Twitter as washing dishes

This little snippet from Reuters will probably pass unnoticed, but it’s really terribly interesting and relevant.

“Old media executives too busy, private for Twitter,” the headline says. Go ahead, take 2 minutes and read it.

Any one of the Twitter-phobic quotes could apply to me. My critique of Twitter runs along these lines:

- I’m busy enough with everything else, so I don’t have the actual or mental time to follow a constantly changing Twitter feed.
- Twitter is a very limited form of communication. I’m a writer. I like crafting phrases, sentences, paragraphs. Twitter doesn’t let me do that. This blog does. So does Facebook, to a lesser degree. Not Twitter.
- Most of what I see on Twitter is so superficial as to be ridiculous. I don’t wish to join the chattering classes who apparently have too much time on their hands.

I will gladly concede Twitter’s importance. When students are rioting in Tahrir Square, Twitter gets the news up first. It’s the most awesome media ever invented for instantaneous sharing of breaking events, complete with video. That is truly historic. But I don’t have to tweet in order to “get” Twitter. As one advertising guy said, in a delicious quote, “I understand how to wash dishes. I don’t do it regularly.”

I also understand why celebrities like Twitter. If you’re Lady Gaga, it’s a great way to reach out to your fans and keep them bonded to you (although Aston Kucher apparently grew bored with it). But I’m not a celebrity and I don’t think anyone cares about my every move.

I’ve been predicting a Twitter meltdown for years now. I just don’t think it has legs–at least, to continue its explosive growth. I don’t think it’s just “old media executives” who can’t embrace Twitter. More and more people are discovering that actually living in the real world is better than constantly tweeting to a bunch of “followers” you don’t even know. It’s called “get a life,” and if you’re living on Twitter, you don’t have one.

Robert Lawrence Balzar has died

I’m sure that a younger generation never heard of him, and that’s fine. But he went where no American had gone before, and helped launch the modern era of wine criticism, especially in California. It’s important for today’s new crop of wine writers and bloggers to understand that this stuff didn’t just happen sui generis, like Athena springing full-blown from the brow of Zeus. There are roots. Roots are important. Balzar was roots.

That Jay Miller thing

I’ve refrained from writing about the Jay Miller “payola” allegations in Spain, not through any kindness of heart on my part, but because I don’t know the facts, don’t have the time to dig, and refuse to speculate on matters of which I’m fundamentally ignorant.

But I did read this report yesterday, which contained an interesting paraphrase and quote from Parker himself:

…with Parker referencing the tediousness of tasting mediocre wines that can “burn out the best of us…”

That caught my eye, and I want to explore some thoughts of my own, which aren’t entirely clear even to me. I do taste a great deal of mediocre wine. Vast quantities, you might say, a tsunami of boring wine that comes in every day. It is tedious, and I have wondered what effect this has on my palate. Parker suggests tasting tedious wines can “burn out” the taster. This is a scary thought, because the worst thing that can happen to any professional is to be burned out.

I’ve often fantasized of tasting only the great wines of California, but, of course, that’s impossible. A popular, consumer wine magazine needs to review as widely as possible, and that necessarily involves tasting mediocre wines as well as great ones. Still, I’m of two minds here. I like the fact that I can review inexpensive wines, because that’s what most people can afford, and I feel a great sense of duty toward the average consumer, who’s just looking for a decent everyday bottle. I don’t think Parker has that same motive. He’s more geared to the high-end collector/consumer.

At the same time, I do think that tasting mediocre wines can have a dulling effect on the palate, even for “the best of us.” How do I counter-balance this nefarious effect? I have a method, but as you’ll see, it’s not perfect. I try to arrange daily flights so that (let’s say) inexpensive California reds are tasted only against each other, while another flight might feature only Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons, most of which are necessarily expensive.

Every so often, I’ll throw a ringer into a flight: a cheap wine with a bunch of $100 Cabs, or a $100 Cab with a bunch of cheapos. I acknowledge that my system has flaws, but so does every other system in the world. I also maintain excellent health, eat right, work out religiously, keep my weight under control and get plenty of sleep. Those things help to keep me sharp and prevent palate burnout. But palate burnout always must be something the professional taster guards against.

It’s been a while since I explained exactly how I taste wines formally for review. This is always an important topic, since how you experience a wine has a powerful impact on your impressions of it.

When I first started tasting wine–just for myself, years before anyone paid me to do it–I would just taste it openly, i.e., with the bottle in front of me as I made my notes in my Tasting Diary. I can’t remember if I’d heard of blind tasting (much more on that later). If I had, it didn’t impress me enough to actually put the wine in a bag, not that that would have mattered anyway, because back then, I was tasting only one wine at a time. Putting it in a bag wouldn’t have prevented me from knowing it was an Almaden 1980 Cabernet Sauvignon from Monterey County!

