We wine writers who visit winemakers have lots of different choices of how to spend the time. One thing you can do (which I suspect most writers do with winemakers) is to taste the wine. That’s not my favorite thing, because to tell you the truth, I don’t feel I can be completely objective. Sometimes you’re in a cold cellar and the winemaker siphons the wine right out of the barrel. It almost always tastes pretty good under those circumstances. Other times the winemaker will line up bottles and glasses anywhere that’s available: the lab, the tasting room, his office, even on top of a barrel. At any rate it’s hard for me to properly evaluate a wine when I’m sitting with the person who made it.

Another thing you can do with winemakers is to let them take you on a tour of the winery. At this point, I’ve been on so many winery tours, I have bottling lines and fermenting tanks coming out of my ears. These days, when a winemaker walks me through the winery, it’s not uncommon for him to begin by saying, “You’ve probably seen a million wineries,” to which I silently think, Yes, I have, but I would never say that. Instead, I let the winemaker point out whatever he wants (I’m a polite guest). But really, the technological side of a winery has never much interested me (although the architecture does. I can just as easily appreciate a luxurious winery as a shed with a tin roof).

You can also walk through vineyards with winemakers. I like that because it takes me to the heart of where wine is made: the rows of grapevines that produce the grapes that make the juice the yeasts ferment into wine. But after a while, all vineyards begin to look alike. I know that’s heresy to those trained in the art and science of canopy management, but that’s how things are with me.

So what do I like to do with winemakers? I like to drive with them. Specifically, I like piling into the passenger seat of the winemaker’s vehicle (often an SUV, 4-wheel drive or pickup truck) and letting the winemaker do the driving. Winemaker vehicles are usually dirty and in disarray. You know how you sometimes apologize to a visitor because your house isn’t quite as tidy as it might be? Winemakers do the same, although I always tell them not to, because I could care less. Take a look at the inside of a winemaker’s car. Maps, gadgets and junk all over the place. Dried clots of earth on the floormats. Empty soda cans and water bottles. Clipboards on the dashboard, sunglasses and cell phone and pencils and pads and keys and boxes of tissue and little broken bits of metal and plastic. The inside of a winemaker’s vehicle is a veritable junkyard, but it’s a place I love to be.

Where do we drive? Typically around the property and/or the appellation. That’s what I really like to do with winemakers. They can tell me all about the hills and clefts inbetween the ridges that let the maritime influence filter in. They can point out that outcropping of limestone, that jumble of stones, or the way a bench rises suddenly from an alluvial plain. They can show me their neighbors’ vineyards. We can drive to high points where you can see for miles and miles and from that aerial vantage point gain an appreciation of an AVA’s physiognomy (if that’s the right word). Of course, you can do all this driving yourself, on your own, but then you can’t pay proper attention, and a winemaker is the best tour guide in the world. Winemakers know their appellations like they know the palm of their hand. (One of the nice things about chatting while driving is that, because it’s so casual, sometimes there’s some good gossip, oops I mean news, to be had.)

I was reminded of this because I just read my notes of my drive-around the southern Santa Rita Hills with Richard Sanford. One thing that struck me about that appellation was how quickly its vineyards have become famous. Ten years ago everybody knew about Sanford & Benedict Vineyard and Babcock, but who had ever heard of Cargasacchi, Fiddlestix, Fe Ciega, Richard’s own La Encantada, Sea Smoke, Clos Pepe, Melville, Mt. Carmel, Rancho Santa Rosa, Carrie’s, Huber? (I know I’m forgetting others.) Look how well-known they are today. There’s not another appellation in California whose vineyards have come so far, so fast.

I like winemakers anyway, most of them, and somehow they seem more themselves when they’re behind the wheel of their own vehicle.

Drove down the 101 to Shell Beach yesterday under clear blue skies scuttled with fleecy white clouds, and I swear California’s hills never looked greener. All the recent winter rains have made the grasses grow fierce, dappled here and there with lupine and mustard, and every flowering tree — plum, cherry, magnolia — was festooned with brilliant blossoms. Along the hundred-mile stretch of the Salinas Valley, the vineyards of the Santa Lucia Highlands looked pale green, but they were far off, and it was hard to tell if they were already breaking buds. A little further south, the gigantic San Bernabe Vineyard, owned by the Indelicato family and supposedly the world’s largest, looked almost ready to burst into bloom. Spring is just around the corner: another season, another vintage, another turn of the wheel.

