Many of you know that I recently rescued a chihuahua-terrier mix I named  Gus. Gus is insanely cute, the kind of dog that complete strangers on the street stop to compliment. I love him dearly, but there’s an issue. Gus tends to have the occasional “accident” at home.

I was down at the Old Crow yesterday telling this to Terry, looking for a little advice and, probably, commisseration. Terry, like most dog owners I know, told me that, when you have a dog, accidents will happen, and not to get too upset about it. I told him that, as far as I’m concerned, I want an accident-free Gus, 100% housebroken, without exceptions. No pee indoors, ever, period, end of story. Terry said, “Your expectations are pretty high.”

“I know,” I replied, adding, “That’s the way I am. I either have very high expectations, or none at all.” I’d never stated anything in quite those terms, but it just came out, and I was surprised to hear myself put it so bluntly.

On the way home–with Gus sniffing every tree, lamppost and hydrant in Oakland–I was thinking about this, when it occurred to me that there are analogies with wine. When I taste a new release, I’m looking for the most perfect wine ever, one that gives me pleasure on every level. I expect it not only to not disappoint, but to dazzle. I have a Platonic image in my mind of the perfect wine of every type (Pinot Noir, Champagne, Cabernet Sauvignon, sweet white wine, etc.), because in my lifetime I’ve had such wines, and stored each away in the repository of my brain, where I can reference it in detail. So I’ll take the new wine I’m tasting and hold it side by side with the Platonic wine, comparing them. Of course, almost all of the time, the new wine fails to live up to the mental image or expectation of the perfect Platonic wine. So ultimately, 99.9% of the new wines I taste are, on some level, disappointing.

And then it hit me. Am I holding my wines to the same standard as I hold Gus? With wine, is it all or nothing?

I don’t exactly mean “nothing,” of course. If I give a score over 90 to a wine, it ain’t nothing. But any score less than 100 points, regardless how high, still suggests that there’s something wrong with the wine. And that troubles me. My doggie-owning friends, and I have a lot of them, have convinced me that it’s totally unreasonable to expect a dog to never, ever pee in the house, over many years. So is a 95 point score the equivalent of a wine that, great as it is (and Gus is really great), occasionally pees on the carpet?

I’m still working this out. But without following the analogy too far, let me put it this way: I think it’s fair to hold every wine to a standard of perfection. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a box, or if it costs $500; I measure it in my mind against the greatest, what I want and hope it should be, not what it is.

Is it unfair to hold every wine I taste to such a high standard? The difference between wines and Gus, obviously, is that I have only one Gus. It’s he whom I love and must cherish regardless of whatever imperfections he has. With wine, on the other hand, there are thousands each year. I don’t feel any obligation to love or cherish any of them, no matter how much they cost or how hyped they are.

Still, I wonder if that little bit of irritation I feel at a slight imperfection in wine isn’t unduly harsh. The way I rationalize it is in the relationship between the score and the text of my review. An 84 is going to remain an 84 after I blind taste it, no matter what. If I see the wine costs $7, I’m going to give it a break in my description. If it’s $50, I’m going to be harsh. The analogy with Gus, I think, is that he’s a million dollar dog (in my heart) and so I want and expect him to be perfect. Still, I know how unreasonable that is. That’s why I’m hiring a dog psychologist to help us get through this. I can’t do that with wine; a wine that really disappoints me has no mitigation, no intervention by which it can improve itself–at least, until the next vintage. I guess that’s the difference between the living beings in our lives, and the fixed possessions, like wine. You can’t hope to change a flawed wine, no matter what you do. But you can always hope to see a change in a living being you love.

If I gave you a putter that I said had been owned by Luke Donald, who is currently ranked the #1 golfer in the world–and if, moreover, I told you he had used it in his spectacular win earlier this year at the WGC-Accenture Championship–would your own golf performance improve, if you used it?

If the answer is “Yes,” that’s called “positive contagion,” or “the belief of transference of beneficial properties between animate persons/objects to previously neutral objects,” in the words of this study, published online. Even if the golfers in the study did not consciously believe that using Donald’s putter would improve their game, it did: they “had better performance, sinking more putts.” This suggests that “perception can be modulated by positive contagion.” Not only that: “Individuals who believed they were using the professional golfer’s putter perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger than golfers without such a belief.”

