A friend had kindly given me a bottle of 1979 Sanford & Benedict Pinot Noir in advance of my get-together with Richard Sanford last week. He and I might have shared it, but we didn’t do a lot of serious tasting on that cool, early morning; my motive was primarily to talk with Richard and learn what he’s up to, not to drink. So I brought the bottle home to have it in a more proper setting where I, and others, could appreciate it the way wine is meant to be had: with food, over the pleasures of the table.

An old bottle of wine is the complete opposite of a young bottle. Assuming it’s still sound (and you never know until you pop the cork), an old wine is like an old person: meant to be treated with respect and courtesy. You don’t go out for a 5-mile run with an old bottle, the way you might with a young friend; instead, you sit around the living room, talking quietly and letting the old wine reminisce. Young wines shout; old wines have conversations.

I brought it to Maxine and Keith’s for dinner, down in San Mateo. The first decision was whether or not it would go with her paella, which she made in the classic Spanish style, with clams, shrimp, chicken and chorizo and, of course, a dash of saffron. I figured the match would be fine.

To decant or not? I wished Richard had been there; he would have known. In the event, I waited until about 30 minutes before Maxine put the paella pot on the table. But first the bottle had to be opened. With a 31-year old cork, you never know. I used a waiter’s screwtop, probably not the best idea (an Ah-So would have been better). The cork broke in half, with the top impaled on the screw and the bottom stuck deep down in the neck. But the cork smelled clean. Sometimes old corks break; it’s not the worst thing in the world. Since I couldn’t extract the bottom half, I just shoved it down into the wine. A proper sommelier, I expect, would have filtered and decanted the wine. I did neither.

The color was pale, of course; a heavy sediment clearly had gathered into the bottom of the bottle. The wine wasn’t quite brown, but a sort of russet, the color the maple leaves turn in November just before they fall to the sidewalk in front of my house. A good, rich, natural color, but fading. Then the all-important act of sniffing. Ahhh. Clean, sound, attractive. Just a bit maderized — like a fino sherry. Not unusual in so old a wine. Not a problem. Inviting; not a trace of senescence. Gave it a few quick swirls, and out came the cherries, shy at first, like a little girl in her first ballet costume. Pretty and demure.

Before I could sip Keith asked for the glass. I normally don’t like to tell others what I’m experiencing because I know it can color their own expectations, but I did say, “The fruit’s pretty much gone. But it’s really nice.” As Keith sniffed I could see a certain disappointment. He likes young wines, like most people, because he’s used to young wines. So I went into teacher mode and told him something like this:

With wines this old, you look for different things than fruit. You ask the wine to give you its best, but you in turn must give it yours. Begin with respect. This wine is nearly 31 years old. It is still vibrant — still alive — more than alive. Alert, intelligent, with much to say. (It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize such wines.) There is no sickness unto death here. There is a halting quality; the wine is a shadow of its former self, but it is not a feeble shadow. A noble one, proud of its past. (I tried, unsuccessfully, to make an analogy with the aging Willie Mays, but gave up.) By then I had tasted the wine, and fallen in love. Through the maderization, still some sweet, refined fruit and spice. The more you think about such wines, the more you discover in them. It’s as if they are telling you their long autobiography, one memory at a time. There is a memory of climate. “This fresh acidity you appreciate,” the wine says, “is from the wind and the fog that loved me when I was grapes on vines.” Although the label on the bottle says, in those pre-AVA days, “Lompoc, California,” this was after all the same Santa Rita Hills that today is windswept and foggy; the Sanford & Benedict Vineyard still spills down the slopes to Santa Rosa Road (and Richard Sanford’s La Encantada Vineyard is right next door).

