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.

Of all the things I’ve done over the last 30 years to understand wine–reading countless books, tasting 100,000 wines, interviewing hundreds of winemakers and growers–nothing has so “filled me with the spirit” of wine as when I wrote my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River, which was published in 2005 (but reissued, with a new introduction, last year by University of California Press).

That effort took the better part of two years. I saturated myself in wine, not literally, of course (I just had an image of me taking a bath in Pinot Noir), but in the sense that, for almost every day in 2003-2004, I awoke on a day that began precisely where the previous one had left off: immersed in this book. I thought about it constantly, edited myself all the time, dreamed about it at night, worked out the conceptual structure as I drove my car, came up with new ideas in the shower, and spent every minute I could traveling along the Russian River, by every conceivable mode of transportation, having adventures and meeting people, exploring vineyards, eating and drinking on the river, and even, on one unhappy but memorable occasion, almost drowning in water so cold in winter snowmelt, it gave me a case of hypothermia that permanently discombobulated my internal thermostat. I was trapped in whitewater rapids, hanging on for dear life to a “strainer,” a fallen tree whose gnarled limbs looked ominously like wizened fingers, clutched in a death grip to which I clung lest the angry current sweep me away.

In retrospect, it was the perfect metaphor for the way I conducted my research: when someone says they plunged themselves into their work, I can say I did it literally! One of the things I was proudest of in that book was that it contained no wine reviews. I might have filled it with formal notes, but decided not to, because I wanted to write a book that would stand the test of time and be interesting and relevant to future readers. And there’s nothing staler or duller than old wine reviews.

The culture of wine always has appealed to me at least as much as its science, or even as much as tasting. By “culture” I mean the places, the natural formations (rivers, cliffs, mountains, fields, marshes, streams, landslides, forests, wildflowers, gullies, estuaries) that are indigenous to every wine region. The animals too: snakes, deer, wildcats, winery dogs and cats. And the people! The wine industry is never devoid of characters, that’s for sure. There’s a context to every wine that’s important to comprehend, if you’re to fully experience a wine in its fullness. To drink a glass of Robert Mondavi Tokalon Fume Blanc in that vineyard, with Tim Mondavi: that’s context. To witness the Rochioli Vineyard, the source of so many great wines I’ve had over the years, at various times of the year–in the full bloom of harvest, completely underwater during a ferocious winter storm–to have climbed up its bank, as the gravelly dirt slid out from under my feet, is to have given my next experience of a Rochioli wine added depth and imagery. To have known the Rochiolis, Joe, Jr. and Tom, further compounds my appreciation of their wines. To have been present at the creation of Williams Selyem’s estate vineyard [formerly Litton Estate], as the bulldozers broke ground and pulled mountains of rocks out–to have been there the day an arborist warned Bob Cabral he’d better pull out some century-old trees before a storm blew them down on somebody’s head, only to have Bob decide that, No, he couldn’t do it, and instead to persuade his boss to save the trees, with all the expense that implied–and then, years later, to have tasted the Estate Pinot Noir and be able to give it 100 points–and, after that, to see the magnificent new winery building erected on the very spot that had been a wasteland of mud and stone, just seven years earlier–that is context. That is continuity. That is experiencing a wine in its fullness. I have griped before, and often, about how I wish certain winemakers would not insist on having me come to the winery to taste their wine (hello Dalla Valle, Alban, Staglin, Screaming Eagle and all you others!), instead of sending it to me at home, like most wineries do. But the truth is, I totally understand. They wish for me to know their wine in the very context I have described, and I can’t blame them for that. Were I a winemaker, I’d probably do the same thing.

If you don’t think that wining and dining tastemakers isn’t one of the keys (if not the key) to boosting a winery’s reputation, then you don’t live in the real world.

