It used to be, for most of my wine writing career, that I visited winemakers (and winery owners) to listen, not to talk. In the beginning, I had much to learn: about viticulture and enology, about the business side, about how they had gotten into wine, about the local history and terroir and so on.

I’m a good question-asker, with a natural curiosity, and since most people enjoy talking about themselves, the conversation between me (or the reporter in me) and my interviewees never flagged. But these days, I find myself talking to winemakers (and winery owners) more than I used to. Why? Read on.

During a typical visit, the winemaker, who’s been expecting me, has probably gone over in his mind what he wants to tell me. Maybe it’s about his over-arching philosophy. Maybe it’s about a new vineyard he’s developing, or a new winemaking team he’s hired, or a new cave they’re building. Usually, the winemaker wants to taste with me, which opens up whole new areas of conversation. Often, I’ll take out my old-fashioned pen and pad of paper and take notes. This is all in the tried-and-true journalistic tradition of a Q&A where I’m “Q”, the winemaker is “A”, and the result is that odd bit of literature called “an article.”

But I’m afraid I’m turning into a gadfly lately, which is turning the tables on the old way, but when it feels right — when it feels like the winemaker has given me an invitation — then it has to be done. Here’s how it might go.

Winemaker: So I hear your blog is pretty popular.

Me: Thanks. It’s a lot of fun. [Here, there might follow a bit of chatter about how long blogging takes, why I do it, etc. Then I might ask:] So do you blog? Do you do any kind of social media?

Winemaker: [laughing] Me? No. None of that stuff.

Me: Why not?

Winemaker: Oh, I don’t even have a computer! [or a cell phone]. I don’t have the time. It’s too hard; I wouldn’t know where to begin. And I wouldn’t know what to say.

Me: It’s not as hard as you think. You probably have somebody in your employ who’s working with computers, right?

Winemaker: Yeah. [In fact, it could be the winemaker’s son or daughter.]

Me: All you need to do is have them set up the back end, the actual format of the blog. Once that’s done, all you have to do is type in the words. It’s just word-processing. If you’re not comfortable working with a keyboard, just write your blog out in longhand, and have somebody transcribe it for you. It doesn’t have to be long. Maybe 400 words.

Winemaker: [thinking] Well, but what would I say? I’m not a writer.

Me: Well, for example, you met me here this morning, right? You greeted me as the sun was rising and the mist was lifting off the hills. It was cold. Then we piled into your pickup, and you drove me around the appellation, showing me the various vineyards. I asked you questions, remember? About the difference between the hillsides and the flatlands. You talked about alluvial soils, about landslide soils, about limestone outcroppings uplifted 20 million years ago from the sea. Then we drove back here to the winery, where we’re now sitting, tasting through your ‘09 Pinot Noir barrel samples: the 114, 115 and 667 clones, the Pommard, the Swan, the Martini. Don’t you think you could write up 400 words on that?

Winemaker: [frowning] I guess.

Me: So you see, you do have something to say. Every day you have something to say.

Winemaker: Well, who would want to read about it?

Me: Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t?

Winemaker: Anyway, I have a gal I hired who does that for me. She set up our Facebook page and our Twitter account.

Me: Do you even go there?

Winemaker: Not really.

Me: Look. Nobody knows if this “social media” stuff is going to matter for a winery. It may never move a single case; it may be the future. But I can tell you two things: One, it’s basically free, so why not play around with it? You have nothing to lose. And two, don’t let someone else speak for you. Speak for yourself. A P.R. person or a social media employee can never be you. The whole point of a blog is authenticity. Believe me, artificiality shows through a blog like patch of ringworm on a face. You can’t hide it. People want to read blogs written by people who are being themselves — who let it all hang out. They don’t just want to read about facts, which can be spun and manipulated. They want to feel your personality come through, with all its joys, uncertainties, fears, hopes, dreams, enthusiasms, humor. You’re a real person. You’re being real with me right now. All you have to do is write 400 words 3 or 4 times a week and get it up there on your blog.

Winemaker: Well, how would I know if it’s working?

Me: You won’t, initially. You might not get any comments for weeks or months. You might have not have any idea if anyone even reads your blog. But like I said, what have you got to lose?

That’s when I usually see the winemaker lose interest, and I wonder if maybe I’ve overdone it — if I’ve somehow been inappropriate and lectured (or hectored) somebody who was kind enough to be my host. But then I ask them the killer question:

Me: You say you’re increasingly relying on direct sales for your business, right? Like through your tasting room and wine club?

Winemaker: Right.

Me: I bet your direct sales customers skew older, right?