Got to the The Cliffs, where I’m staying, around 3 p.m., and the temperature on my dashboard was 64 degrees, the warmest of any point of my 240 mile trip. Of course, Shell Beach also is closer to Southern California, but there was a mild offshore breeze, making the coast warmer than inland, and I remember once, on a winter day, when Pismo Beach (just a few miles further south) was the warmest place in the continental U.S. Just as you hit Shell Beach on the freeway, the Pacific springs into view, and I never fail to anticipate it, and be amazed. In everyday life those of us who do not dwell directly on the coast tend to forget that the ocean is out there, next stop Japan, and maybe one of these days, when the San Andreas Fault does its thing, God forbid, the ocean will be closer inland than it is now.

My editor at University of California Press, the inimitable Blake Edgar, had advised me to read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” for inspiration for my next book, so I brought it with me to the hotel gym and read it while on the exercycle. (Ninety minutes of hard cardio for this aging Boomer, including ellipticals and treadmill. You have to do something when you’re on the road, eating and drinking all the time.) I came across this quote from the author, Michael Pollan, concerning a fast food meal he, his wife and son ate at McDonald’s: “Perhaps the reason you eat this food quickly is because it doesn’t bear savoring. The more you concentrate on how it tastes, the less like anything it tastes. I said before that McDonald’s serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I’m more inclined to think they’re selling something more schematic than that — something more like a signifier of comfort food.” It’s good, forceful writing, and like all good writing made me think of things in my own life that might be described in the same way. In this case, it’s commodity wine. You know what that is; there’s no need to name names. It’s the mass-produced, varietally-named, inexpensive wine that could come from anywhere and, in California, usually comes from the Central Valley. It’s comfort wine, or, as Pollan wrote, a signifier of comfort wine, since it’s not like the meatloaf and mashed potatoes I make at home — real comfort food — but more like frozen food meatloaf and mashed potatoes that may, or may not, actually contain meat and potatoes. I mean no disrespect to these wines. When priced accordingly, they enable millions of Americans to drink true varietal (or, at least, 75% varietal) wine on an everyday basis, and Lord knows I’ve given lots of Best Buys to them in Wine Enthusiast. There’s a huge difference between the chicken McNuggets Pollan indicts in “Omnivore’s Dilemma” and the oceans of inexpensive plonk California churns out. The world always has produced plonk; I welcome it and celebrate it. But “it doesn’t bear savoring.”

Do we wine aficienadoes make too much of “savoring”? No. Great wine, like great cuisine, is an extraordinary experience. And that may be the ultimate definition of the difference between an 85 point wine and a 99 or 100 pointer: Can it be savored? Not just “is it good?” or “is it easy to like?” or even “does it go well with food?,” but “Can you sip it again and again, as it warms in the glass, and be astounded?”

I leave today for a week on the road. First it’s to Shell Beach, on the beautiful San Luis Obispo Central Coast, for the World of Pinot Noir event, which Wine Enthusiast co-sponsors, and to which I’ve I’ve gone every year since the start, except for once when I was sick. To me, WOPN represents how to do a wine event at a high level of quality and efficiency. Granted, it’s not for everyone: it’s expensive and rather small; in other words, it’s not a ZAP tasting at Fort Mason! But for a working writer like me, it’s manna from heaven. You get to go to incredibly informative seminars, led by brilliant people who know what they’re talking about. You taste as much wine as you could possibly want. You meet old friends, make new ones, and catch up on all the latest news and gossip. Best of all, once the valet at The Cliffs Resort takes your car upon arrival, there’s no more driving until you go home, three days later! Yay! As someone who absolutely, positively does not drink and drive, that’s a godsend.