I’ll get to examples in a moment, but first, let me explain what I just said. Take two wines that are equal in quality. Give one of them a huge budget to dazzle tastemakers (wine and food writers especially, but also sommeliers, merchants and so on). Let that budget be spent on fantastic tastings with unbelievably good food, held in fancy settings such as hotel ballrooms and four star restaurants. Even better if you can underwrite the attendees’ travel expenses, since wine and food writers aren’t exactly paid very well. As for the other wine–the one without the budget–let it depend on sending a sample out to the same tastemakers. Do you know which wine will be the cause celebre? I do, and it’s not the wine with the puny budget. They’re lucky if they can send a free corkscrew with the sample.

The fact is, dazzling tastemakers and influencers has been the way certain wineries and wine regions got famous to begin with, and it still is. When I wrote my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River, Tom Jordan, who created Jordan Winery, told me how he got tastemakers to pay attention. Quote: “Early on, I realized the challenge was, How are you going to get recognized?” What Tom did was to invite restaurateurs, somms, wine merchants, distributors and food and wine writers to the winery (which is one of the showplaces of California wine country) and wow them. “We had guest suites and guest houses and a superb kitchen operation, and we brought chefs in from France to cook,” Tom said, adding, “I knew the wine was never going to taste better than it would in that nice setting…”.

Now, I don’t mean to criticize what Tom did. He had learned well from the Bordelais, who have been plying influencers with goodies for centuries. This is simply how the game is played, and the fact that it works is proved by Jordan’s being one of the top winery brands on American restaurant wine lists, a feat it has replicated for many years.

Which brings us to–where else?–Asia, the El Dorado of today’s wine trade, the Lost City of Gold, only it is no longer a lost city but one that definitely has been discovered and is in the process of being exploited by those who can afford it. Read this article about how the cellarmaster at South Africa’s Rupert & Rothschild (yes, that Rothschild, on the Baron Edmund/Lafite side, meaning there’s a lot of money) flew to Bangkok to host a dinner. I’ll quote just a little from the article so you get a general idea of what you missed: “After a refreshing round of amuse bouche, the action kicked off with the first course: poached seafood, mussel tomato gelee, kaffir lime, dill and smoked herring pearls paired with 2008 Rupert & Rothschild Baroness Nadine [Chardonnay]…Next up was seared Wagyu beef flank, mixed bean salad, rucola [sic] and red currant with raspberry, paired with 2008 Rupert & Rothschild Classique…” etc. etc.

Well, the guy who wrote this up was suitably impressed, for his descriptors were glowing (“perfect,” “classic,” “exciting”), and I bet anybody who read his account went away thinking, “Hmm, I sure would like to get my hands on those Rupert & Rothschild wines.” Which is the point, isn’t it? If you’re a little family winery, you’re not going to be able to wine and dine tastemakers in Bangkok (much less Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, and so on). So you’re probably never going to get on the Asian “A” list, even if you’re making spectacular wine. (It can happen, but it would take a minor miracle.)

So consider today’s posting another in my occasional debunkings of how famous wines get and stay famous. Sometimes it’s about the quality, but sometimes it’s about the credulity of the tastemakers who are gobbling all that smoked salmon and filet mignon and then telling people how fabulous everything was. (Say, I wonder what was in the swag bag at the Bangkok dinner?)

After my post yesterday on the Anthony Bourdain-Paula Deen smackdown I decided to watch the Food Network’s reality TV show, Food Star. Starring such on-air chef personalities as Bobby Flay, Alton Brown and Giada De Laurentiis, it’s the center of the celebrity chef universe these days.

Modeled after Project Runway, Food Star pits wanna chefs against each other: the prize is their own program on the Food Network. Heady stuff. On the episode I watched, they were down to the final three contestants. Each of them made some food and then the judges had “a l’il talk” (as Heidi Klum might put it). What they said kind of shocked me. It was, basically, “Everybody’s food is really good, so our selection isn’t going to be based on culinary talent. Instead, it’s on personality–on air appeal–likeability–shtick–star power.”