With the paella the wine was a dream. For comparison’s sake I opened a 2006 Siduri Cargasacchi Pinot. (If I’d had a recent Sanford & Benedict that would have been better but I didn’t.). You can see Cargasacchi right across Santa Rosa Road, so the two wines shared the same, or nearly the same, terroir. The Siduri is a wonderful wine — I scored it 92 points for Wine Enthusiast — but the minute Keith tried it, right after the old S&B, he pouted and said, “It tastes horrible!” No, it wasn’t horrible, it is a very good Pinot Noir, but everything is relative; and perhaps nothing in our sensory experience is as relative as when, and under what circumstances, you taste wine. The 3-1/2 year old tannins in the Siduri were hard as nails, after the silk of the S&B. The Siduri’s fruit was too bold, too aggressive, compared to the older wine’s discretion; it was like (and I’ve made this analogy before) the late Tammy Faye Bakker’s makeup: garish. The S&B by contrast was evanescent as a ghost. Not a scary, chain-rattling ghost, but a friendly familiar. A spirit. An angel.

All of which, of course, leads to the big question: Will today’s Pinot Noirs, which routinely top 14% of alcohol and frequently are more than 15%, age like that ‘79 S&B? Its alcohol was 13.2% (and there’s no reason at all to think that number was not accurate, the way I routinely doubt today’s official alcohol readings on labels). I have no way of knowing. Keith asked why a higher alcohol Pinot might not age as well and, once more, I wished Richard had been there, for he would have given us the answer. I murmured something about balance. In complex systems, the slightest inherent imbalance, no matter how barely noticeable early on, may sometimes lead to gigantic consequences, like a space satellite spinning out of orbit. Maybe the winemakers who craft these modern-style Pinot Noirs will weigh in with their opinions. Will these 2007s and 2008s be as beautiful in 31 years as that old S&B?

And this just in:

The case of the mysterious mailing list deaths

This is a true story about one of the most terrible and horrendous events in the history of the wine industry. It is a tale of murder, greed and covetuousness — and the lengths to which humans will go in order to satisfy their unnatural lusts.

It began on a dark, stormy night in December, 2008, in the Hollywood Hills, where the well-known movie producer (“Cheaper by the Dozen 2,” “All About Steve”), James Schnorrer, was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool. His body was discovered by his housekeeper, who called police. The Los Angeles coroner eventually determined that the cause of death was accidental drowning. Schnorrer’s blood was found to contain traces of marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and prescription drugs. The presumption was that he had gotten high, gone for a swim, and passed out in the water. Case closed.

Two weeks later, in Boca Raton, Florida, in the upscale Highland Beach neighborhood, Jay Silverbring, a wealthy importer of East Asian antiques, similarly was found dead in his home. His wife, Lisa, had been shopping. On her return, she discovered Silverbring face-down on the livingroom floor. There were no signs of violence, no marks on the body, nothing to indicate that a crime had been committed. The coroner determined that Silverbring had died from a massive coronary thrombosis, although he had been in excellent health. His age at the time of his death was 54.

Over the next six months, which is to say through the summer of 2009, more than sixty men and women, all in upper income brackets, were found dead, of various causes: heart attacks. Strokes. Drownings. Car accidents. Falls down staircases and off cliffs. Nine were determined to have committed suicide: five by hanging, three by slicing their wrists, and one by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. By the beginning of 2010, the number has grown to 111. That is when a private detective by the name of Maury Saperstein became involved, and eventually solved the mystery.

Saperstein had been hired by the widow of one of the dead men, a Silicon Valley millionaire who had developed a new high-speed processor, whose patent he had sold to Cisco for $45 million. Claude Recluser — that was his name — had taken his fortune and decided to live a Larry Ellison-type lifestyle. He climbed mountains, including K-2. He sailed a 32-foot schooner from La Jolla to Melbourne, alone. He practiced hang-gliding, flew his own small jet, and kayacked whitewater rivers from New Zealand to Ireland. It was Recluser who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. He was only 37 years old at the time, was 5 feet 11 inches tall, weighed 150 pounds, and had 2.4% bodyfat. His overall health, including his mental health, had been perfect. His widow described him as “as happy as a man could be, living his dream.” He had had no reason to kill himself, which is why the widow — Katherine Recluser — hired Saperstein. She wanted to know why her husband had killed himself, or rather, she wanted to know why someone had pushed him off the Golden Gate Bridge, making it appear that he had killed himself. For she knew, in her heart, that he hadn’t.