After WOPN, I continue south, to Santa Barbara County and specifically to the lovely little town of Santa Ynez. I’ll be there for a few days, working through a big, blind Chardonnay tasting. I love big blind tastings, but only when they’ve been very carefully planned out in advance, and include related wines about which something is known (variety or type and region being most important). This is called tasting in context. Only when you are comparing apples to apples can you truly determine a wine’s qualities. Only then, also, can you hope to make terroir generalizations. I’ll be tasting through the Chardonnays from all Santa Barbara’s regions (Santa Ynez Valley, Santa Rita Hills, Santa Maria Valley, Happy Canyon [if there are any Chardonnays from there, which I don't think there are] and the non-appellated areas), and hopefully regional distinctions will appear. But this isn’t as easy as it might once have been. Winemaking styles are so similar (malolactic fermentation, ripe grapes, new oak, acidification, sur lies aging and battonage) that terroir nuances tend to disappear under all that intervention. I’ve never been entirely comfortable making sweeping pronouncements about different AVAs anyway, the way some critics do. There are too many variables that prove the opposite. Still, reaching regional conclusions has its place and is valid, up to a point. The consumer likes reading about regional character, and it makes for interesting, everlasting thinking and conversation. But even if I don’t find clear regional distinctions in Santa Barbara, I’ll be happy, because I love Chardonnay, and they have many fine ones down there.

One item worth mentioning: I have been getting lots and lots of wines sent to me for review that I previously reviewed, in some cases more than a year ago. At Wine Enthusiast, we don’t re-review previously reviewed wines, except under very limited circumstances. So why are so many people resending previously sent wines? The fact that they are shows me that they’ve been unable to sell those wines. If you have to resend the same wine a year after it was first released, you must have piles of it gathering dust. More proof of this is offered by the fact that, in many instances, the wines sent the second time around are priced 10%-30% lower than the first time around. There’s a bloodbath out there, and I don’t see it getting better before this summer, at least.

One of my regular readers (Randy) commented here yesterday:

Having read for a while thoughts from Charlie, Steve, 1winedude and Tom, how do you guys get RP, JL and the other players to actually engage you guys on these blogs? Do they actually think they’re like, untouchable or are they so embarrassed by their official words that they can’t back them up in a free moving (on record) conversation?

What a great question. I replied, “Here’s my take: RP, JL and a few others have nothing to gain and a lot to lose by engaging with us po’ folk. They do tend to think they’re untouchable. It’s sad, but true. I would welcome their participation on this blog, but I’m not holding my breath.”

I think this topic is worth investigating a little bit more. When U.S. Presidents choose to isolate themselves away from a curious press corps (as sitting Presidents often do during re-election campaigns), they conduct what’s called a “Rose Garden strategy.” That’s when they appear only at carefully choreographed functions during which they take no questions but appear in all their glory surrounded by the majesty of their office. Their supporters claim that the President is “above the fray” but really, everybody understands that what’s really happening is the President (whoever he is, of whatever party) is actually afraid to engage in a bare-knuckled mano a mano with a bunch of reporters who are (usually) on top of the facts.

That’s how I see RP and JL. Why won’t they engage with me, or any of the other bloggers such as Alder or Eric? If they did, I can speak for the group of us: We would be respectful and keep the dialog on a high level, as we do anyway. It’s true that Tom Matthews, the top editor at Wine Spectator, frequently comments on blogs, but as far as I can tell, it’s not really to engage so much as to respond to criticism, i.e. damage control. It’s not a conversation when all you’re doing is reciting your magazine’s editorial policies.

Wine Spectator and Wine Advocate have taken a thrashing on the blogosphere in part because of their perceived arrogance. I wonder why they’ve held out for this long from engaging in the back-and-forth. It’s certainly not too late; they would be received here with open arms. As for JL, he seems to be more isolated than ever. One never sees him anywhere in California, whether it be at a bloggers conference, a writers conference, a Premier Napa Valley event, or anywhere up and down the state. As far and widely as I travel, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Jim in years. I wonder why. It seems so, well, twentieth century to play the “I vant to be alone” game. Bob, Jim, come on down! The weather’s fine. You might even find a little romance out here on the dance floor.