But I didn’t think there was any problem knowing what I was tasting. In fact, it didn’t seem to make sense not to. So I tasted openly for years, before I was hired by Wine Enthusiast and expected to adhere to the magazine’s tasting protocol: all wine is tasted blind.

So that’s how I do it nowadays. However, I don’t taste double blind, but only single blind. Double is where you have no idea what the wine is, except its color. Single is where you have some knowledge of what you’re drinking–for instance, “These are all Cabernet Sauvignons.” The idea behind this is that any knowledge you have of the wine, even to the smallest degree, will influence your perception of it.

Surely there is truth to this reasoning. If I know I’m tasting First Growth Bordeaux, then I know (expect, anticipate, believe) that I am tasting great wine, and that expectation/belief will have a huge influence on my experience. Right? The same psychological bias would apply when I know that I’m tasting wines in a box. Some part of my brain would “know” that the wine could not possibly be great–that the most I could expect would be to have a satisfactory, perhaps even a pleasant wine. And so it would be.

I taste single blind out of necessity. I set up my own tastings at home. Therefore, I know what the 12-15 wines a day are. I attempt to taste like with like. One day it might be newly released Pinot Noirs. Another day might be devoted to new Napa Cabernets. It’s not always possible, for logistical reasons, for me to have pure flights of the same variety or type, however, so I’ll sometimes have a “mixed flight”: an assortment of reds such as Zinfandel, Petite Sirah and field blends. I reason to myself that this kind of flight is acceptable, because the wines are broadly similar: brawny, spicy, full-bodied, rustic. I would never, though, include a Cabernet or a Pinot Noir is such a “mixed” flight. These noble varieties deserve to be tasted alongside their peers.

The bottles are always in brown paper bags. At the time I pour, I honestly do not know which is which. There is a single exception: if one bottle is particularly distinctive from all the others, then I know what the wine is. For example, Shafer puts their Hillside Select in a bottle that weighs about 10 pounds! Not really, but it’s heavy and thick, and most of the time it will be immediately noticeable in its bag. Under that circumstance, which doesn’t happen too often, all I can do is be as objective as I can be.

But the truth is, knowing what the wine is can be a double edged sword. Think about it. If I know it’s Shafer Hillside Select (a wine I’ve given huge scores to over the years), then, yes, on some level my anticipation is piqued. But what if the wine isn’t quite as fabulous as I expect it to be? Then there can be a reverse reaction: instead of giving it a high score because I know it’s Shafer Hillside Select, I might demote it as a disappointment. So while I respect the logic behind blind tasting, I’m also aware of its limits.

After I’ve formed my impression of the wine and settled on a numerical score in my mind, I carry the glass and bottle to my desk, where I enter everything into the computer. It’s necessary to bring the bottle, because the data that goes into the computer must correspond precisely with what the label says, since that’s what the consumer sees. You’d be amazed at how much the paperwork accompanying a submission can vary from what’s on the label. Single vineyard designations on paperwork frequently do not appear anywhere on the label. A “Napa Valley” appellation on the paperwork is magically transformed into a “California” appellation on the label. And so on. So double-checking the label at the last moment is critical in order to be accurate.

Finally, there’s the text. As I said, I’ve already decided on the number. But it’s when I’m sitting at the computer, doing the text of the review, that writerly issues come into play. There are no guidelines for text, except that there should be a rational correlation between the number and the words. A text that reads “Fabulous, first growth quality, complex and ageworthy” obviously should be accompanied by a high score. Given that I’m limited to about 50 words per review, at the most, writing these things turns into the practice of haiku. You have to say a lot with just a few words. Fortunately, this isn’t hard for me, since I’ve been doing it for a long time and have gotten the hang of it.

When I’m finished tasting I generally pour the remains of the bottle down the drain before washing the bottle twice, in order to prevent fruit flies from my recycling space. When people hear that I pour expensive wines down the drain, they’re appalled, and often ask if they can take it off my hands. I’d like to accommodate, but I don’t really want these kinds of dependency relationships from developing. I do often box up what we call “recorks” for Chuck, my intern, who’s studying for the WSET. That gives him something even I don’t have: the benefit of seeing how an opened bottle evolves over a day or two.

I like tasting wine. I’ve probably tasted close to 100,000 over the years. You might think it would be boring, but it never is. There’s always a sense of venturing into the unknown. I wish I had the time to taste a greater range of the world’s wines than the [mostly] California wines I review, but I don’t. If there’s one country I wish I could study, it’s Italy. But I’ll leave that to Wine Enthusiast’s talented Rome editor, Monica Larner.

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.