily mild weather). I will say what a great success it was. To be nominated for a Wine Star Award is one of the highest honors that can come to anyone in the wine and food industries. To actually win must be a very great and memorable experience for those lucky enough to know it. I sat at the table of the Jackson family: Barbara Banke (the late, great and immortal Jess Jackson’s widow), her children Chris, Katie and Julia (such lovely, sweet people), Don Hartford (the proprietor of Hartford Court, who must be the world’s greatest dinner companion) and various friends and fiancés. Barbara had asked me to be at her table, which honored me to no end. Otherwise, I’m sure I would have sat with Bob Cabral, Wiliams Selyem’s great winemaker, whom I had nominated as Winemaker of the Year; of course, he won. Bob gave an amazing speech, and was crying at the end. He is fundamentally a little boy from a hardscrabble Central Valley family who cannot believe how blessed his life has turned out to be, and gives credit at every stretch to his parents and family.

On Tuesday, the magazine’s staff all could have used another 14 hours of sleep, but there was important work to be done, so we gathered early at the office and did all the things that need to be done to produce a successful magazine, one that counts in the industry and that people look forward to reading. That was all day long; then it was off to a well-oiled dinner. Back at the hotel, of course, the traveling editors and staff did not go straight to bed. No, we gathered in one of our rooms, with a couple bottles of wine, and extended the fun, recapping the days events and having plenty of laughs. I can truly say how lucky I feel not only to respect my co-workers but to like and even love them. The great Roger Voss, from Bordeaux, Monica Larner, who so brilliantly covers Italy from her perch in Rome, and our two “sales ladies,” Denise Valenza and my old buddy, Allison Langhoff. They keep me sane.

And so back to California. I will return in full force Thursday. Be well.

There were only 5 of us at the Christmas table, not counting various kids who were on the computer and a 13 year old who piloted a foot stool all around the house as if it were a hobby horse. But it was festive. After all kinds of appetizers–cashews, salami, cheese, crackers–Marilyn served her own homemade honey baked ham, with stewed fruits, oven roasted squashes and potatoes, and a salad of bitter greens, candied pecans and feta cheese which she criticized but that everyone else seemed to enjoy. She’d bought a gigantic chocolate layer cake for dessert, bedizened or should I say festooned with candy canes, sugary elves, garish Santas and little reindeer (FD&C red dye #40), which really added insult to the injury after all the food; and when everyone had ate their fill, and half of the cake was still left over, Marilyn tried to convince someone, anyone, to please bring it home with them. No takers.

Wines? We kept it simple. I brought along a bottle of JCB non-vintage Brut Rosé, a great buy for only $20, rich, delicious and clean. Everybody liked it, even Marilyn’s son and daughter-in-law, who profess to dislike sparkling wine. They made such a fuss over it that the teenaged kids asked for a sip, which they duly received–a tiny one. I personally think our drinking age laws are anachronistic. I do recognize we can’t just let kids drink alcohol anytime they feel like it, but surely we can respect the European tradition of letting them have a little, at the table, in the company of civilized adults, so they don’t end up thinking drinking is just for getting smashed.

What else did we drink? I also brought a bottle of Jarvis 2006 Estate Cabernet. Now that, my friends, is a helluva wine. I don’t know if Jarvis routinely appears on the list of Napa Valley “cult” Cabs. I myself have never prepared such a list, although I suppose if I had to, I could. But I’d be embarrassed; such a silly, pandering thing to do. Anyway I brought the Jarvis, even though I knew it wasn’t the ideal wine for the ham (which Marilyn had told me beforehand was the main dish), because I like for people to love the wines I bring, and I knew that everybody would adore that wine. And they did.

We had a couple Pinot Noirs, and a bottle of Chardonnay, and lots of sparkling water. Marilyn’s brother, Bud, who would be the first to admit he’s not a wine guy but likes to drink anyway, bought a bottle of Barefoot Sauvignon Blanc, which he drank on the rocks. Lest you think dinner with Steve necessarily implies wine snobbery of the highest order, keep that image in mind!

When everyone had gone home, Marilyn and I watched the 2008 documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. (He’d been a favorite of mine from way back in the day, and I like to think the New Journalism he helped to inspire has had its influence on my writing in this blog.) The dogs cuddled up with us, little Annie with Marilyn, her mommy, Gus with me, and Maisie, Marilyn’s big, goofy Golden Lab, curled up snoring by the fireplace. It was cold in Pacifica, and the fog was rolling in as thick as mashed potatoes, but inside it was toasty warm and peaceful, as Christmas evenings should be.

You meet so many different kinds of people on the kind of long, complex journey I’ve just returned from. Sommeliers, winemakers, cellar rats, winery owners both rich and not so rich, chefs, personal assistants, field hands, bartenders, valets, waiters, the spouses and kids of all the above–it’s a veritable whirlwind of social networking.

It can be exhausting over the course of three or four days to do the visiting wine writer’s dance. People want to know who you are. You can sense them probing into your character: is he authentic? A phony? Does he know what he’s talking about? Is he an asshole or a nice guy? Of course, you want everyone to feel good about your visit. The wine writer gets used to being put on a slide and examined under the microscope.

