If California has taught the world anything, and I hope and like to think it has, it’s that the first duty of a wine is to be delicious.

Not ageable. Delicious.

Some wine critics look at ageability as something desirable. They swoon over wines that are tannic, mute and stubborn in youth, rhapsodizing over what they will turn into some day—10, 20, 30 years down the road—when they become nectar. And sure, there’s a handful of wines in the world that do become special in old age

There are two flaws in this vision, though. The first is that the appreciation of old wine is an acquired taste. Most people who have never developed that particular esthetic would find an aged wine—I mean one that has actually developed bouquet and cellar character, not one that’s simply old—disagreeable.

The second fly in the ointment is this: Correct me if I’m wrong, but the entire notion of aging wine arose during the 1700s and 1800s (after proper bottles and stoppers were invented) because many of the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy were so tannic that they were basically undrinkable during their early years. The French figured out that if they lay the bottles on their sides, in a cool place where the temperature couldn’t do them any harm, those pesky tannins would eventually fall out. The wine then could be carefully decanted, with the sediment falling into the shoulder, and the resulting liquid would pour clear and sweet.

Do you think the French would have made less tannic wines if they’d possessed the ability to do so? I do. There was nothing particularly advantageous in having to store wine for so many years. It took up space, it required management, it was tedious, and the bottles developed notoriously unevenly. The French (and their English, Belgian, Swiss, Danish and other customers) just wanted something to drink that was, well, delicious. That they had to wait for years was simply an accident of technology: modern methods of tannin management, including developments in the vineyard and in the winery, didn’t yet exist.

Well, they do now. Take Napa Valley Cabernet. I’ve heard many French people say how tannic they find it, which is weird, because I think Grand Cru Bordeaux is really tannic. Regardless of who’s right or wrong on that score, Napa Valley Cabernet is tannic, because the grape’s thick skins make it so. But vintners have developed all sorts of ways to soften those tannins, fundamentally changing their molecular structure to make them feel silkier. The result, in a wine like (for example) Monticelllo’s 2008 Corley Reserve, is spectacular deliciousness. Nor is this yummy factor limited to Cabernet, as evidenced by (another example; I could have cited dozens) Roessler’s 2009 Hein Family Vineyard Pinot Noir, from the Anderson Valley, rich, glyceriney and delicious.

Had the Bordelais and Burgundians been able to produce wines like these, I’m positive they would have, and this whole notion of cellaring wines would never have assumed the proportions it has. An entire industry of refrigerated storage units and customized residential cellars might not even exist. But that’s not how things turned out. The French were utterly unable to manage their tannins, and so history took a different turn.

I sometimes think that the anti-California wine crowd out there has a problem with immediate gratification. They’re like Puritans who think life should be hard. Any joy, in the way of dancing, movies, sex, luxuriating in food and drink, is bad. It’s not just California wine they complain about, it’s the California style itself: hedonistic, sensuous, physically beautiful, playful, sexy, celebratory rather than stoical, fun. To condemn California for being all glittery surface and no substance is very old and widespread, but isn’t it always tinged with a little jealousy? Our wine, too, is criticized, but it has taught the world to see fruit in a different way that has improved wine everywhere.

My friend Hunter de la Ghetto has an installation/conceptual artwork currently on exhibit at my tattoo parlor, Old Crow Tattoo & Gallery. It was just reviewed in the art magazine, Juxtapoz, where the reviewer called it “a bizarre and surreal microcosm of false wealth and superstition” that “creates a tension between excess, wealth, and ritual” and “bridges…the imagery of wealth…and death.”

I like Hunter’s piece, which consists of hanging, paint-spattered windows, candles, skulls, piles of coal and lottery tickets, but I never came to the definite conclusions of its “meaning” the way the reviewer did. So when I saw Hunter, I asked him what he thought of her review, and he said he liked it, and thought she’d pretty much nailed his intention. Then I asked him if she’d gotten her ideas from him, or come up with them on her own. On her own, Hunter replied; he’d never even talked to her.

