So now it’s official: The TTB this morning finally published a formal notice of rulemaking for a new Happy Canyon AVA in the easternmost reaches of the Santa Ynez Valley of Santa Barbara County. I first heard about Happy Canyon (the name conjures up images of the gods at play in some immortal realm) about ten years ago. It had become apparent by then that the Santa Ynez Valley proper was incapable of producing a Cabernet Sauvignon of high quality. It was too cool, which is why the push into Happy Canyon occurred by grapegrowers like Vogelzang, Dierberg and Westerly. The Santa Ynez Valley grows progressively warmer the further inland you go, so that if the temperature is, say, 94 in the town of Santa Ynez, it might be 98 at Dierberg’s Star Lane vineyard, in Happy Canyon. Those few degrees can make all the difference when it comes to ripening Cabernet.

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The tourists go to San Francisco, Napa and Sonoma. Some even venture into Berkeley. No one comes to poor old Oakland, but they should. We have a beautiful city with the best climate of any major U.S. city (from a Rand McNally survey), and despite the crime statistics, most sections of the city are perfectly safe.

I’ve lived here for 20 years now. Here are 5 cool places I go to and if you’re ever here, you should too.

Nan Yang: The best Burmese restaurant in Northern California, maybe in the whole state. I first discovered this gem when I moved here. It was then located in a little storefront in Oakland’s Chinatown. I quickly became an addict, in particular for the ginger salad, eight treasure bean curd, and (believe it or not), the chicken noodle soup, made not with matzah balls but coconut milk and ginger. Nan Yang is now located in the fashionable Rock Ridge District, not far from U.C. Berkeley, but the food is as good as ever, and founder Philip Chu still presides over the kitchen. (No web site)

Oliveto Cafe and Restaurant: For years it’s been considered one of the top Italian places in the Bay Area, with homemade pastas and salumi. Even though longtime chef Paul Bertolli left a few years ago, his replacement, CIA grad Paul Canales, hasn’t missed a beat. Oliveto’s upstairs dining room, with its views of bustling College Avenue, is where I always meet visiting winemakers when we’re having lunch and tasting. The waiters set us up with big crystal glasses, we take a table in the corner, and no matter what we’re drinking, Oliveto’s food seems to adapt to it. Or the other way around.

Paul Marcus Wines: Just downstairs from Oliveto, in the Market Hall (a collection of little food stores), is this smallish but interesting wine shop, which has been there at least since I can remember. Seldom does a week go by than I don’t stop by for something. They offer a range of small producers from France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Spain, California and other countries, and the staff is knowledgeable and happy to chat. They don’t have a tasting bar, but are starting to have special wine and food pairing events.

Bay Wolf: Well, I don’t exactly hang out at Bay Wolf. It’s too expensive. But I do like to eat there once or twice a year and I have for the last 20 years. Other restaurants come and go; Bay Wolf remains. Founded 30 years ago by chef Michael Wild, Bay Wolf was part of the East Bay culinary scene that also gave rise to Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. Wolf’s idol was Elizabeth David, and the kitchen still sticks to the ideals of seasonally fresh, local ingredients and simple preparation. Bay Wolf also has an amazing wine list, and on any given night, you might run into a famous winemaker.

Vine: One of the neatest phenomena about Oakland is the proliferation of wine bars that’s sprouted up in the last year or so. Who woulda thunk, wine bars in Oakland!! Yet they’re all over the place, and apparently doing well. My favorite is right in my neighborhood. Vine is the town’s hottest wine bar. They use those nitrogen machines to offer dozens of mainly small (500 cases or less) production wines by the glass, or you can buy a “tasting ticket” for $20 minimum. The space is a refurbished old building, with brick walls and loft-high ceilings, and owner Chris Williams is expanding upstairs and outside for summer grilling and barbecuing. The crowd is young, hip and very Oaktownish. They have live music.

In California (as everywhere), wine regions want to be thought of as special. A region that’s perceived as special can charge more money for their wines, which in turn lets them invest in their viticulture and enology and make the wines even better. This is why every wine region in California is secretly jealous of Napa Valley (not that they’d admit it).

But not every wine region can be special. It’s a law of the universe. In this day and age of marketing, though, wine regions do the most amazing things to promote themselves as special. They form regional associations, charge dues, and hire publicists to, well, publicize their attributes and paint them in the best possible light. Nothing wrong with that. If you’re a wine region and you don’t blow your own horn, you’ve got a problem.

Which makes it all the more remarkable when a new wine region comes on the scene and achieves fame even before they have a functioning association and with hardly lifting a finger to promote themselves. I’m talking about the Santa Rita Hills appellation of Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley.

