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.

All these articles about what wines to drink at Thanksgiving are giving me a headache, but I get it. They’re a staple of the wine publishing trade. Heck, for all I know, someone’s gonna write one for Wine Enthusiast! While I defer to no one in my penchant for the best wine and food pairings, Thanksgiving is the annual lacuna in this fun practice. Such is the nature of the traditional table that there’s almost no wine you can put on it that someone won’t like, or that won’t match up with something. At our annual family turkey day, I just pack up a crate of this and that–a little dry white, some Chardonnay, some bubbly, a Pinot Noir, Zinfandel for sure, even a Cabernet, and definitely some sweet wine, and that’s it.

People always turn to me as the expert to ask what to drink with what, but for the most part I defer from taking up that mantle. In many respects, I’m the least wine snobby person I know, and I think it has to do with my constitutional makeup. I’ve always been acutely aware of snobbism in life. Hated it from day one. A snob might have been that preppy kid in 8th grade who was too good to talk to me and my friends. It could have been the frat boy when I was a frosh in college, who went around thinking he was God’s gift to the world. My first experience in wine snobs was meeting the country’s leading collectors when I wrote The Collecting Page at Wine Spectator. My lord, what a tedious bunch of men. Too much money, too little self-respect, and a complete lacking of common sense etiquette. It was a variation on the old “Mine is bigger than yours,” except it was “Mine is older than yours,” or “Mine cost more money than yours,” or “Mine is much rarer than yours.” Better still, a combination of all three. I saw the soft underbelly of the wine world at that time, and it had a profound effect on me. I think that’s why Wine Enthusiast and I are such a perfect fit. We’re the anti-snob magazine. Wine is about fun, and laughter, and companionship, and eating lots of fantastic food. It’s not about having a heart attack worrying about whether the ‘02 or the ‘03 will better serve the lamb.

Still, there can be obvious mismatches. When we were in Monterey the other day, we (four of us) went to an Italian restaurant, Cibo. Cookie and Allison ordered angel hair pasta with fish, Lisa had the breaded cod, and I opted for a pizza with green apples and prosciutto (unbearably good). Then the girls handed me the wine list and told me to have at it. I could have gone through every permutation in my head over the precise nature of the meats, sauces and spices, the way some people I know do, and agonized over the possibility that something might go dreadfully wrong. But I didn’t. I saw a Nozzole Riserva, with six years of bottle age, and that was that. I used to drink a lot of Nozzole in the Eighties and knew it would be fine, which it was. Dry as dust, so smooth in tannins, earthy and rich in cherries and tobacco. The girls loved it with their food, I loved it with mine. A no brainer. (Our server liked my pick, too.)

This Thanksgiving we’re having about 20 people at Maxine’s, down in San Mateo. I promised to help with the prep. There will be little kids, medium sized mini-adults, proper adults and, uh, aging boomers. I like Thanksgiving because it’s our country’s own holiday, secular, and fun, but with a serious point. I’m sure all of us of legal age who are not on 12-step programs (a few in my family are) will indulge like crazy, which if fine with me. I love getting my blood alcohol to illegal limits when I’m with friends, although as most of you know, I will not drive after I’ve been drinking. Fortunately, I’ll stay the night at Maxine’s, then drive home to Oakland early the next morning. For all my loathing of driving the Bay Area’s impossibly crowded, frustrating freeways, I adore driving just as dawn is breaking. Heading east on the 101, you come around Hospital Curve and there it is, downtown San Francisco, the soaring towers (the Jukebox Marriott, as Herb Caen called it, is my favorite) gleaming in the rising sun, the sky over the East Bay Hills ablaze in fire. When I’m able to relax and just drive instead of battling my way through gridlock, I sense how small the Bay Area really is. If you’re on the Bay Bridge, Napa is just to your left, Sonoma a little behind your left shoulder, Livermore Valley straight ahead, and the Santa Cruz Mountains just over your right shoulder. I’ve driven from Boonville to Oakland early on a Sunday morning in an hour and twenty minutes. It seems far away, but it’s not.

Oh, the headline on this post? I don’t know what it means, either. I just liked the sound of the words.