Winemaker: Yes, they do.

Case closed.

Yesterday, the sixth and final day of my road trip south, primarily consisted of a blind tasting of 60 Chardonnays. The tasting was held in a small meeting cottage at the Santa Ynez Inn, and was kindly set up by my friend Sao Anash, who assists many writers when they visit Santa Barbara County.

I had never done a standalone tasting of Santa Barbara Chards. (There were two from San Luis Obispo.) I was interested to see if I could discern differences between the county’s various appellations. Most of the Chardonnays were from either Santa Rita Hills or Santa Maria Valley, with some marked simply “Santa Barbara County.” These latter were either from Santa Maria or Santa Rita (so far as I could tell) but preferred to keep the better-known countywide appellation on the label, or they were from an interesting region around Los Alamos, which is more or less inbetween Santa Rita Hills and Santa Maria Valley, but does not yet have its own AVA but should. There are fewer and fewer Chardonnays from the Santa Ynez Valley these days, which is as it should be, as it’s too warm there, although SYV is great Sauvignon Blanc county.

I’m sure there are people who would conclusively state that there are vast differences between Santa Rita Hills and Santa Maria Valley Chards, but I’m not one of them. Clonal and barrel differences are at least as important in imparting character as a few miles of separation. Both regions have more reasons to be similar than not. In fact, I think of them as basically the same, separated only by the accident of the 101 Freeway. They’re both west-east running valleys (unlike any others in California), thus allowing chilly Pacific air (and believe me, the ocean is cold out there) to funnel in, given the westerly or northwesterly breezes that characterize the California coast most of the time. That makes them cool-climate regions. You don’t want to grow Cabernet in Santa Maria or Santa Rita Hills. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are the grapes of choice, although Syrah does just fine, and the occasional other white grape (Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc) can excel. Not much Sauvignon Blanc works here: too green. Gewurztraminer would probably succeed; Riesling, too, but nobody would buy them, so it’s not worth it for vintners to grow.

Soil-wise, I can’t tell. They’re a jumble down here, now clay, now chalky, sometimes sandy, sometimes stony. As near as I can figure, it doesn’t matter as long as they’re well-drained. Of course, you need superb viticulture, which all the Chardonnays in my tasting had. One vineyard in particular, Bien Nacido, stood out. But then, it had more entries than any other source.

Santa Barbara County is one of California’s great Chardonnay areas and a case can be made that it is the greatest. Certainly there’s a consistency of style. The wines always are acidic; that goes without saying. Acidity is one of the touchstones of a great wine, especially a white one, and super-especially when the fruit is as ripe as it tends to get in Santa Barbara. The reason the fruit gets so ripe is because the growing season is incredibly long. Budbreak begins earlier than in the North Coast, and harvest can extend as long and leisurely as the grower wants. It doesn’t rain much down here, and such rains as do fall usually wait until November. That means the grapes can hang, hang, hang until they rid themselves of all green flavors and develop marvelously fruity ones. To my palate the fruits tend toward pineapples, Meyer lemons and limes, but that’s over-simplifying. The pineapples often have a grilled quality, as if they’d been on a skewer barbecued over hot red oak. The Meyer lemons have an intense, pie-filling quality, while the limes likewise have a pastry taste, like the Key lime pies I used to bring home with me when my parents lived in Florida. Of course, part of that pie and pastry quality is oak, toasty and smoky and slightly sweet. These Santa Barbara Chardonnays can handle new oak as easily as Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, for the same reason: they’re rich, voluminous wines, broad and impressive in body. Flamboyant in themselves (just try Cambria’s 2007 “Unwooded” from Santa Maria Valley if you want to see what unoaked Chard can do), they adapt to oak the way a Hollywood actress on the red carpet shows off haute couture. Beauty clad in beauty equals dazzle.

Santa Barbara whites also have a minerality. We can argue all day what that means and where it comes from. Locals insist its from the white chalky limestone that’s exposed on outcroppings. Maybe. The acidity certainly helps inspire a tangy, cold metal-like taste. Whatever the source, this minerality is bracing. So that becomes another factor in Santa Barbara Chardonnay. They have a nervy, electric quality without which the fruit would be merely ripe. Edna Valley Chardonnay has this electric quality. But it seldom has the depth and interest of Santa Barbara Chardonnay.

The overall quality of the wines I tasted was extraordinary. Sao came in two or three times during the nearly five hours (!!) I took, just to see how I was doing, and I swear, every time she did I told her in marveled and ecstatic terms how thrilling this tasting was. Wine after wine, so pure and intense, so visionary and translucent, it was hard to pick winners from losers. And in truth, there were no losers. But the wine critic must rank order. That is his job.