The days are long. There are tastings early in the morning, throughout the day and on into the evening. Endless schmoozing, winery tours, rides and walks through vineyards, walk throughs of homes. Then there are the inevitable late night dinners, with intense drinking and conversing. It’s fun, I like it because I like people, and it’s obviously a vital part of my job, but it can take a physical toll. Early last Thursday night, I slammed into the wall. Crashed right out until Friday morning, when I awoke at 4 a.m. wondering what the hell had hit me.

Since there are so many different personalities, one finds oneself talking about all sorts of different things, looking to fit into whatever the situation demands, trying to connect across the spaces that separate us. People want to talk about what they love. One minute a grower is telling you about clones he presumes you understand. The next, an owner is explaining the intricacies of his new press, a machine whose functions he assumes you know all about. A particular personality type endemic to the business is the winemaker who’s also a fine wine aficienado. These are people who buy and study famous wines and love to talk about them. They can tell you the difference between the 1978 and 1979 Chambolle-Musignys, how things changed when the old winemaker left and the new one arrived, where rare old wines might still be available for purchase at auction or through private connections, even how labels have changed over the decades. These tastings are the arcania of connoisseurdom. They are the high wire act of wine, and if you’re merely a humble wine writer from California, you can feel adrift.

What all the people I meet on these trips have in common are two qualities. The first is brilliance. Each is accomplished in some distinguished way. Even if you’re “just” a lowly cellar rat, the fact is that if you’re a 24 year old working in the cellar for some great winemaker, you’ve worked very hard to get and stay there, and have thus achieved something noteworthy. The wine industry is as pure a meritocracy as exists; the cream rises to the top, and on these trips I tend to meet the creamiest of the cream.

The second quality the people you meet have in common is hopefulness. The cellar rat dreams someday of being a great winemaker in his own right. The winemaker dreams of making ever greater wines in his unattainable quest for perfection. Even the millionaire businessman, for all his success, dreams of his little brand being the next Au Bon Climat, Sine Qua Non or Williams Selyem. Endemic to the wine business is the truth that as soon as the current vintage is over, no matter how bad it was, next year will be better. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” the saying goes, hope being programmed into Nature herself; and those who work with Nature live and breathe that hope. Of all the discoveries I make on these wine tours, the greatest is not some fabulous old vintage wine. No, it’s the hope in the breasts of the people I meet.

My visit to Santa Barbara County continues apace, as they say. Yesterday dawned clear and cold, with frost on the windowpanes of the little red cottage. We took a little walk, Gus and I, and he basically lost it when he saw the goats—critters he’d never encountered before. Bien Nacido, which is much more than merely a vineyard, but is a working ranch, must be an infinitude of smells for a dog with a nose as big as Gus’s. He’s half Chihuahua; they were bred to be ratters, I’m told, and he is the sniffiest dog I’ve even known, able to obsess on a single point of a leaf for as long as I let him.

Anyway, later, I drove with Bien Nacido’s vineyard manager, Chris Hammell, and their new winemaker, Trey Fletcher, to the Miller’s Solomon Hills Vineyard, where we tasted through some Bien Nacido and SH Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. Nicholas Miller was lucky to lure Trey away from Littorai. For such a young [31] man, Trey has an impressive resumé and I’m sure that both the BNV and SH brands are in good hands. Trey is obviously thrilled at being able to work with fruit of that quality.

Then it was on to Presqu’ile, a newish winery in the western part of the Santa Maria Valley whose owners, the Murphy family, have big plans. Matt Murphy showed me the enormous construction project they’re engaged in, which surely must make the contractors and builders of Santa Barbara County ecstatic in this economy. Matt plans to put in a big tasting room with tourist amenities, such as visiting chefs preparing wine-and-food pairings. The topic of bringing tourists into Santa Maria Valley often arises down here, as the wine people are acutely aware that fashionable Santa Ynez Valley gets all the foot traffic, and frankly, there’s nothing for visitors to do in SMV, except to drive from tasting room to tasting room. A real dearth of decent restaurants and no place to stay worthy of mention. So maybe the Presqu’ile people can start to turn that around. Presqu’ile’s winemaker is Dieter Conje, the dreaded [as in hair] South African who’s turned into a pal over the last year or so. He was on my panel at the 2011 Chardonnay Symposium and I guarantee he’ll be on it next year because he’s articulate, funny and smart, exactly the qualities a panel moderator needs his panel participants to possess. Presqu’ile’s wines, incidentally, are quite good. They’ve been buying fruit, but the estate vineyard is starting to come into production, and I predict it is going to be the source of spectacular Pinot Noir.

After that, we went back to the little red cottage, where I’d left Gus, and man, was he happy to see me and take another walk. He tugged me straight to the goat field, but they were gone! The Mexican field hands had brought them someplace else and Gus was disappointed. He’d particularly liked watching the rams butt each other, and I think their mounting behavior totally puzzled him.

