Random notes

Eric Asimov and Karen MacNeil had a panel on “Sensory Analysis vs. Wine Reviews” in which Eric reprised an earlier topic about “the tyranny of the tasting note.” He calls tasting notes “pernicious” because it makes wine seem “unambiguous,” which it isn’t, and “rips the heart of out its mystery.” Well, yes…and no. Yes, because it’s awfully hard to summarize the experience of a wine in words. No, because if you’re reviewing a wine, you have to say something, so all you can do is your best. That is, after all, what writing is all about: doing your best.

Eric is right on about the laundry lists of descriptors many critics use. It’s too often pretentious, precious and downright silly, all those olalaberries and grilled asphalt and so on. I myself have vastly simplified my metaphors over the years, and moved more toward writing about balance, structure and elegance (or the lack thereof). My problem with some young bloggers is that they’re going back to the use of obscure fruits, flowers etc. Maybe they have to; maybe that’s something the novice wine writer has to do.

Earlier, my old colleague Jeff Morgan had a panel called “What wine writers need to know about wine” that was particularly welcome, I’m sure, by all us writers. There’s been much discussion, including here on my blog, about how much technical knowledge a wine writer should have. A little? A lot? Obviously, some knowledge is desirable, but I’ve always thought a lot is unnecessary and can even be a hindrance. A move critic doesn’t need to know all about digital film technology or lighting manufacturers or Dolby sound. If technical knowledge made for a better wine critic, the best of them would be viticulture and enology professors — which is patently not the case.

Jeff raised the question of watering back wines or musts to combat high alcohol — which he said 80% of Napa vintners routinely do. He said although this actually improves the wines, the winemakers are loathe to admit to writers that they do it. “It’s because some powerful columnists lambast anything they perceive as interventionist, and the public buys into that,” I said. Jeff, or course, agreed. I personally am not bothered by so-called “interventions” to make better wine. Everything about winemaking is interventionist. It’s a bogus controversy ginned up by some writers who don’t actually have to make wine themselves. If a winemaker waters down, or acidulates, or sulfurs, or uses R.O. — whatever — who cares, as long as the wine is good? So next time you read a critic ranting about “intervention,” understand he’s just looking to pick a fight.

Later that day, we did a blind tasting of 5 Napa reds with Ms. MacNeil and I completely wiped out. We all did. I don’t necessarily feel bad abut guessing Barbera when the wine was an old field blend, and so on. The important thing in these useful exercises is for your logic, your deductive process to be correct. I understand that in the M.W. tests they don’t care if you guess the wine correctly, they want to know that your reasoning was accurate.

In the evening Bill Harlan hosted a few of us for drinks, and then it was on to the Restaurant at Meadowood. The food was obviously great but for me the highlight was sitting (and drinking) with Eric Asimov and Alder Yarrow, both of whom I got to know much better than ever. Such smart guys, so savvy and brilliant in their own unique ways. Easy to see why they’re both where they are in their blog careers. We had what easily was the greatest conversation about blogging, social media and where it’s all going that I’ve ever had. (And I was so pleased to discover that Eric and I share a martial arts education.) Now, this morning, it’s on to the two big panels, Alder’s on Monetizing your new media writing (which I’m on) and mine on Wine writers, ethics and income streams. This is going to be hot stuff. I’ll report tomorrow.

Back in the ‘90s they called them DINKs: double income, no kids. They were primarily gay men, and they were perhaps the most highly sought-after demographic, because they had a lot of cash to spend — including on wine.

They’re still dependable spenders. And now, one of the biggest and most formidable amateur wine groups in California, Magnum Men’s Wine Tasting Group, is comprised primarily of gay men. It has about 400 members, and is run out of the Healdsburg home of retired tech exec Bill Carney and his partner, Scott Monroe, who does hospitality at Gary Farrell winery.

The group meets once a month from Spring until Winter, at gay-friendly wineries. “We’ll pick a varietal, and then people bring along [bottles of] what’s designated,” Carney says. The group tastes the wines blind; attendees fill out scoring sheets, and a winner is declared at the end of the evening. There’s usually a potluck dinner. “It’s really a fun thing,” Carney notes, adding, “and it’s also an opportunity for the host winery to showcase their wine to a community that in many cases has discretionary income. They can talk about their wine, put one in the mix, do sales, club sign-ups, and so on.”