Sta. Rita Hills (as the name must appear on the label to avoid a conflict of interest with Chile’s Santa Rita Winery) is probably most famous as the main location of the movie Sideways, but that film did not create SRH’s fame. I can’t even recall that the words “Santa Rita Hills” were ever uttered in the movie. (If anyone knows, please tell me.)

Besides, wine critics are not about to salivate over a wine region simply because it’s in a movie.

No, the critics began praising SRH in the ‘90s, and the pace has simply accelerated in the 2000s. Today, I think it’s safe to say that SRH stands as one of the greatest places in the New World to grow Pinot Noir (and they do a great job at Chardonnay and Syrah and Pinot Gris and perhaps one or two others).

And they got there on their own — not with fancy marketing packages and press kits and events with celebrity auctioneers. Not with spin and hype. Not by luring in big spenders with resorts and great restaurants and golf courses. They did it the old-fashioned way: They earned it. (I can still hear John Houseman saying those words.)

They earned it through the dogged efforts of people like Richard Sanford, who was there (with his partner, Michael Benedict) when everyone else thought they were crazy. They did it through the pioneering of guys like Brian Babcock …through the vision and hard work of a younger generation of idealists, like Greg Brewer, Steve Clifton, Wes Hagen and Kathy Joseph. (I could go on and on, and I apologize to others, equally important, who are not on this list.) They put the Santa Rita Hills on the world wine map for the most fundamental reason of all: the quality of the wines.

It’s an important lesson for California’s other wine regions (there are more than 100 AVAs, with more on the way). Quality comes first. Figure out what you do better than anyone else, and then do it. Fame will surely follow.

Here are 8 amazing Santa Rita Hills Pinot Noirs I’ve had recently. It’s no coincidence that 3 of them come from the Cargasacchi Vineyard (which happens to be all Clone 115). The italicized numbers are my Wine Enthusiast scores:

96 Sea Smoke 2006 Ten Pinot Noir
95 Melville 2006 Estate Carrie’s Pinot Noir
94 Samsara 2006 Melville Vineyard Pinot Noir
94 Bonaccorsi 2006 Cargasacchi Vineyard Pinot Noir
94 Loring Wine Company 2006 Cargasacchi Vineyard Pinot Noir
94 Coup de Foudre 2006 Pinot Noir
94 Hitching Post 2006 Cargasacchi Vineyard Pinot Noir
93 Rusack 2006 Reserve Pinot Noir

P.S. Please visit my weekly blog at Wine Enthusiast.

More than 1,700 wildfires continued to rage across California as of Thursday morning. One of the biggest, the 56,000-acre Basin Complex Fire in Big Sur, is still spreading, prompting California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to order the evacuation of hundreds of homes. Large stretches of the Coast Highway are closed. At least 19,000 emergency firefighters are working to combat the blazes, which began June 21 when a lightning storm hit the state.

In better news, the Indians Fire, which had raged in the Ventana Wilderness mountains between Carmel Valley and the the Arroyo Seco, is expected to be contained today.

Most of the fires are in Central and Northern California and the Sierra Foothills, but a new one in the Santa Ynez Mountains, the Gap Fire, brought an early start to Southern California’s fire season. It was raging out of control in the Los Padres National Forest, about 10 miles from downtown Santa Barbara, and has knocked out power to 70,000 homes in the area. Last night, the county declared a state of emergency.

The fires have consumed nearly a half million acres statewide. Parts of Shasta County are under mandatory evacuation orders.

Here’s the link to the latest fire map from the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

The big fires in Napa and Solano counties are out, but the 37,900-acre Lightning Complex Fire — actually 40 separate uncontrolled fires — is only 40% contained in Mendocino County, forcing many to flee their homes. County officials have banned all fireworks this holiday season. The areas most affected are south of Ukiah and around the town of Navarro, in Anderson Valley.

The California National Guard was called into action by Schwarzenegger, the first time in 30 years their ground forces have fought fires.

So far there have been no reports of damage to vineyards or wineries, beyond smoke-related issues whose impact at this point is unclear.

This is a fluid situation changing from moment to moment, and I will try to report further developments.

You’ve read for years how red wine’s antioxidant properties are good for your heart and may even prevent cancer. Maybe you don’t like red wine; it gives you a headache. Too bad white wines don’t have the same properties, but they’re not fermented on their skins, like red wines, so white wines don’t have nearly the same level of polyphenols as red wines.

But wait! Now comes news out of Israel that scientists have figured out a way to make white wine with the same antioxidant polyphenols as red wine. The technique was developed at the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, by Michael Aviram, a professor of biochemistry and medicine. It is said to involve incubating squeezed grapes in the presence of alcohol for 18 hours before removing their skins. This allows the skins to ferment with the pulp before the final fermentation is completed. Aviram says the resulting white wine has the same antioxidant activity as red wine.