I found that interesting, because just the day before, I’d had a conversation with some winery people out in Fort Ross about critical reviews of their wines. What did they think of them, I asked. Did they ever read things they disagreed with? Did critics ever use language for their wines that sounded bizarre, as if they’d tasted something else?

Yes, and yes, were their answers. As is always the case when I ask a winemaker these questions.

I suppose reading someone else’s description of your creative effort can ignite a gamut of responses. You may be pleased, of course, if the critic praises your creation, and especially if she infers from it your creative intent. On the other hand, you may be offended, or baffled, by a description that’s completely out of whack with your own perception. I suppose this is why it’s said that some actors never read the critical reviews of their performances. It’s too crazy-making.

Winemakers need a thick skin to survive in this critical world. What the critic giveth with one hand, he may taketh away with the other. And what the critic experiences may be so far away from what the winemaker experienced that the chasm is unbridgeable. Maybe that’s why each winemaker has to struggle to decide whether or not to play the wine-sample game. Send the critic a bottle and risk getting a review that makes you want to pound your head against the wall. (Or the wine critic’s.) Don’t send a bottle, and risk not having a good score to use in your marketing. On the third hand, the proliferation of wine critics nowadays (when anyone with a blog can purport to be one) means that the winemaker has his choice of multiple reviews to use. Nine critics may strike you down; one calls the wine a sensation. That’s the one you quote on your web site.

It would be cool, and sobering, for critics to hear what winemakers say about us and our reviews behind our backs. I have no idea what they say about me. But the one thing I think they can’t say is that my reviews are pompous purple prose. I have deliberately moved away from hifalutin exaggerated nonsense toward simpler, leaner prose. It’s easier to get to the essence of a wine that way, in the same way that haiku strips away all that is non-essential to penetrate to the core of the thing being described. Aristotle called this “essence.” What is the wine’s essence? Marcus Aurelius asked, “This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what is it doing in the world?” What is it doing in the world…that is the question I ask of every wine I taste (and every person I meet).

The San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic, Michael Bauer, got some heat from his readers in the “comments” section of his blog yesterday after he [Michael] trash-talked a restaurant for selling him a bad bottle of wine at an inflated price.

The wine was a Portuguese rosé that Michael paid $30 for. “I suspect[ed] the bottle was corked,” Michael wrote, explaining that he didn’t return it because, as the most famous restaurant critic in Northern California, he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

It wasn’t just the bad wine that irked him, it was the service. Waitstaff didn’t even put wine glasses on the table, only “small drinking glasses.” Moreover, “The staff didn’t seem to know anything about wine.” (It should be noted that the restaurant, Mau, is a Vietnamese restaurant, in the red-hot Valencia Corridor of the city’s Mission District, so maybe you have to cut them some slack.) As for the $30 tab, Michael had a friend do some calculating and determined that the restaurant paid about $6.90 a bottle, meaning they marked it up more than four times, which he called “gouging.”

Michael was clearly irked and in ranting mode, and some readers called him out on it. One wrote, “Here is a simple solution Bauer, if you don’t like the pricing at a restuarant DON”T eat there.” Another: “There’s a simple solution to this. Stop wining.” And: “There are people homeless in New Jersey and Staten Island and this guy is fuming over a bottle of Rose instead?” and: “This just goes to show that Bauer either has never worked the books at a restaurant or is bad at writing.” And: “O cry me a river. As a poster mentioned earlier, we don’t see anybody publishing articles about the mark up of popcorn in a movie theater.” And: “You suspected the wine was corked but didn’t send it back? I don’t see how being a reviewer affects the correct behavior in this case.” And: “If you are worried about saving money get a case of cheap Zin at Trader Joes and order a pizza to eat at home.”