Saperstein worked all the usual angles. Was there another woman? Multiple women? Nothing. Claude had been, seemingly, the perfect family man, devoted to Katherine and to their two young children. Had Recluser been involved in anything shady that might have cost him his life? No; there was no evidence of anything like that at all. Did he have enemies? Had he cheated someone out of a fortune, stolen an idea, caused an enemy to be fired, wrecked someone’s business? Again, nothing. Could he have been suffering from a deep depression that not even his wife had noted? Possibly, but Saperstein interviewed all Recluser’s friends — and he had hundreds of friends — and all testified to his happiness, his balance, his overall joy in life. He had accomplished everything he had set out to do, and now was enjoying the fruits of his labors. In fact, several of his friends noted, Claude had some new ideas about technology, and was even considering getting back into the business.

Saperstein was at a dead end when one of those serendipitous things happened that so often opens a door when all options seem shut. A wine fan himself, Saperstein happened to overhear a conversation at a wine bar in downtown San Francisco. It seemed that the owner of a famous cult winery, Babbling Buzzard, which had received a 100 point review from Robert Parker, had been complaining that his mailing list — the people to whom his coveted wine was offered, on a first-come, first-serve basis each year — had diminished rapidly and mysteriously. Even granted the effects of the recession, hundreds of his mailing list customers had allowed their subscriptions to run out, and simply disappeared.

Saperstein called Mrs. Recluser. Had Claude been on the Babbling Buzzard mailing list? Why yes, Mrs. Recluser replied; he had. In fact, she had just sold off a consignment of older vintages, since she, herself, was not a fan of wine.

Saperstein did his research. He obtained from the owner of Babbling Buzzard a list of the names of former members who had allowed their subscriptions to lapse over the previous 18 months. There was a total of 177 names. Saperstein further ascertained that, of that 177, 123, or nearly 70 percent — including Claude Recluser — had died under mysterious circumstances. The victims included James Schnorrer and Jay Silverbring. All were wealthy, all lived in good neighborhoods, and all had died tragically (or allegedly had killed themselves). This was an important enough discovery by Saperstein, the kind a private detective might work through an entire career without stumbling across, but what is even more amazing is how Saperstein determined that there was a single killer, a woman who had waited for more than 5 years to get onto Babbling Buzzard’s mailing list, unsuccessfully, and who then had determined that, rather than wait for the actual mailing list customers to die or voluntarily quit so that she could be admitted, she would help them along, by killing them, one by one. How Saperstein eventually discovered the killer will be the subject of a future blog.

Jon Bonné, the wine editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a nice piece yesterday in his blog, The Cellarist, on the topic of Viognier. He nailed the problems — of excessive ripeness and sweetness, mostly, and sometimes heat. I’d add one further issue that Jon didn’t address: bizarre, added acidity, which can make the texture and especially the finish unpleasantly scoury. My guess is that most California Viognier is acidified, as opposed to the “retained” acidity Jon described.

Jon referenced 2 Viogniers he likes: from Calera and from Cristom. I remember the first Calera Viognier I ever had, which was also the first one Josh Jensen made. (I think it would have been the ‘89 or ‘90.) I was visiting with Josh at the winery, which is way out in the middle of nowhere in the Gavilan Mountains of San Benito County, and we’d worked our way through his Mount Harlan Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays when he said, “Hey, do you wanna try something new?” Of course I did. He siphoned off some wine from a tank and filled my glass with the pale yellow-golden liquid. I sniffed, sipped — and the top of my scalp blew off.

Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. That’s a very rare experience for a wine lover — when you taste something new and unexpected and it’s so thrilling, it feels like your brain is exploding. It happened once with my first Hugel Vendange Tardive Pinot Gris. An awesome thing you never forget.