I say it shocked me, because I would have thought that such a decision would be based on talent alone. Granted that all three of the final contestants produced good food: surely, somebody’s had to be better than the others’. And they all had a corpus of work the judges were aware of and could base a decision on. But instead of really analyzing the chefs’ cooking talent, the judges based their decision on whom they presumed Food Network’s viewers would want to watch on TV.

Isn’t that bizarre? But it gets to something I’ve touched on in this blog on various occasions. For example, I wrote about waitstaff in restaurants, who seem to be hired mostly for their looks and sex appeal than for their serving talent, especially in San Francisco, where looks count for so much. Ditto for bartenders, or mixologists (is there a difference?). They all look like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Maybe they’re talented, but can’t ordinary looking people be talented?

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a pretty face as much as the next guy or gal. But here’s my question, and it relates to what Anthony Bourdain was criticizing the Food Network for. Why are these people hired in the first place? It’s not because they’re great cooks. It’s because they’re entertainers. “Star power” is exactly what they have, even if their food isn’t any better than, well, yours or mine.

There’s an analogy to be made here with news reporting. It used to be that TV news anchors were hired for their intelligence and ability to deliver the news clearly and authoritatively. Think of Walter Cronkite or Jim Lehrer. Now, we have news deliverers hired solely on the basis of their ability to rile viewers up: Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann (see, I’m trying to be nonpartisan). On local television, it seems like news people are hired for their looks. The blow dried, square jawed male anchor, with his Barbie Doll long blond-haired sidechick, are clichés we all rightfully make fun of. But what’s the difference between that, and the Food Network looking for sex appeal in their stars? (Yes, I’m talking to you, Ms. De Laurentiis, and you, Mr. Flay, and you, Mr. Tyler “Diesel Jeans” Florence, and even you, dear Paula Deen. You’re no longer young, but you’re still hot!).

Thank goodness the wine media has largely avoided resorting to using people based on their looks instead of talent. To tell you the truth, most wine writers are pretty ordinary looking. If it were a matter of good looks, we’d be out of jobs. (I exempt, of course, 1WineDude). But seriously, Hollywoodization is taking everything over. Even presidential candidates have to be hot. (Calling Ms. Bachmann, Ms. Palin and Gov. Perry, and please, Rick, wear your Stetson.) We seem to have such low self-esteem that we need to ogle beautiful people in order to make life bearable. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

Does any of this matter for wine writing? Yes, because content is king. If content actually contains content, we’re fine. If content is content-less, delivered by some pretty airhead wannabe cyberface who claims to know everything but is clueless and whose only plus is a groovy personality, we’re in trouble.

Slow Sunday yesterday, nothing to do and not wanting to do anything. So just sat around the house and read the paper, caught up on the Irene news (which included hearing from old friends in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and seeing some scary YouTubes of the rampaging Deerfield River which, when I lived there, was just a pleasant little stream). Then I decided, since I’m paying for premium movie channels anyway, I might as well watch one.

I’d seen Julie and Julia when it first came out and to be perfectly honest, didn’t much care for it. True, Meryl Streep was awesome as usual, but  Amy Adams’ Julie seemed self-centered and annoying (she herself admitted to being a bitch), so much so that I had an unpleasant memory of the film. But, as sometimes happens, on second viewing I liked it considerably more.

One of the more interesting aspects for me was Julie’s experience with blogging. As you know if you saw the film, she began blogging more or less as a lark, with no expectation that anyone would read her or that blogging would bring her to the brink of a real career. And yet, in that climatic scene where she finds 67 phone messages after the Christian Science Monitor wrote about her, overnight Julie was sought after by editors, publicists and all the other denizens of the celebrity world looking for the next big thing for the next 15 minutes.