Okay, so maybe Michael brought some of this snarkiness on himself. He was in a bad mood, he was venting, and this wasn’t his printed column in the newspaper, it was his blog, where immediacy and emotional transparency come easier and are more appropriate to the medium than in a print publication. But let me tell you, as a critic myself, sometimes you need to rant, and I’ll explain why.

It wasn’t just Michael’s experience at Mau that so distressed him. He’s had that same experience scores, if not hundreds of times, over many years, at many restaurants. Mau just tipped him over the edge. It happens. You see a dereliction of duty and, recalling too many such, you lose your temper and let ‘er rip. Now, you can argue that a critic should always be evenly-tempered and sweet in disposition, and you might be theoretically correct, but that’s not reality. Critics have very high standards of ethical behavior–Michael for restaurants, me for wineries. We bring that high moral code to the industries we report on, and even though we know we’re supposed to remain balanced, sometimes the violations just get to you. You think, These people are idiots. They don’t deserve to be in business! You want and need to get it out of your system–to cleanse yourself–to rant.

As for the snarky comments, I get a lot of those myself, as some of my readers know. They don’t bother me, as I’m sure Michael isn’t bothered, either. Both of us know, before we hit that “publish” button, that we’re going to get snark, and the stronger we feel about something, the more snark we get. It goes with the territory. But intensity, two-way communication, passion, opinionating, strong expression of feeling, even snark–they’re all part of the blogging experience. I’m glad. Readers have been used to being on the receiving end of a one-way communication for a long time, and now that they have the ability to respond, they take full advantage of it.

“It has always been a comforting thought,” the late, great Harry Waugh wrote, “that seldom have the proprietors recognized their own wine, but this is not surprising because the wines were all of the same family as it were…all were classified growths of Saint Julien.”

This quote is from an article he wrote, “A Visit to Bordxeaux,” in the Oct.-Nov. 1987 issue of The Friends of Wine magazine, which was the publication of the old Les Amis du Vin wine society. LADV was the premier amateur wine lover’s organization in the U.S. in the 1980s. I doubt anything like it could recur today, but it sure was fun in its time.

Anyway, Harry was a great one for humility. He also coined the immortal “not since lunch” when asked the last time he’d confused Bordeaux with Burgundy, suggesting that it’s not just families of wines [like Saint-Julien; Harry missed the hyphen] that resemble each other. In the article, Harry didn’t identify which chateau proprietors didn’t recognize their own wines at the tasting, but the chateaux represented included Beychevelle, Léoville-Poyferré, Léoville-Barton, Gruaud-Larose, Léoville-Lascases, Talbot and Ducru-Beaucaillou. In other words, a pretty swanky class of wineries.

Recently, I wrote that all California wines share (or should share, at their best) the trait of richness. One or two commenters called me out on it. Their sugggestion, which I knew would be forthcoming because when I write certain things I always know exactly which ones people will jump on, was that I was lumping everything together and failing to appreciate or possibly even understand the terroir differences that exist throughout California. Well, that’s not what I meant at all, but my statement (all California wines should exhibit richness) does perhaps bear some explanation.

California is a warm climate. Yes, we talk about “cool climate” appellations like the Santa Maria Valley or the Edna Valley or the Deep End of the Anderson Valley or the Green Valley of the Russian River or the Fort Ross-Seaview area. And we make much of the coastal fog that does in fact permeate all these regions, whose evenings require jackets and sweaters even in high summer. Yet the fact remain that they’re in California–sunny, blue-skied California, where it doesn’t rain between May and November (usually, and if it does, it’s not much), and where the days dependably get warm to hot.

If you look at a map, you’ll see that California lies at a much more southerly latitude than the great wine regions of Europe. In fact, San Francisco’s latitude, 37.7 degrees N, is virtually the same as Sicily’s, 37.6 degrees N. Our climate is Mediterranean, so when you plant grapes that were developed for Europe’s continental climate, like Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, they get much riper than they do in places like Bordeaux or Burgundy. This extra ripeness is, of course, what their critics point to in calling them atypical of their type. But it’s also why so many consumers, including me, like them. Richness is not to be condemned in wine.