An astronishing statement, that! Calls into question the nature of objective reality, doesn’t it? We tend to believe that “reality” is something “out there,” solid, concrete and unalterable, as opposed to the squishy world of dreams and imagination. After all, golf holes don’t get bigger or smaller, like Alice in Wonderland, depending on where we’re coming from. They’re 4.25 inches in diameter, period. So how can our golfer who’s using Luke Donald’s putter perceive the hole to be bigger than it really is?

In the discussion part of the article, the authors wonder “how positive contagion influenced putting performance.” One theory is that “priming,” which is “a mental activation of certain stereotypes,” can have an effect on behavior. For instance, if I tell you that a person is a Harvard professor of physics, you might logically infer that that person would be more knowledgeable and intelligent than most, and you might therefore be more inclined to believe him if he instructs you about quantum theory. Research suggests this is the case: students, told that someone was a “professor,” experienced “enhanc[ed] performance on subsequent knowledge tests” on that topic!

I think we can see this same phenomenon of “positive contagion” in wine. It explains how the anecdotal, upwardly mobile Chinese person finds Lafite to be the greatest wine in the world, simply because it is Lafite. His perception of the wine has been exposed to the contagion of what he knows about it. It’s as if he thinks, on some subconscious level, “The fact that I am able to own, display and drink this Lafite, which centuries of Kings, Popes and millionaires have coveted, means I am a better person than I actually am.” If he were to find fault with the Lafite, he would be in denial of his own goodness.  It’s a sort of halo effect: From Wikipedia: the halo effect is “a cognitive bias whereby the perception of one trait (i.e. a characteristic of a person or object) is influenced by the perception of another trait (or several traits) of that person or object. An example would be judging a good-looking person as more intelligent.” Or an expensive bottle of wine as better than an inexpensive one.

We see this commonly in the wine world. It underlies much of pricing strategy and marketing (as the Bordelais and Screaming Eagle understand quite well). It’s also why blind tasting is the only ruthless and efficient way of doing away with such bias. To revert to the golfing example, if you were to give our hypothetical golfer Luke Donald’s putter, but you did not tell him, our golfers’ game would not be impacted. There is nothing special about Luke Donald’s putter: it does not possess magical qualities that mysteriously flow from it into the mind and body of its user. The trick only works when the golfer knows he’s putting with Luke’s club. With Lafite, the trick works only when the drinker knows it’s Lafite. Otherwise, it’s just another good red wine.

We should always keep this in mind when interpreting the results of expert tastings of wine. Did they know it was Luke Donald’s putter, or didn’t they? If they did, there’s a good chance their experience was the positive contagion effect, which is not to be trusted.

I started my tasting diary on Feb. 16, 1983. I’d been seriously getting into wine the previous four years, and, infatuated with Michael Broadbent’s Great Vintage Wine Book, decided that, like him, I’d keep track of every wine I had. I even removed the labels and pasted them in the diary.

The first wine in Book One of my diary was a 1981 Morgon Beaujolais from Georges Duboeuf. It cost $6. I called it “delightful.” The second wine was from the following night. It was a Macon-Villages, also 1981, and it set me back all of $4. It was all right; I said it was a “good Chinese food wine.” The third wine was Kenwood’s 1980 Vintage Red Cabernet Sauvignon ($3.50). Kenwood’s basic Red and White wines were staples of the Heimoff household for a good part of the 1980s.

The fourth wine brings us to Germany: an off-dry 1980 Bernkastler Badstube, from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer ($3.99). I drank it with a cheese omelot. The fifth wine (and the fifth in as many days–I was basically a bottle-a-day man back then) also was German: 1981 Erben Kabinett, from the fine producer, Langguth, in the Rheinhessen. It cost $4. Number six brought me back to France, a 1979 Domaine d’Ormesson. For $3, it was another house favorite of mine. Here are numbers 7 through 10:

1979 Kirchheimer Romerstrasse Riesling Kabinett, trocken (price not recorded)

1979 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay ($12, pricy)

1976 Chateau Beauregard, Saint-Julien ($5)

1976 Wine and the People Zinfandel, Sonoma ($10)

I engage in this stroll down memory lane because I find it remarkable how catholic (with a small “c”) my drinking was back then. You will find in that tasting diary wines from all over the world, in every price bracket: Yquem and Leoville-Las-Cases at the higher end, cheap little regional wines at the low.