Anyway, Josh was very pleased with my reaction. I can’t say, though, that I’ve liked every Calera Viognier I’ve had since. There are certainly ones I’ve admired more: Alban’s, in particular, and also Failla’s (is there anything Ehren Jordan can’t do?). Pride Mountain always manages to make these amazingly gigantic Viogniers that somehow retain elegance and balance. How, I don’t know. Minerals? Acidity? Dryness plays a part, which is why I never really cared for Kent Rosenblum’s. Too sweet. Tangent also makes a very nice Viognier (as well as a range of other “alternative” white wines). That winery is owned by the Niven family, of Baileyana in the Edna Valley, and Tangent wines (which come in screwtopped bottles) always are unoaked. That way, you get to taste what the variety really tastes like. Viognier, at its best, is a big, fruity, floral wine, usually with all kinds of tropical fruits, honeysuckle and vanilla, and from Tangent you also get that stony, Edna Valley minerality and high acidity, which (I think, but don’t know for sure) really is natural, not added. I could be wrong.

You usually have to pay a pretty high price for a good Viognier (except for Tangent’s). I’ve found that most all Viogniers below, say, $20 are awful. And unless Viognier is from a cool place, it’s likely to be boring. The worst Viognier I ever had came from Lodi. I’ve had other bad ones from Clarksburg, Paso Robles, Temecula, Yuba County, Contra Costa County and with a “California” appellation, which I have to presume includes Central Valley fruit. If you don’t think they grow Viognier in the Central Valley, you’re wrong. There was more of it (in 2008) in San Joaquin County than in either Napa or Sonoma, almost as much in Madera County as in Monterey, and almost as much in Yolo County as in Santa Barbara. Where do you think all that Central Valley fruit goes?

Jon ended his essay with the question, “Did we really believe it [Viognier] would be the next Chardonnay?” Made me laugh. Yes, we did — “we” being the wine media around 1991. That was the same “we” as predicted that Sangiovese was the next superstar red, and that Super-Tuscans were taking over California. Just shows that you shouldn’t believe everything the wine writers say.

It comes as no news to me that “lighting can influence both how wine tastes and how much consumers are willing to pay for it.”

Everything influences how wine tastes: temperature, setting, time of day or night, what you previously ate, how you feel, if you got enough sleep, the glasses you taste from, the flight in which the wine is included, what you see outside the window (if there is a window), whom you are with — I could go on.

Under these circumstances, the curious reader will wonder, “Well, then what’s the value of a wine review?” This is a fair question, and one that can’t be analyzed enough.

I know a fellow — Rod Smith, whom many of you also know — a fine writer. We once were at a tasting that Andy Beckstoffer held in his Rutherford offices of Cabernet Sauvignons from his portion of the To Kalon Vineyard (Robert Mondavi’s portion is spelled “Tokalon”). There was a small group of us scribes sitting around a table, tasting and scribbling. Rod had been fairly silent, so I asked him what he thought of the wines.

I remember Rod giving me a less than charitable glance and then saying, in fairly withering terms, “I don’t review wines. I write about them.” Well, sure; I took his point. Rod had reached the conclusion (I’m doing a lot of inferring here, but I think it’s true) that wine criticism is so inherently subjective, there’s no point in doing it. His approach is to write beautifully and elegantly and factually on all aspects of wine’s history and production.

I do that, too, both in my articles for Wine Enthusiast and in my books for University of California Press. (In my Russian River book, there are only one or two critical remarks made about specific wines, and none at all in my Conversations book.) But I also am paid to be a critic, and so a critic I must be. That means I have got occasionally to defend our practice, in spite of the many instabilities that afflict it.