Do you know what the greatest marketing scheme in the modern history of wine has been?

a. the French Paradox
b. Beaujolais nouveau
c. the 1976 Paris tasting
d. Sideways
e. the cult Cabernet phenomenon

All the above were brilliant, impacting the perception and sale of wine, but the greatest of them all was (b), Beaujolais nouveau. For those of you who live in a cave and don’t know what that is, it’s the first wine of the new vintage, released worldwide on the third Thursday in November amidst great furor and publicity. I almost wrote “traditionally released” because that’s how most writers refer to it, but there’s nothing “traditional” about the November release. According to some published reports, it wasn’t until 1985 that the “commercial phenomenon” of Beaujolais nouveau was invented. By the early 1990s, it was certainly set into place in California. I remember going to Kermit Lynch’s annual Beaujolais nouveau festival, in the parking lot outside his Berkeley store, where in additional to huge quantities of frothy, purple wine they’d serve grilled sausages and baguettes from Acme Bakery, next door.

Beaujolais, the wine, was nothing special prior to Beaujolais nouveau day. In my many older wine books, dating back to pre-Prohibition times, it’s scarcely mentioned. It wasn’t until the late, great Alexis Lichine’s 1979 book, Guide to the Wines and Vineyards of France, that Beaujolais nouveau found its way into a wine book in any great detail, although Lichine preferred to call it Beaujolais primeur. He colorfully describes how, on the night of Nov. 15, “hundreds and hundreds of trucks and trailers [gathered] in the Beaujolais to pick up the wine,” likening the traffic headed into the big cities as “an army convoy.” But he did not write about the worldwide phenomenon of Beaujolais nouveau, because it did not then exist.

Wikipedia suggests that Georges Duboeuf “saw the potential for marketing Beaujolais Nouveau” and says that by the late 1970s its release in France “had become a national event,” spreading to other European countries and the U.S. in the 1980s and to Asia in the 1990s. Whatever its precise origins, Beaujolais nouveau day has  elevated a rather humble wine to an excitement meriting what amounts to a holiday in the world of wine. From Beijing to Lyons and San Francisco, Beaujolais nouveau makes a lot of producers a lot of money.

Can the phenomenon be replicated with other wines? Probably not. But that should never stop clever producers and their marketing agents from trying. You never know, before-hand, what’s going to work with P.R. Nobody could have predicted Pinot Noir’s resurgence prior to Sideways, or the launch of California’s reputation before the Paris tasting. And Sixty Minutes’ episode of the French Paradox was totally unexpected, in its massive impact on consumer attitudes toward [mainly red] wine.

Anyway, this year I’m going to pick up a few bottles of Beaujolais nouveau and bring them to our family’s Thanksgiving dinner. It’s the perfect bridge wine, a little sweet, chilled like a white, fizzy and fruity. And now, I’m off to Monterey, for tomorrow’s Best of the Blue event. I’ll be taking questions on Saturday afternoon; if you want, send in yours at the Monterey Vintners’ Facebook page, and we’ll tweet back my replies!

I’ll be at Best of the Blue, the big wine event down in Monterey town, this Saturday, and we’ll be tweeting live. You’re all encouraged to send me any questions or comments. It’s between 1:30 and 3:45, Pacific time.

In the morning I’ll be hosting a tasting with the following wines: Testarossa 2009 Doctor’s Vineyard Pinot Noir (Santa Lucia Highlands), La Crema 2009 Chardonnay (Monterey), Cambiata 2007 Tannat (Monterey), Chateau Julien 2007 Private Reserve Merlot (Monterey County), Morgan 2010 Metallico Un-Oaked Chardonnay (Monterey) and Novy 2008 Syrah (Santa Lucia Highlands). I chose the wines to reflect various varieties and terroirs of Monterey County, and because I’d given each of them a good score. Monterey has a wide variety of soils and climates, and I believe the county’s potential is enormous. Of all wine-producing coastal counties, Monterey is actually the least understood, for a variety of reasons. That is beginning to change.

The afternoon session–the one we’ll be live online–consists of three “Ask Steve” segments of 15 minutes each. That was the Association’s idea. They say there’ll be a lot of people there, and so I’m opening myself up to anything people want to ask–or say–including your tweets and Facebook comments. I love the give-and-take of large public events that are unstructured and unrehearsed. People tend to ask the most incredible questions, things that keep me on my toes and make me think about stuff I wouldn’t otherwise.

If you want to get in on the action, you can ask or comment through the Monterey Wines Facebook page or directly via Twitter @MontereyWines.