You’ll be able to find such heart-protecting wines in the U.S. later this year because an Israeli winery, Binyamina, is planning on releasing a wine that was produced with the Aviram formula. It’s a Muscat, and it’s sweet, because the alcohol is so high that the yeasts can’t complete the fermentation, resulting in residual sugar.

It’s not hard to envision where all this is going. Red wine sales have been on the uptick ever since Morley Safer did his famous “French Paradox” segment on Sixty Minutes in 1991. There have been anecdotal reports ever since that people would drink red wine for its health benefits if it didn’t give them a headache. If Aviram’s technology really works as advertised, then white wine could be the new red. It would help if the wines were dry, but with today’s new genetically-modified (GM) designer yeasts that can function at higher alcohol levels, that shouldn’t be too hard.

But how far down this slippery slope should we go? Critics have already sounded the alarm over GM food products, charging that the necessary safety tests have not been conducted. In the world of wine, harsh criticism has been leveled against GM grapevines and yeasts. Late last year, The Economist reported that many French people view such tinkering as a “war on terroir,” while here in the States, wines made with GM techniques have been dubbed “Frankenwine.” Such tinkering at the genetic level opens up vistas that previously existed only in science fiction. As The Economist mused, “Why should sauvignon blanc be stuck with boring old gooseberry and cabernet sauvignon with cassis? Genomics could beget some novel wine flavours and combinations to ensure the wine really does go with the food…”.

I’m all for conducting safety tests. We don’t want to be putting anything into our bodies that could harm us or the gene pool. But I have a feeling that some people will never be satisfied with anything GM because it just rubs them the wrong way. They’re philosophically opposed to it. What do you think about GM grapes, yeasts, vines and wines?

I knew it. Knew that getting involved in another dustup over AVAs is like wading into quicksand. It’s easy to get in, hard to get out, and the more you try to disengage, the more stuck you get. Last week it was the flap over Calistoga and the Federal government’s proposal to make it harder to create “nested” AVAs. This week, that same Federal government — via the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which oversees AVAs — announced it will no longer consider creating a Tulocay AVA in the southeastern Napa Valley. It was only the second time in many years that TTB has pulled an AVA application from consideration.

Now, such a “sure thing” had been this Tulocay AVA that it was assumed up in Napa that it was just a matter of time before it happened. Alas, such was the furor over “Tulocay” that TTB yesterday yanked the application “because of questions regarding the actual name of the proposed viticultural area.” It’s as dead as Hillary’s presidential campaign.

The details, as I write, are these. The original petitioners for a Tulocay AVA, back in 2006, were Aaron Pott, then winemaker at Quintessa (now a consultant) and someone called Marshall Newman, from Newman Communications. They proposed to appellationize [is that a word?] 11,200 acres, of which 900 were planted to grapes. The name “Tulocay” is of Native American origin.

Everything seemed to be rolling along, and Tulocay seemed destined to become California’s latest AVA, joining other luminaries such as Lime Kiln Valley, Merritt Island and Salado Creek. But a funny thing happened on the way to AVA-hood: Somebody wrote TTB a letter charging that the creation of a Tulocay AVA would cause “inestimable economic damage” to his brand.

That was Bill Cadman, the owner of Tulocay Winery. His objection sprang from the fact that he has been able to use the word “Tulocay” for decades on wines not made from the Tulocay region (e.g., his Amador County Zinfandel). He feared that if “Tulocay” became law, he would no longer be able to do so.

Art Resnick, the chief spokesman for TTB, emailed me the official Notice of withdrawal. It said that the agency had received 20 comments on Tulocay during the comment period: 8 in favor and 12 against, with the naysayers urging instead a “Coombsville” AVA in the same region (and based on a different set of historical facts). The Notice also said that TTB was contacted by Cadman’s lawyer (who’s with the San Francisco firm of Hinman & Carmichael), who urged TTB to use “extreme caution” in considering the Tulocay AVA. This is lawyerese for “We might sue you really bad if you go ahead with this.”

TTB saw the light! (Or felt the heat, which is the same thing.) Their conclusion: “After careful consideration TTB has determined that it would not be appropriate to proceed with the establishment of the proposed Tulocay American viticultural area…”.

In other words: Here comes Coombsville!

Now, what are we to make of this whole brouhaha? I, for one, am getting a headache trying to follow the whirlwind of politics, business, egos, lawyers and government bureaucrats that infests every discussion of AVAs. They used to be so simple and charming: It was all about weather and dirt and history. Now, it’s the lawyers’ full employment act. I have a suggestion: Let’s just let individual wineries have their own AVAs (like Chateau-Grillet has in France). No fuss, no muss, no drama. After all, it’s not about the AVA, it’s about what’s in the bottle, anyway.

P.S. What if someone starts a Coombsville Cellars before the AVA goes through? Do they get grandfathered in?