I tasted even more broadly throughout the later 1980s and into the early 1990s, after I began writing about wine and getting invited to events at which the great wines of the world were opened for me, including First Growth Bordeaux and Grand Cru Burgundy. But when Wine Enthusiast asked me to be their California reviewer, I found that I no longer had the time to indulge in worldwide tasting, swamped as I was with Cali wines. That remains the situation today. I try to get out to international tastings, and occasionally I’ll pull an older bottle of something Italian or French from my [small] wine cellar. But I’ll be the first to admit that my tasting is 98% California these days.

We all taste with the palate we have, which is not necessarily the palate we might want (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld from a different context), so I suppose it’s no use lamenting that I might have developed a California palate over the years. If I have, so be it. Such a palate might be described as favoring full-bodied, higher-alcohol wines with overtly sweet, ripe fruit and, often, a generous cloak of new oak. One can say such wines trade finesse for power, elegance for audacity, subtlety for sheer razzle dazzle. Still, within this context one still can find enough distinctions of finesse, elegance and subtlety to make comparative judgments. Let us consider two Cabernet Sauvignons: Araujo 2007 Eisele Vineyard and Mockingbird 2007 Red Label. Both are expensive; both are from Napa Valley. Both have vast concentrations of sweet black fruits, but the former has impeccable structure and dryness, while the latter lacks it. I could see a Bordeauxphile trying both wines and objecting that both are candied and unbalanced. However, I am not a Bordeauxphile, and to my palate there is a big difference between these two wines, similar as they are to each other.

Does my California palate mean I can’t appreciate a good, dry Bordeaux? I don’t think so. But I will admit that when I taste Bordeaux (for example, at the annual Union des Grands Crus event in San Francisco), I often find it too austere and earthy for me; and when a Bordeaux does appeal to me, it’s because it’s Californian in style. This isn’t to say I think that California Cabernet Sauvignon is objectively better than Bordeaux. It’s just my taste. But it puzzles and annoys me when somebody says Bordeaux is objectively better than California Cabernet Sauvignon. Why do they have to make it a contest? Two different wines, two different kinds of people. Something for everyone.

When all’s said and done, I do worry that I’ve developed a California palate, but like I said earlier, there’s nothing to be done about it. Besides, it would be bizarre indeed if I–a California wine critic–didn’t care for California wine. I like it a lot, but, as a final note, I will concede (sadly) that too much California wine, red and white, is too sweet. I like sweet fruit, but I loathe a table wine that should finish dry but doesn’t. (I loathe an unripe wine, too.) That’s the risk of making wine in sunny California. The brix gets carried away. Too many winemakers either allow it to happen and don’t know or care, or else they think they’re catering to a consumer who likes soda-poppy wines. I don’t.

It finally got hot yesterday in Oakland, one of the few times this unusually cold summer the temperature hit 90, so I decided not to taste. I work at home, and I don’t have an air conditioner–practically nobody does in the Bay Area, because you only need it a couple times a year. So as a result my house was pretty toasty, and so was I–not the ideal physical conditions to taste.

I don’t always feel like tasting, but I do it because it’s my job. No matter what your job–President of the United States or janitor–there are days you don’t feel like working but you do anyway because it’s, well, your job. When I don’t feel like tasting, and I have no legitimate excuse not to, I simply take a deep breath and forge ahead and, alcohol being alcohol (even when you’re spitting), it’s not long before my mood changes and I get into the gestalt of tasting. It’s a very nice gestalt to be in.

But not yesterday. Had I had cold white wines and sparkling wines, I might have, but I didn’t. For some reason, I get about 8 times as many reds as whites, and always have. I don’t understand why. Maybe one of my smart readers can explain. As for sparkling wines, they came in a rush during July, August and early September, as usual. Wineries want their bubbly reviews in the bag by November (they know it takes a couple months for print periodicals to get them published), because they need those scores for the holidays. So, alas, sparkling wine season is over. That left me with a bunch of Cabernets, Zinfandels and Petite Sirahs–not exactly the wines you want to taste when your room temperature is somewhere in the 80s.