Along these lines, 1WineDude wrote yesterday of his experience at the pre-Premier Napa Valley tasting, where our hosts had graciously set up big flights of Cabernet and Chardonnay. The Dude described his aversion to tasting his way through such massive events (and gently prodded Vinography for doing so). I didn’t make it into print in that posting, but I was there at the Culinary Institute of America, and ran into Dude at one point. When he asked me what wines I liked, I had to tell him, “None,” because the fact is that I wasn’t there to drink or taste. It makes no sense at all to me to try and review wines seriously under the circumstances of a mob scene, in a fairly alien environment of fuss and confused commotion. Instead, I took advantage of the scene to study it, rather like an anthropologist in the field (Margaret Mead among the Samoans?), witnessing the sometimes odd, sometimes amusing, sometimes baffling behavior of the populace. You can learn a lot from just watching people, especially when so many of them are bloggers.

When I taste wine formally, it has to be under precise circumstances in my home. Same time of day, same glasses, same table, same computer, same pattern of opening bottles in the kitchen and bagging them, same corkscrew (a standard somm’s), same view outside my window of a terraceful of geraniums and cacti, same lighting, even with the same TV turned on (with the sound off), which comforts me. Only then can I be assured that all the influences I described above can be minimized in their impact.

Does that make my winetasting less subject to distortion? Yes. Does it make it perfect? No. People who are deadset against individual wine reviewing will always find plenty of reasons to criticize it, and their reasons have some validity. All I can do is do my job, as carefully as I know how, and hope it has some value.

After dinner last night we had a “post-prandial” tasting of older Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons. As this was not a formal tasting, I made only token notes, and confined myself pretty much to a single consideration: How’s it drinking? Is it too old, still young, or just right? My findings didn’t surprise me: in general, Napa Cab is best drunk young — say, below 8 years.

Here are the wines, with quick comments:

Oakville Ranch 1998: too old
Juslyn 1999: hard, dur; may not be ready.
Truchard 1999: overripe, pruny
Corison 2000: lovely. We had this wine last month in NYC and it was really good.
Keenan 1994 Hillside Estate: on the down side
Peju 1999 Reserve: too old, leathery
Dalla Valle 1995: extraordinary. Near perfect. Still plenty of time.
Jones 1997: old-fashioned, dry. A puzzle. Could develop.
Farella-Park 1995: raisiny, tannic
Trefethen 1981: dried out
Duckhorn 1991: dried out, raisiny
Spring Mountain 1987: old, dry, tannic

Also there was the 1WineDude himself, Joe Roberts. We were talking about how so many people think that, just because a Cabernet comes from Napa Valley and is old, it’s got to be good. Not!

A few notes, after the first day of the WWS: Ran into Alder Yarrow at check-in and sat with him at dinner. It was nice to see Eric Asimov looking hale and hearty. The seminar’s director, Jim Gordon, is my editor from the old days, and it’s always a pleasure to see him. Saw a few other familiar faces, but most of the people were newcomers to me.

“What’s the word? That’s the mystery.” Thus spake Frances Mayes (”Under the Tuscan Sun”), the keynote speaker, describing how to describe a 30-year old Barolo. Finding the right word is the wine writer’s challenge, obligation and joy. Ms. Mayes correctly reminded us how hard that can be, and that the writer must not rest until he knows his copy cannot be improved.

Several panel members pointed to the analogy between the “sense of place” the writer tries to create, and the “sense of place” of a wine, i.e. terroir. I’ve never been as convinced as some that a single vineyard is necessary for a great wine. I think a great wine can be blended from different places. That’s just me. I know lots of others disagree.

Today we are off to the Culinary Institute of America for a bunch of workshops, including one led by my old buddy and former Wine Enthusiast colleague, Jeff Morgan, and one by Karen MacNeil, who was kind enough to write a dust jacket recco for my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River. Also speaking will be Michael Bauer, the S.F. Chronicle’s Food and Wine Editor and restaurant reviewer; he will, I trust, be out of disguise. My own panels are on Thursday; I’ll report on them on Friday morning.

Another celebration of stupid

So there’s this D.C.-based guy, Charlie Adler, a wine and food educator, who has a new book out called I Drink on the Job, that seems to be the latest expression of the “you can be stupid and still like wine” movement that is so reminiscent of the teabaggers. [Confession: I haven’t read the book and know its contents only from published material on the web, including the author’s website.] The book, according to this review, “is a series of vignettes illustrating why wine should be enjoyed organically, rather than studied and dissected.” On his book’s website, Adler writes: “’I Drink on the Job’ takes an anecdotal and often humorous look at wine from a slightly different perspective than your average wine book and draws an immediate conclusion – it’s better to ‘drink first and ask questions later’.”

