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.

Ever since I started blogging (two years this May!), some people have painted me out to be some kind of dinosaur who’s afraid that my world — that of the old-fashioned, top-down, print-based wine critic — is fast disappearing.

Trying to defend a system whose time has come, they say. Refusing to recognize that ordinary consumers no longer want or need “experts” to tell them about anything. And whenever I rise to my defense (and the defense of wine critics in general), I’m answered with something like this: “You’re just an industry gatekeeper, pushing back out of fear against the new world wherein every wine drinker is entitled to his own opinion.”

That’s how the well-known M.W., Tim Hanni, has been putting it, mostly lately in this article, in today’s online Guardian, out of England. Tim once again criticizes the “snobbery” and “prejudice” of those of us who dare to make wine suggestions and recommendations, a sin he believes “costs the wine industry billions of dollars a year” (for some undefined reason). Along the way, he also “debunks” one of wine’s most cherished assumptions: that certain wines and foods pair well together while others don’t. “’Matching’ wine and food is lazily unchallenged bunk,” the Guardian writer paraphrases Tim as saying. And, a little later: “For years, Hanni taught that wine had unassailable, objective absolutes; that certain foods are best eaten with certain wines – oysters with muscadet, say, or chablis.” There followed for Tim, in the mid-1990s, “an epiphany or a nervous breakdown” that made him reconsider “everything he had formerly believed.”

Well, I’m not big on epiphanies, although I’ve had my share of surprises that have made me reconsider lots of things. But I can’t imagine anything that would make Zinfandel taste good with oysters. Or a big, oaky Cabernet Sauvignon. Can you? Uggh.

Sure, it feels great to reassure people that they can drink anything they want with any food. People love reading that. It frees them from the very real tyranny that too often surrounds the wine-drinking experience. Tim argues that his mission in life is to liberate consumers from formulae, including pairings that are very old and well-understood. It’s what he calls “this profoundly modern, compellingly individualist approach,” which stands in utter contrast to tradition. And what better time to trash tradition than today, when everything we’ve known for so long seems to be coming undone?

I don’t agree with Tim’s premise, though. He can call me a dinosaur, an industry gatekeeper pushing back furiously against the onslaught of change. But none of that changes the truth. A winetaster can learn to understand and talk about wine. The longer you study it, the better you get. A wine critic who tastes his way through thousands of wines a year is in a better position to make judgments than the ordinary consumer. Food and wine pairings are not arbitrary.

Look, if you want to drink Harlan Estate with your oysters, be my guest. Not gonna lose any sleep over that one! If you want to say that all wine critics are full of it, go right ahead! Sticks and stones and all that. If you want to take the view that everybody’s palate is equal, feel free. I’m not gonna argue with you. If you tell people not to worry so much about wine, I’ll be right there beside you. In fact, I’ll say it now: People! Don’t worry so much about wine!

Still, having said that, I do think there’s a movement afoot in America driven by the “de-mystification” crowd who hope to make a living by doing that professional “de-mystifying” the public so deserves. Ironic that the people leading that movement are former critics and “snobs” themselves. Like Twelve-Steppers, they claim to have “seen the light” or “seen the error of their ways” (or, in Tim’ case, to have had “an epiphany”). But I’ll tell you the truth: Anybody who says their goal in life is to make simple what we wine critics over-analyze is giving you a simplistic explanation and one moreover you should take with a grain of salt. Beware the demystification industry. It’s not as pure and disinterested as you might think.