Which is not to say that richness hides terroir. A Carneros Pinot Noir may be quite different from one grown at the Pisoni Vineyard. An Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon is not an Alexander Valley Cabernet much less one from the Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara. But–to revert to old Harry–they all show a family resemblance, and the name of the family is California.

If you think about it, if this similarity exists up and down the state, then how much harder it is to differentiate between, say, the Pinot Noirs of the Russian River Valley? Closer than spittin’ cousins, as my Uncle Elmer used to say. Vintners make much of the differences in the wines they produce from neighboring vineyards and even from blocks within the same vineyard, and I’m sure they detect those differences, as a parent with triplet kids can tell them apart from a cry in the night, as opposed to everybody else to whom they’re impossible to sort out. And these subtle differences are there, and they’re part of what makes wine tasting so much fun. But they also can be subtle to the point of uncertainty.

I’ve seen winemakers at blind tastings identify their own wines, and I’ve also seen them fail to do so. It shouldn’t be embarrassing. We make too much of these contests where “experts” are supposed to take one sniff and then go, “Obviously, it’s Harlan, and from a good year…I should think ‘97.” That’s a parlor trick (albeit a pretty impressive one, if you can pull it off). If Harry Waugh took comfort in the thought that a Bordeaux proprietor could fail to recognize his own wine, then I take comfort in Harry’s inability to distinguish Burgundy from Bordeaux…since lunch.

You remember recently when the news out of Italy was that some seismologists who had failed to adequately warn residents of an impending earthquake were threatened with lawsuits? According to published reports, some of them actually were sentenced to prison terms for manslaughter.

When I heard that, I thought it was insane. Then, somewhere in the back of my mind, I idly wondered if perhaps a wine critic, who was trying to be similarly objective in his reporting, could not someday be sued, for giving a wine a lousy review. The proprietor could argue something along the lines of slander, or defamation, or interference with his ability to run his business successfully, or monetary damages–something like that. And, in our litigious society, that proprietor might easily find a sympathetic jury. As this thought was mildly disturbing, I quickly got rid of it.

Then, there came this report, from just a few days ago, where a Minnesota doctor sued someone who had given him a bad review on a rate-your-doctor website. According to the report, the case has now reached the state’s Supreme Court.

Now we have Rob McMillan, the resident wine guy at Silicon Valley Bank, musing on the question, “Can you sue a wine writer?” From Rob, we learn (I didn’t know it) that Parker had been sued back in the 1990s by Faiveley for libel, after Parker implied that the Burgundy producer might have been “cheating” [Rob’s word].

Rob also wondered about whether a bad Yelp review could result in a lawsuit, and about the culpability of bloggers. Speaking for myself, as both a published critic in Wine Enthusiast and as a blogger, I can’t imagine a winery proprietor coming after me legally for a poor review. He or she would be so attacked by the media (other bloggers, editorialists, critics, mainstream columnists, the ACLU and other free speech defenders) that it wouldn’t be worth his time or money to pursue such a case. Or would it?

Most of the wine I review–pretty much all of it, actually–is either sent to me by the proprietors, or submitted by them to large, regional blind tastings in places like Napa Valley and Santa Barbara County. If a proprietor elects to send his wine to a critic, he is rolling the dice and has to accept the consequences.

On Yelp’s Usage Language box, they write that posters “…may expose yourself to liability if, for example, your content contains material that is false, intentionally misleading, or defamatory…”. A review cannot be “false,” since it’s the writer’s opinion, not a statement of fact. Nor can it be “intentionally misleading,” unless someone can prove that the critic’s state of mind was such that he really liked the wine in question, but then deliberately wrote otherwise. The word “defamatory” is harder to parse, but “defamation” means the intentional slander or libel of someone or something, and that, too, would have to be proved in court. Of course, an angry proprietor could know he didn’t have a case and still wish to harass a critic, legally and financially, out of sheer pique.