This “wine is humorous” thing (you know who you are, bloggers) is really starting to get annoying. It’s like saying, “Hey, if you don’t feel like taking the time to understand something, just make fun of it, and tease people who do try to understand it.” It’s demeaning and insulting to suggest that wine drinkers aren’t intelligent enough to enjoy wine and study it at the same time. That’s like saying a person can’t like going to the movies unless he also is a film buff. I don’t know any wine writers who ever made that claim. If anything, America’s best wine writers have stressed exactly the opposite. It’s not Adler’s message, it’s the way he says it, by inferentially putting down knowledge in favor of some kind of blue-collar ignorance. “[H]e just wants Americans to consume wine with their meals – everyday!” Adler writes, third-person, on his website. Well, so do we all. But this anti-elitist stance (which is really a dumbed-down form of elitism) doesn’t help advance that goal.

Speaking of new books

We come now to The Wine Trials 2010, which was co-authored by Robin Goldstein, who many of you will remember was the prankster behind that hilarious phony Italian restaurant that won a Wine Spectator award. The new book “recommends 150 wines under $15 that outscored $50-$150 wines in brown-bag blind tastings.”

This time, the book is for real, and fine, as far as it goes; I myself frequently come across relatively inexpensive wines that out-score expensive ones, and I love pointing that out to Wine Enthusiast readers. What I find interesting is the discussion going on behind the scenes of Robin’s book. For example, in this review, Joe Briand, a wine buyer for a major restaurant group, digs into the concept of blind tasting and declares “I believe blind tastings tend to leave the subtle wines that I prefer at a distinct disadvantage to bigger bolder wines which ‘stick out’ more when consumed blind.” That remark, plus others, prompted Wine Spectator’s executive editor, Tom Matthews, always first out of the gate to defend blind tasting, to clarify [in the Comments section] his earlier assurances that Wine Spectator reviewers always taste blind. “I agree with you that we can learn more from a wine the more we know about it,” Tom wrote, and then immediately added, “But in order to evaluate a wine without biases (conscious or not), it’s important to taste blind.”

Do you see the inherent contradiction here? How can both statements be true? If you can learn more about a wine by knowing more about it, then why is it more important to taste it blind, instead of in some sort of context? Well, the answer, of course, is that context is vital for a proper tasting, as Tom knows. There are not simply two ways to taste, blind and open. There are gradations. But the blogosphere has created this impression than it’s an either/or proposition, and Tom, I think, is replying out of intimidation from the Woodward/Bernstein gotcha! crowd.

(By the way, Tom’s job now seems to be damage control: to peruse the wine blogosphere and reply immediately to anything that could possibly be negative.)

Goldstein himself points out the complexities of tasting in this Feb. 13 blog posting, in which he laments that certain luxury producers (he names LVMH [Yquem, Dom Perignon] in particular) “are overpriced,” and he indicts “the mainstream wine media” for not taking “brands to task for this.”

Well, as a representative of that mainstream wine media, here’s my reply. Anybody who reads my reviews knows that I’m not a slave to prices. I give crummy scores to expensive wines all the time. I don’t have to overtly accuse a wine company of taking advantage of image; my scores are the ultimate accusation. But in general, I agree with Goldstein. He’s on the mark when he writes, “My sense is that, especially when it comes to hazy markets like wine, real human beings—within certain constraints — generally anchor themselves to market prices that are imposed upon them, and generally pay for things what they’re told those things are worth.” That’s true; always has been in the luxury department, and always will be. But it’s also good to let people know that, if they’re serious about not wanting to get ripped off, they need to take the time to educate themselves. A stupid consumer will be taken advantage of every time; an informed one is far more impervious to manipulation.