Recent or upcoming wineries that have hosted Magnum events include Passalaqua, Sbragia, Seghesio, Gary Farrell, Clos du Bois, Raymond Burr, Wilson, Mazzocco and Ridge.

The group began informally about 5 years ago when some gay men in the wine industry decided to get together as a social thing. “Then it started to snowball,” Carney recalls. “People heard about it and wanted to know when the next one was. So Scott and I decided to turn it into a network and institutionalize it.”

Carney says he posted results of the tastings on the e-Parker blog and also on Wine Spectator’s, but ran into some not-so-subtle homophobia on the latter. “Unfortunately, on Wine Spectator, it turned into a hate blog. ‘Who wants to join a bunch of fags?’ People were really rude. It turned into a really ugly situation. I stopped posting because it got so unpleasant.” Carney is quick to point out that the Wine Spectator moderator did not quash his posts. “Privately, he emailed me saying he thought we were great. But some of the people were idiots and bigots, and I just got tired of responding.” At e-Parker, Carney says, “nothing like that happened. People were very civil.”

But the story had a happy ending. “It’s turned into a great thing,” Carney says. “There’s a lot of gay people who take pride in what we do in the wine industry.”

I emailed Wine Spectator’s editor, Tom Matthews, asking for comment. Tom, who has previously posted on this blog and with whom I used to work, did not immediately reply. If he does, I will report it here.

I asked Carney why California needs a gay men’s wine tasting group. “People raised that question on the Wine Spectator blog,” he replied. “It’s a matter of comfort. People like to be around the same type. At Wine Spectator’s blog, they have Jewish singles! So people self-select who they want to be around. It’s a social opportunity.”

Magnum isn’t just for gay men, it’s for anyone who likes seriously tasting wine in a nice atmosphere. Members are primarily from Sonoma County, with a smattering from Napa Valley and San Francisco. If you’re interested, go to eventbrite.com and search for Magnum Men’s Wine Events. The next event is a Pinot Noir tasting at Gary Farrell.

Tom Matthews responds: [I got his email after posting]

Steve,

I appreciate your reaching out to me before commenting on this matter. However, I find your email ambiguous, and am not sure if you are implying that Wine Spectator supported the “homophobic readers” by cancelling posts by Magnum, or supported Magnum by cancelling posts that attacked the group. Let me say first that we would never discriminate against a poster because of their orientation (whether sexual, political or vinous), nor do we tolerate hateful or defamatory comments in our Forums.
(Read our Terms of Service here: http://forums.winespectator.com/eve/tos)

It’s true that Magnum posted a few times on Wine Spectator’s Forums, that there was some vigorous back and forth, and that Magnum has not posted for a while. Your characterization that they were “attacked by homophobic readers” seems provocative to me, but that is a matter of judgment. None of Magnum’s posts were “cancelled,” though some of the less-civil comments by other posters were deleted from one thread.

Here is some background:

On September 6, 2006, a Forums member using the handle “ZinGasm” started a
thread entitled “Monthly Gay Men’s Winetasting Events – Healdsburg Area” on
the WS “Off-Line Events” board.  The thread drew a certain amount of
negative feedback from some other users (egregious examples of which were
deleted), but it remained active until March 30, 2007.

You can see the first post in the thread here:

http://forums.winespectator.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2566058161/m/302108683/p/
1

Once we determined the thread had run its course, it was closed by our moderator, Robert Taylor. However, his post closing the thread invited ZinGasm to continue to post:

http://forums.winespectator.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2566058161/m/302108683/p/
7

ZinGasm launched another thread on March 28, 2007, but it again drew some
negative feedback, and ZinGasm seems to have abandoned it after April 4,
2007.  You can see that thread here:

http://forums.winespectator.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2566058161/m/614105524?r=
371108624#371108624

In addition, Taylor had some private email correspondence with Zingasm. While I don’t think it would be appropriate to share that with you, I can say that Zingasm stated he was satisfied with our response.

As you must know from your own experience, posts and comments from anonymous users can sometimes be boorish, insensitive, hostile and inflammatory. We try to maintain a balance between allowing free expression and maintaining a respectful community. We did our best with this thread. I don’t know who is trying to dig up old dirt now, but judging from the phrasing of your email, it may be someone with an axe to grind against Wine Spectator. I hope you’ll read through this material thoroughly, and carefully consider anything you decide to say on the matter.