I can see it happening one of these days, maybe not to me, but to someone else. It’s already happened to restaurant critics. The San Francisco Chronicle’s great reviewer, Michael Bauer, wrote a few years ago on his blog about how restaurant critics in both Australia and Philadelphia were sued for “liable for a defamatory review…These type of cases are nothing new,” Michael wrote, adding that “The next frontier will be when a restaurant decides to sue a Web site, community reviewer or a blogger about comments made on the Internet.” We’re perilously close to that frontier, if we haven’t already crossed it. I personally couldn’t afford to defend myself against a nuisance lawsuit from a rich winery owner, but I know that Wine Enthusiast would be there for me.

You remember recently when the news out of Italy was that some seismologists who had failed to adequately warn residents of an impending earthquake were threatened with lawsuits? According to published reports, some of them actually were sentenced to prison terms for manslaughter.

When I heard that, I thought it was insane. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I idly wondered if perhaps a wine critic, who was trying to be similarly objective in his reporting, could not someday be sued, for giving a wine a lousy review. The winery proprietor could argue something along the lines of slander, or defamation, or interference with his ability to run his business successfully, or monetary damages–something like that. And, in our litigious society, that proprietor might easily find a sympathetic jury. As this thought was mildly disturbing, I quickly got rid of it.

Then, there came this report, from just a few days ago, where a Minnesota doctor sued someone who had given him a bad review on a rate-your-doctor website. According to the report, the case has now reached the state’s Supreme Court.

Now we have Rob McMillan, the resident wine guy at Silicon Valley Bank, musing on the question, “Can you sue a wine writer?” From Rob, we learn (I didn’t know it) that Parker had been sued back in the 1990s by Faiveley for libel, after Parker implied that the Burgundy producer might have been “cheating” [Rob’s word].

Rob also wondered about whether a bad Yelp review could result in a lawsuit, and about the culpability of bloggers. Speaking for myself, as both a published critic in Wine Enthusiast and as a blogger, I can’t imagine a winery proprietor coming after me legally for a poor review. He or she would be so attacked by the media (other bloggers, editorialists, critics, mainstream columnists, the ACLU and other free speech defenders) that it wouldn’t be worth his time or money to pursue such a case.

Besides, most of the wine I review–pretty much all of it, actually–is either sent to me by the proprietors, or submitted by them to large, regional blind tastings in places like Napa Valley and Santa Barbara County. If a proprietor elects to send his wine to a critic, he is rolling the dice and has to accept the consequences.

On Yelp’s Usage Language box, they write that posters “…may expose yourself to liability if, for example, Your Content contains material that is false, intentionally misleading, or defamatory…”. A review cannot be “false,” since it’s the writer’s opinion, not a statement of fact. Nor can it be “intentionally misleading,” unless someone can prove that the critic’s state of mind was such that he really liked the wine in question, but then deliberately wrote otherwise. The word “defamatory” is harder to parse, but “defamation” means the intentional slander or libel of someone or something, and that, too, would have to be proved in court. Of course, an angry proprietor could know he didn’t have a case and still wish to harass a critic, legally and financially, out of sheer pique.

I can see it happening one of these days, maybe not to me, but to someone else. It’s already happened to restaurant critics. The San Francisco Chronicle’s great reviewer, Michael Bauer, wrote a few years ago on his blog about how restaurant critics in both Australia and Philadelphia were sued for “liable for a defamatory review…These type of cases are nothing new,” Michael wrote, adding that “The next frontier will be when a restaurant decides to sue a Web site, community reviewer or a blogger about comments made on the Internet.” We may be perilously closer to that frontier than we think, if in fact we haven’t already crossed it.