I like Monterey County. It has a look and feel of its own, totally unique insofar as the other California wine regions are concerned, and a bit of that old Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” attitude. The grapegrowing action used to be down on the floor of the Salinas Valley, which most of you who’ve driven on Highway 101 have seen. But a lot of the vineyards have been removed over the years, because it’s pretty cold and windy down there, which makes it unsuitable for fine wine production. The epithet “Monterey veggies” referred to wines, chiefly Cabernet Sauvignon, that grew there in the 70s. I remember an Almaden Cabernet that I liked anyway, but if I reviewed it now, I probably wouldn’t give it a good score. Nowadays, of course, the Santa Lucia Highlands have (has? it’s an appellation) become famous for Pinot Noir (not to mention Syrah and Chardonnay), while the hilly vineyards in the eastern mountains, the Gavilans, also contain many Pinot Noir vineyards; that area deserves its own appellation, but it doesn’t currently have one. Monterey also contains the Chalone AVA, Carmel Valley, and, to the south, San Bernabe, San Lucas, San Antonio Valley and Hames Valley. The climate gets progressively warmer in the south as you approach Paso Robles. The Arroyo Seco may be the most interesting emerging region in the county. It’s undergirded by rocks and boulders swept along for Millennia by the Salinas River, and is relatively sheltered from the wind. I’ve liked Arroyo Seco whites for a long time, but the reds, including Pinot Noir, are making a play.

It’s good for a writer like me to get out and meet the public, both face to face and online. We tend to get locked into a bubble, forgetting that there’s a real world out there, with real wine loving people who have real questions and concerns. I hope to hear from you this Saturday.

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.

Check out the new ish of Mutineer Magazine, which has a multipage interview with me by a guy I’m glad to call my friend, editor in chief Alan Kropf. (The article isn’t online, so you’ll have to buy the zine.) Alan put me through my paces, asking good questions and letting me go on at length. He did a good job editing, so the article is really an accurate representation of our conversation. (And the pictures are totally cool!)

Alan wanted to know my thoughts about “the controversial nature of my writing.” I told him I was surprised by this question, because I didn’t know my writing was controversial. Sure, three years ago there was that blowup about the Rodney Strong “Rockaway” Cabernet Sauvignon (and if you don’t know what that was all about, it doesn’t matter, because it’s ancient history). But it blew over quickly, and as I told Alan, the wine bloggers needed time to get to know me, and vice versa. As far as I’m concerned, all is smooth sailing now.

Alan got me reminiscing about the 1980s and how I got into wine. I love remembering those good old days when, even in San Francisco, not too many people were into wine, and those who were felt like part of an underground cult. One of the things I liked best about the scene was that you met the most interesting people, whom you otherwise never would have. I ended up joining the old Les Amis du Vin group (at one point, they asked me to head it up, but I didn’t want to). We’d meet once a week or so in a restaurant to taste wine with an invited proprietor. I still have my notes from those days. In fact, I advise budding wine lovers to take plenty of notes and keep every one of them. You never know. Look what Michael Broadbent did with all his old tasting notes.

I guess I should consider myself lucky that a younger-orientated magazine like Mutineer is interested in me. But I’m interested in them, so it’s a two way street. I’m interested in how people in their 20s and 30s drink and think about wine. I want to know how they make their buying decisions. I’m curious about whom they listen to when it comes to recommendations. The conventional wisdom is that they go on Facebook or Twitter, and their “friends” tell them what to buy, but I’ve never believed that. I have 2,400 Facebook friends. If each of them recommends a wine (and believe me, lots of them do), am I better off with personal reccos, or am I more confused than ever? The latter, I should think. I won’t buy a wine just because a Facebook friend, whom I may never even have met, tells me to. I’m much more likely to buy a wine if an expert tells me to. And in order to be an expect, you have to have earned the position, in my book.

Alan Kropf called me “a trailblazing wine blogger who is leveraging his experience as a respected wine writer to help evolve the medium through his fearlessly opinionated blog.” That hyperbole is beyond me, but I appreciate Alan for understanding that, in my blog, I try to go beyond what I write in both Wine Enthusiast and the books I’ve been privileged to publish for University of California Press, to express as pure an opinion as you’re likely to get from a wine critic these days. There are times I write stuff on this blog that I can’t believe I said. But I hit the “publish” button, and it seems to work.