Let me know if you have further questions,

Sincerely,

Tom

I was up in Napa Valley for a couple days to check out the Rutherford area for an upcoming article in Wine Enthusiast, and then on to Premier Napa Valley on Saturday. Napa was very beautiful and warm between winter storms. The skies were clear, Mount St. Helena’s peaks were dusted with snowy white, the flowering plum trees were pink, and every vineyard and hillside was splashed with cheery yellow mustard blossom. But people seemed to have the blues.

The view from Rubicon, looking north

Everywhere I went, I asked winery folks how business was going, and the answer invariably was a shrug of the shoulders or a roll heavenward of the eyes. Winery owners large and small told me things are tough; they’re hanging in there, hoping for better times. A friend, a wealthy grower, cracked that even the multi-millionaires are scared: they used to be worth $20 million and now it’s only $10 million. I went to Dean & DeLuca’s wine store, filled with dozens of tiny-production Cabs priced from $75 to $100 and up. “How’s high-end Cab doing?” I asked the guy working the floor. He shook his head. “Terrible.” People just aren’t buying anymore.

I stopped by the Oakville Grocery for lunch. There were two beefy guys, contractor-types, grabbing coffee and danish. I overheard one tell the other, “I told him I have to cut his salary if he wants to stay employed. Hell, I cut my own salary 25 percent.” As I handed my credit card to the lady at the register, the guy said to me, “You wouldn’t be needin’ any work, would ya?” I laughed and said, “Only if you let me pay on credit.” He laughed back. There’s a kind of grim, gallow’s humor these days, even in Oakville.

Went to a famous cult winery and asked the winemaker how sales are doing. Pretty good direct, he said, meaning through the tasting room and wine club, “but New York is dead.” The head of another cult winery said he’s seeing a big drop in off-premise sales, which is a mainstay of cult Cabs. “A lot of this is anecdotal,” he shared, “but we hear about restaurants closing all over the country, and customers shifting from going out to dinner to buying more of their wines at stores.” No way will 2009 repeat the sales of 2008, he fretted.

On the other hand, the parking lot at Auberge du Soleil was jammed, while limo drivers waited out along the curb on winding Rutherford Hill Road, to whisk sated guests back to whence they came.

But of course it was Premier Napa Valley weekend, second in importance only to the Napa Wine Auction itself, and an important gauge as to how the economy is doing; and in Napa, topic number one was the collapse of the Naples [Florida] Winter Wine Auction. Held  Feb. 7, it saw the take plunge to $5 million from 2008’s $14 million, a shocking fall of 65 percent. Everybody was wondering if it could happen here. During the barrel tasting at the Culinary Institute of America, a winery owner confided, “I’ll be amazed if PNV does half of last year,” when the auction fetched $2.2 million.

Well, in the end, PNV did better than that: nearly $1.5 million, or about 68 percent of last year’s haul. In his article in the Napa Register, my old friend, the writer Pierce Carson, called that “exceeding expectations” because the fears of a fall off the cliff had been so widespread. I guess that’s true, but still, when you’re down 32 percent from a year ago, it’s not really good news.

I’ve begun holding winetasting seminars at Franklin Square Wine Bar, a hip new wine bar that recently opened on Broadway in my Upper Lake Merritt neighborhood, near downtown Oakland. Upper Broadway was wrecked by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but it’s roaring back, with new condos and commercial buildings, restaurants, art galleries and cafés, as well as Franklin Square Wine Bar. Here are some images of my May 4 tasting of various Pinot Noirs from the Pisoni Vineyard, in Monterey’s Santa Lucia Highlands, with my special guest, Gary Pisoni. (www.pisonivineyards.com)

Mr. and Mrs. Gary Pisoni with Steve. That’s proprietor Rick Mitchell in the background on the left.

Gary first planted the vineyard back in 1982, mainly to Bordeaux varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon. “We didn’t know what to grow!” he told me. Today, of course, the vineyard is mainly known for its Pinot Noirs; wineries line up “from here to Napa, and from here to Santa Barbara, both ways,” to procure the grapes, Gary laughs. Only about a dozen wineries are lucky enough to actually be able to buy fruit from the 55-acre vineyard. In 1998, Gary launched his own Pisoni brand. (more…)