I’ve alluded before to how your reaction to a wine depends on many different things. There’s a pretension out there, on the part of some whose income is connected with tasting, that a professional critic can turn himself into a tasting machine. A machine, like your computer, doesn’t care if it’s cold or hot. A computer doesn’t tire, or get bored, or have something better to do on a Saturday afternoon than taste wine. A computer doesn’t feel anything. It’s strictly an input-output equation. However, that’s not how a real human being behaves. I am a real, flesh and blood human being. I have to make judgments about when I’m fit to taste, and when I’m not. And yesterday, I wasn’t.

Today, I am. I drive up later this morning to a vertical tasting at Pride Mountain Vineyards–25 years of their wines, I believe. It’s not that common, even for someone like me, to get invited to something this spectacular. I’ll be interested in how the wines are developing, of course, but I’ll also try to understand more about how wines age in the first place. Extrapolating from a tasting, like Pride’s, whose best wines have a Napa-Sonoma appellation, to a tasting of, say, older Opus Ones is not a straight line. But there are generalities that can be made, inferences that can be drawn. In my reviews, I’ll sometimes give recommendations of how long to hold a wine, but the fact is that I’m never entirely comfortable doing so. These prognostications are educated guesses, at best, and I always feel like adding, “But if the wine is dead is 2017, don’t sue me.” I’ve had more dead Cabernets that were supposed to age, than Cabernets that actually did make it to ten years or longer. The result is that over the years I’ve lowered my expectations of how long to hold a Cab. But this is complicated stuff, considering bottle variation, shipping, cellar conditions, etc. Anyway, I’ll be writing about the Pride tasting at Wine Enthusiast’s website in the next few weeks.

Some of you know there’s a new addition to the Heimoff family in Gus, a two-year old Chihuahua-Terrier mix I adopted last Sunday from the SPCA.

Gus is the only dog I’ve ever had, which means that the art and science of dog walking is new to me. Who knew it could be so complicated? Turns out you don’t just leash puppy up and hit the streets, where he does his business quickly. No, Gus needs endless sniffing, and I don’t know what he’s going to do and even if he will. The end result, in short, is unpredictable.

So in getting used to this new ritual in my life, I was thinking that the only way to deal with it sanely is to relax, chill, let go and let Gus be in charge. Which is different from the usual way I lead my life. We’re going to have to divide my existence into B.G. and A.G. periods–before Gus and after Gus. Before Gus, I came and went as I felt like. If I was impatient with something, I left it. Walking Gus is completely different. I now realize I have to slow down and let something besides myself be in charge.

So what, you are wondering, does this have to do with wine?

I’m still working this out, but it goes like this. My job as a wine critic is to taste through a bunch of wines and give my immediate impressions. In practical terms, and speaking for myself, that means a few minutes per wine. Sometimes I’ll take longer, if a wine speaks to me in such a way that suggests it has more to say than an immediate impression can convey. Sometimes it takes only a few seconds for me to determine that  no matter how long I study it, it’s not going to change my immediate, disappointing impression.

A legitimate criticism of wine reviewing, of the kind I and most wine critics do, is that we don’t spend enough time with the wine, to see how it changes in the glass over time, or how it tastes with different kinds of food. And, after all, normal people drink wine with food. The critics’ reply is that we don’t have the time to spend a vast amount of time with a wine. As long as we’re transparent about this limitation, we’re on safe ground, I think. My reviews are snapshots of wines. They are not extensive explorations of their intricacies, if such exist. I have no problem at all in letting people know that.

But back to Gus!

When I walks Gus I have to slow down. Sometimes that involves looking at things in my neighborhood, on my very block, I’ve walked past for twenty years without every quite noticing. A particular tree trunk, a curb, a hedge. Gus not only notices them, he’s obsessed with them. I can only imagine what he’s smelling.

So I think: What am I missing in the wines I quickly taste that I might appreciate if I spent more time with them?