I thought, why did Julie start blogging? Why did she go through all that work–not just holding down a fulltime job all day, but then cooking all night and, when the cooking and eating was over, far from laying her weary body down (with her husband), she then prolonged her workday by blogging about it? This line of thought naturally brought me, by extension, to my own reasons for blogging and–by extension from that–to all the other bloggers, both known and unknown to me, who cannot sleep at night, or who cannot wake up normally in the morning and go about their lives, until they’ve put their thoughts online for all to see.

At first, this seems like very self-centered behavior. Why would anybody think that one’s thoughts would be of the slightest interest to anybody else, much less a bunch of strangers out there in cyberspace? It’s very strange. I can see why (for example), people might be curious about what Dick Cheney has to say in his new book.  Regardless of what you thought about Cheney, he impacted our lives. But why would anyone care about the thoughts of a wine writer? It’s not as if we’re smarter than anyone else, or wiser. I’ve been reading classic Greek literature lately and am working my way through The Apology, in which Socrates/Plato makes the point that he who is wisest is the one who knows that he is utterly without wisdom. The older I get, the more I feel precisely that way, which makes it even weirder that this blog would attract the attention of anyone.

I know that some of it has to do with the fact that I am said to possess a certain kind of “power” through my job as a wine critic. People are curious, I suppose, how I perceive that supposed power, how I use it, how it shapes my thinking. The answer is: I perceive it as an illusion. It is an accident of my history and karma that came without my conscious bidding and will disappear just as abruptly as it arrived; and my responsibility as its vessel is to preside over its loss, when it goes, with equanimity. Which is to say that, like Plato’s Socrates, I’m aware that “power,” like “wisdom,” is a forgery.

The rest of the question had to do with you. Why do you read this blog, or any blog, for that matter? I like to think (maybe I flatter myself) that it’s because the writing pleases you. I’m not much for social intercourse in person, and I seem to get lamer with each passing month. It’s hard for me to be myself with others, unless they’re people I know extremely well and trust. Otherwise, my life’s experiences have made me rather mistrustful of people; and especially if they’re in the industry, I can never be sure exactly what their motives are. It’s hard having all the time to guess what’s really going on behind somebody else’s smiling facade.

Still, like most people, I’m a social animal. I think, I drink, I think about drinking, and wine–more than any other beverage–stimulates the deepest, best thinking because wine is the best beverage. It’s simply easier for me to frame the thoughts I want to share in words on a computer screen than to express them verbally in a social situation. Conversation happens quickly; half the time our words just fly out of our mouths, surprising even ourselves. With writing, you can take the time to express a thought articulately, so that you’re sure that what you just wrote is precisely what you meant. Which reminds of of something Meryl Steep’s Julia Child character said in the movie. She wanted (she said) to write down her recipes with “scientific precision” so that nobody who attempted to use them would ever make a mistake. That’s the way I feel about writing, and wine reviewing in general. I want to get it right.

Just in: Wine Enthusiast’s 2011 Wine Star Award nominees!

We have this free newsweekly in the Bay Area, SF Weekly, which has a columnist, Katy St. Clair, who writes a feature called Bouncer. It’s about the bar scene and is always a fun read I look forward to. This week’s headline is “Why Psychopaths Make Good Bartenders,” and with an intro like that, I just had to read. Katy’s theory is that bartenders possess outsized personality traits such as grandiosity, a magnetic, charming personality, an inability to feel empathy or remorse, “and what can be described as ‘play-acting’ when it comes to emotions.” By this, Katy means that bartenders have a pre-rehearsed grab bag of emotional reactions, any one of which they can pull out at will to fit the circumstance. Of all the personality traits Katy sees in bartenders, the most powerful is “always needing to win.” Collectively, these traits constitute a certain clinical psychopathy. By way of name dropping, Katy uses such charmers as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer to make her case.

Anyway, I don’t know that much about bar culture; it’s been a good many years since I spent my nights getting loaded looking for someone to go home with (although it does seem to me that most young bartenders are still quite good looking). But I take Katy at her word, and it made me think: If there’s a bartender “type” with specific personality traits, is there a wine writer type?