Event Alert

My friend Bo Simons, who runs the wonderful Sonoma County Wine Library, asked if I could publicize their upcoming (Feb. 26, 6:30 p.m.) event, which will honor Arturo Robledo. Mr. Robledo worked his way from laborer to supervisor, to vineyard manager and is now a successful business owner. A bevy of wine industry stars will appear at the event, which is at Paradise Ridge Winery, in Santa Rosa. If you’re interested, you can call Bo at 707-433-3772, ext. 5.

I returned home in a euphoric state of mind. (My therapist had to explain the difference to me between “manic” and “euphoric.”) All this stuff about monetization and ethics and “blogs into books” may be boring inside-the-beltway fare for 99.9% of the wine-drinking public, but it’s the meat-and-potatoes of the writer’s life, and it was so educational and pleasant to be able to explore these issues with our own kind.

Alder Yarrow did a yeoman’s job at coverage on his blog the other day. I had noticed him more or less continually pecking away on his laptop (Joe Roberts, too) and wondered how a mere human can be in 2 places at the same time, i.e., listening and paying attention to the intellectual give-and-take of a panel discussion, while at the same time twittering and/or blogging. But, as Alder and Joe and the others seem to be able to get away with this balancing act quite well, who am I to say it can’t be done?

I do take some — not a lot, but some — issue with Alder singling out Heather John’s statement

“Wine writers have some of the worst reputations for bad ethics in the business”

as “The most interesting.” After all, there were dozens of interesting, compelling and wise things said throughout the symposium’s three days. I could, for instance, cite Michael Bauer, to the effect that “A paid wine writer can afford to be ethical.” Heather may have simply been reporting on what she’s told by P.R. people, and I don’t doubt that the bad behavior Alder itemized is rampant among a certain class of “writer.” But the implication that malfeasance is more widespread among print writers than bloggers made me squirm. Well, of course it would be, for now; there are a lot more employed print writers than bloggers, they’ve been around for a longer time, the wineries have long histories with them, etc. So it’s not because print writers are sleazier or less ethical, it’s a question of numbers. There’s been this suggestion that bloggers are somehow purer and more noble than print writers; less capable of sin; less self-interested, and more interested in the greater good. That’s piffle.

Not piffle is this sentence from 1WineDude: “Both Eric Asimov and Steve Heimoff are practical, warm and charming in person (meaning that I have lost at least two bets and the week isn’t even over yet).”

Why would Asimov and Heimoff not be charming and warm? I don’t know what “practical” means, though. (And, by the way, nobody is more charming than Mr. Dude himself!) Somebody (okay, not just anybody, but the estimable Tom Merle) wrote in to the Dude’s website that:

“Of course your hosts would ~say~ this. They can’t ask you point blank to shill for them, even though…they expect it. Just as all entities who sponsor press junkets are morally right to expect coverage for their product, service of client. This is planet earth. If someone scratches your back, you better scratch back or you have violated the protocol.”

So let’s take a minute to talk about gratitude, and back-scratching, and who-owes-what-to-whom-for-what, and all that good stuff. The late, great California Secretary of State, Jesse Unruh (yes, the same guy who said “Money is the mother’s milk of politics”) once remarked, of lobbyists:

“If you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and vote against ‘em anyway, you don’t belong in the Legislature.”

Those are words of wisdom, Mr. Merle, which I would paraphrase thusly: “If you can’t take their samples, eat their food, stay in their lodges and then trash their wines, you shouldn’t be writing about wine.” (I have deliberately omitted any reference to SWOTJ, or “screwing while on the job.”) I don’t mean “trashing” gratuitously, only as needed. It’s also, I may say, a little unfair to “them” to imply that “they” expect good coverage in return for their largesse. In my long career, they don’t. They hope for good coverage. They may even pray for it. But it would be tacky for them to expect it, and most winemakers — at least, in California — aren’t tacky. As for Mr. Bill Harlan, who, as the managing partner (or whatever his title is) of Meadowood and the proprietor of  Harlan Estate, if anybody thinks this man needs to have his back scratched by a blogger, you don’t know him.