This is obviously a self-defeating question. It leads to a slippery slope. The answer is that I cannot know what I’m missing, since there’s no practical way to answer the question. All I can do is make the assumption that  my immediate impression of a wine is accurate, and no matter how much time I spend pondering it, my final conclusion won’t change.

This is where Gus’s experience of the street, and my experience of wine, is different. Gus needs lots of time to determine if a particular spot is to his liking. I don’t. I have to arrive at quick decisions. But it does trouble me. I wish I could review one wine a day, taking the time to let it develop in the glass, trying it with different foods, letting my mind change. But I can’t. Unlike Gus, I have to limit each wine to its immediate appeal, day after day. I’m not saying that’s the best approach. But it’s what we wine critics have to deal with.

I’ve been tasting a lot with winemakers lately, at their wineries. It’s such a different experience from tasting by myself, at home. In both cases, you’re doing the same things objectively: looking at the color, swirling, sniffing, sipping, rolling the wine around in your mouth, letting just the tiniest amount dribble down the throat so you can sense the aftertaste, then spitting most of the remainder out.

It’s what’s in the mind, however, that makes the two experiences utterly different.

When I’m tasting by myself my mind is largely empty. I mean, I’m obviously thinking about what I’m doing, coming to preliminary conclusions, correcting myself, anticipating what to do next. But I’m not thinking about anyone else. In this, my mental existence is more or less what Martin Buber called the I-it relationship: with an external object.

When I’m tasting with the winemaker, that mental existence moves into the more complicated territory of Buber’s I-thou: instead of interacting with an object, I’m interacting with another consciousness. The I-it relationship has bounds, but “Thou has no bounds,” Buber wrote.

This absence of bounds when tasting with the winemaker means that the objective act of of winetasting now shares center stage with the drama of a personal relationship with the winemaker. And, as we all know from our own experiences, personal relationships can be complex and uncertain, demanding of us whatever skills we possess to navigate through them. This is especially true when you don’t know the other person well, as is the case most of the time when a traveling wine writer sits down with a winemaker. I know some winemakers quite well, but with most of them, that’s not the case, and in many instances, we’re meeting each other for the first time.

First meetings are usually occasions for both sides to put their best foot forward. They’re generally pleasant, with informal chit-chat served up to break the ice and probe one another for areas of possible agreement, to find out where the boundaries are, and what sort of relationship might ensue.

When you’re a wine critic, however, this normally pleasant exercise becomes distorted in major ways. For you, there critic, are there to pass judgment on the created product of the other person–a product that may be as important to him, nearly, as his child, insofar as he’s put a huge amount of time, effort, ego and vision into producing it. The other person, the winemaker, may profess not to care what you say or think, but really, he wouldn’t have invited you to taste unless he did. You, meanwhile, know all this, and he knows you know, but there’s no getting inside either one’s head, so there’s a lot of guesswork going on. And when the tasting session extends over an hour or more, it can turn into an exquisite pas de deux, with full choreography.

I’ve had very successful tasting sessions with winemakers and some less successful, but I can truly say most of them are good. Getting a little buzzed helps both parties relax. For me, the best approach is to gain the other person’s trust and even affection by being myself, injecting a little humor into things, and not come across as too sanctimonious or conceited. Of course, there’s risk when you’re a wine critic. Part of you wants to show the winemaker that you know your stuff. You’re not just some boob off the bus, pretending to be the all-knowing guru but in actuality an idiot. I have enough self-doubt to prevent that from happening, but I also know what I know, or what I think I know, and sometimes, when what I know differs from what the winemaker knows (or thinks he knows), that can lead to tension. Tasting in Oakville the other day, there were two instances of this: one where I thought the less expensive wine was pretty much as good as the more expensive (although, after 20 minutes of airing, the latter proved itself), and one where a Bordeaux blend tasted surprisingly mute right out of the bottle. This, too, corrected itself after about 20 minutes, but I did share with the winemaker that, had I been power tasting (as many critics do), I might well have missed the beautiful nuances the wine showed once the air woke it up. I wondered if this statement indicted all wine critics, but I’ve found over my career that it’s helpful to share with winemakers my understanding of the (sometimes severe) limitations under which we work.