In order to answer that question, I first had to go through the rolodex in my mind that consists of all the wine writers I’ve known. (Does the word “rolodex” date me? It’s my handwritten card file, if you don’t know, and it works faster and more accurately for me than anything computerized.) And rest assured, I’ve known a lot of wine writers. In California–which is the only state that really matters when it comes to wine, right?–I’ve known them all. Like God watching sparrows fall to earth, there hasn’t been a wine writer in my generation who’s operated beneath my radar. So my rolodex is full.

I’ve also met quite a few out-of-state wine writers, and actually found them to be quite decent, despite not coming from California, although the New Yawkahs can have attitude problems. And since I started blogging, I’ve met scads of wine bloggers, if you can call them “wine writers” which I think you can. So I figure over the years I’ve known at least 400 wine writers, enough of a sample to come to some reasonable conclusions.

First off, wine writers aren’t like bartenders. Most of them aren’t good looking (I exclude our beautiful woman wine writers, such as Leslie Sbrocco and Karen NacNeil), a pity, since I spend so much time looking at them. In fact, most wine writers are the opposite of good looking. I don’t mean that insultingly, it just puts things in perspective: most people aren’t good looking, so wine writers are about as homely as everybody else.

The “grandiosity” of bartenders of which Katy speaks is a function of how good looking they are. So is that magnetic, charming personality. Good looking guys know they’re good looking, they’ve known from an early age that others gaze upon them with desire and love, and that idealization swells their egos and makes them feel charismatic and deserving. Wine writers, by contrast, have egos that have been thwarted. Nobody ever gazed upon them with desire; they did not grow up in that charmed spotlight. Hence, you’ll more often than not find in wine writers a sense of having been deprived. Those who feel that life has been less than fair often have rich inner lives; they have to rationalize a lot in order to stay sane. Wine writers are, in other words, intellectuals. No matter what else you can say about bartenders, I don’t think most people would describe them as intellectual. This intellectualism also tags wine writers with geekiness, which comes in handy when you’re obsessed with rainfall patterns in the Vacas. The captain of the football team never would have ended up as a wine writer. But the vice president of the chess club probably is.

Do wine writers have prefabricated emotions the way bartenders do? Bartenders can’t afford to be empathetic because of the nature of their jobs. They spend all night hearing out moaners, whiners, drunks, cruisers, con men, liars, losers, loud mouths, suicidals, poseurs, wackos. How could anyone be real in that zoo? Bartenders use whatever emotional response will get them through the situation.

Wine writers are similar to bartenders in this respect. They meet a wide range of people, and they have to be polite and responsive to everyone. This can be quite exhausting, so wine writers develop certain habits and traits to cope. (Hopefully, this doesn’t involve drinking too much, but I’ve known some wine writers who were serious alcoholics.) Like bartenders, they have to have a certain amount of charm; but behind the charm lies an impenetrable mystery. Who the wine writer really is, is something most people he meets will never know. I don’t believe wine writers try “to manipulate others,” as Katy says bartenders do. But they are skilled at creating comfort zones that allow both sides to escape from what can be a sticky situation.

Do wine writers “always need to win”? Of course. Duh. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be telling everyone what to like.

None of this, of course, makes wine writers psychopaths. But I do think wine writers tread the line. There are classic signs. They’re not real good at parties. They don’t mix well, the solitary nature of their jobs making them loners. They’re also somewhat “on stage” in public, which makes them queasy. Bartenders are constantly on stage, but they like it and thrive center-stage. The public persona of the wine writer must be something he’s never entirely comfortable with. He or she puts on a costume with every public appearance. The wine writer who is least psycopathic learns to make this costume as transparent as possible, so there’s they least distinction between the “real self” and the “perceived persona.” The most psychopathic wine writers are those whose actual personalities are impossible to discern from their public presentation–even to themselves, which is the essence of their psychopathy. If you run into a wine writer, how do you know the difference? Trust your intuition.