Finally it was back to Santa Ynez for a long, lugubrious dinner at Mattei’s, a local favorite. Lots of winemakers there. It’s always a little weird to know that they’ve turned out for me, so I try to return the respect by letting them know how highly I think of Santa Barbara County wine. It’s true, and it completely blows my mind that many other writers, some quite well known, tend to dismiss the region, as evidenced by how seldom they visit it. At least, that’s what the winemakers tell me, and after all, they would know! Andrew Murray was there, his hair much shorter than when I first met him, but looking fit and trim. Chad Melville, too, whom I toasted (along with his partner, Greg Brewer, who wasn’t there) as my first hosts to Santa, err, Sta. Rita Hills when I first visited. They schlepped me all over the place, answering my questions [this was back in the 90s] and being such fine ambassadors for the region—a role they’ve played with many others. One of my favorites, John Falcone, was there. I’ve known John since his Atlas Peak days but fortunately he’s now at Rusack, and also has his own brand, Falcone, from Paso Robles grapes. The delightful Paul Lato was there, enigmatic and smiling and funny. Blair Fox, Sam Spencer, Ryan Devolet, Matt Dees, a cat named Max Gleason I don’t know much about except that he was an artist in NYC and Kurt Aamman rounded out the group. Everybody brought at least one bottle, which meant a lot of wine, and personally speaking I indulged happily because I didn’t have to drive. The topics of conversation included the 2011 vintage [challenging to say the least] and what makes Santa Barbara different from Napa Valley. The consensus was that SBC is about farming, with all that implies: a sense of rectitude, of rural modesty, self-sufficiency and helping your neighbors. I’m not sure the Napans wouldn’t say the same things about themselves. But without being able to exactly put my finger on it, Santa Barbara County is a very special place; and the wines speak for themselves.

I’m on the deck of Bien Nacido Vineyards’s little red house, looking west over the lower part of the vineyard, now bare of grapes except for some late harvest Pinot Blanc remaining to be picked. The sun will shortly set; the day’s last light is golden, giving this part of the Santa Maria Valley a spacious luster I’d never noticed before. We speak often of climate and soil in discussions of terroir, but rarely of light: how the rays of the sun arch out above the landscape, how the sky glows during the daylight hours, the energy of light pervading the environment, suffusing it in life. The sky over Bien Nacido is big, very big—horizon to horizon big, the kind of expanse you imagine in Texas, or the Canadian tundra. The light seems to come from everywhere, down from the sky, up from the ground, dripping like honey off the mountains. Light in this valley comes early and stays late this far south, where the days are longer than up north, where I live. The light is quite literally alive.

The ball of the sun reddens and sinks. Directly to the west, out beyond the Bettaravia flats and Santa Maria City, is the Pacific. Today was warm, even for Santa Barbara County this time of the year, with the temperature in the mid-70s, but already at this hour the land is giving up the heat, fast, and in the growing chill I fancy I can feel the cold ocean. I smell the ice in the Gulf of Alaska, like a sharp pinch in the nostrils. You have to get further south than this, to Malibu, before you have a sense of the tropics. In the Santa Maria Valley, the elements remind you this is Central, not Southern, California.

Staying the night in a winery house alone, in the midst of a vineyard, is an occupational necessity for a wine writer, but also a rare gift. Most people never get the opportunity. It’s very quiet, as you’d expect (a particular treat for an inner city denizen like me). After dark, the workers all go home, and you’re alone, all by yourself, in the country. (Well, Gus is with me, so I’m not really alone.) One time when I was here, I tried to imagine being a grapevine. The quietude does that. Being a citified wine critic, there’s always the danger of losing your connection to and appreciation of what wine really is: an agricultural product. I’ve known a lot of vineyard managers over the years, and I never quite feel like we’re living on the same plane. They dwell in a realm of seasons and insects and mold and wild critters and weather and grape prices and buyer contracts. A writer must know a little about a lot of different things, but not a lot about anything. Conversations between writers and true expects, like growers, are truncated, but you try to come away knowing a little more than you knew before.

A word, too, about drinking while you’re staying in a winery guest house. I always bring a few emergency bottles with me when I travel. You never know if the place you’re staying will have any. I’ve stayed in winery guest houses where I was surprised to find nothing. Not that I expect freebies, but…hence my emergency stashes. This time I brought a Byron Pinot (to honor Santa Maria Valley) and a Mer Soleil Chardonnay, because that’s a style I like. I enjoy getting high when I’m alone in a winery guest house. Not drunk: there’s a difference between high, which is a pleasant buzz, and sloshed. I haven’t been drunk in many years, because my body tells me when to stop. It would be perverse to stay the night in the middle of a vineyard and not enjoy the fruit of the vine.

Later, Bien Nacido’s great vineyard manager, Chris Hammell, stopped by. We drained a bottle of Ojai Syrah (from Melville Vineyard) and talked about viticulture for a little while, before discovering that he’s a student of Brazilian Ju-Jitsu while I of course have my history of Japanese karate-do. That was pretty much it. The next few hours were all about fighting, senseis and all that stuff, not wine. No disrespect to wine, but just because you’re both in the industry doesn’t mean it’s the only thing you can talk about. Wine unites us in humanity; drinking together opens that union to wherever it wants to go.