How do you determine preferences between wines of such quality? There’s only one way: balance. Balance is the exquisite tension between ripeness of fruit (so easy to achieve) and all the other moving parts: Acidity. Oak. Tannins. Length. Finish. Lees influence. Minerality. Richness. Dryness. Malolactic fermetation. Creaminess. Utlimately, balance is impossible to define. It’s like former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

Well, I know balance when I encounter it in wine. Here are some of the great Santa Barbara Chardonnays I tasted yesterday. All should be current in the market. My full reviews and scores will appear in upcoming issues of Wine Enthusiast Magazine.

Alma Rosa 2008 (Santa Barbara County)
Byron 2007 Wente Clone (Santa Maria Valley)
Fontes & Phillips 2008 (Santa Barbara County)
Cambria 2007 Clone 95 (Santa Maria Valley)
Fess Parker 20008 Ashley’s (Santa Rita Hills)
Longoria 2008 Cuvee Diana (Santa Rita Hills)
Melville 2008 Estate (Santa Rita Hills)
Ojai 2007 Clos Pepe Vineyard (Santa Rita Hills)
Rusack 2008 Reserve (Santa Maria Valley)
Vino 2007 Solomon Hills Vineyard (Santa Maria Valley)
Testarossa 2008 Bien Nacido Vineyard (Santa Maria Valley)
Au Bon Climat 2007 Los Alamos Vineyard (Santa Barbara County)

These are awesome Chardonnays that prove there is a “Chardonnay zone” of climate that snakes its way through the county’s western canyons and up onto the foothills. They show, also, that both 2007 and 2008 were very great years for Chardonnay in Santa Barbara County.

Richard Sanford and I spent the morning tasting and talking about the Santa Rita Hills and his fabled career. Lest you know him only for his Alma Rosa Pinot Noirs, particularly from his La Encantada Vineyard, his twin white Pinots — Gris and Blanc — with their natural crispness — are worthy of your attention. The latter is rich, the former sleek as a Brancusi swirl of steel. More on Richard at another time.

From there my friend Sao Anash whisked me up to Bien Nacido where four fabulous chefs — Matt and Jeff Nichols, Frank Ostini and Rick Manson — prepared a Santa Maria-style barbecue to put all previous barbecues I’ve even seen to utter shame. Bien Nacido’s Miller family were my hosts, and my gladness was diminished only by the absence of Nicholas, the “face” of Bien Nacido Vineyard and someone whose joy in life is infectious. After lunch it was back down to Los Olivos for a visit and tasting with a winery I’ve followed for a long time, owned by one of the premier wine families of the Santa Ynez Valley, Gainey. It is about this tasting I want to concentrate in today’s blog.

I’ve given quite high scores for many years to Gainey’s wines, and the barrel samples they offered me certainly didn’t disappoint and in fact raised the bar higher. We went through various samples of block-sourced 2009 Chardonnays that did and did not go through the malolactic fermentation. If you’ve never had that exercise, do so. Here’s a non-ML that’s so crisp and savory in fruit it makes your mouth water. Then there’s the ML version and, as I said, almost apologetically, “I know we’re not supposed to say the word ‘buttered popcorn’ but…”. They smiled. A touch of that movie theater treat is great; too much would be a disaster. But Gainey has seldom if ever been guilty of “too much” of anything, or “too little” either.

It was the 2009 Pinot Noir clonal tasting that excited me and, to be blunt, challenged me. Usually I grill winemakers. This time it was the other way around, courtesy of one of Gainey’s longtime winemakers, and a person I decided I liked way back when I first met him, Kirby Anderson. The four clones we went through were Pommard, Swan, 667 and 114. (Well, I guess technically the first two would be called “selections,” not clones.) Kirby made me explain my impressions of each. My spiel went something like this:
“From left to right [i.e., Pommard to 114], we went from fruitier and lighter to denser, more full-bodied and weightier.”

Kirby: “Right. What fruits did you find in the 114?”

Steve: “No fruit, in fact. I wrote: ‘tannic, beetroot, dry, sassafras.’”

Kirby: “Very good. The 114 is earthy.”

Steve: “That’s what I meant by ‘beetroot.’”

Kirby: “What else?”

Steve: “The Pommard was all cranberry-cherry. Also very spicy. The Swan reminds me of Russian River: cherries, cola, raspberry. The 667 is deeper black cherries, with greater structure.”

Kirby: “And overall?”

Steve: “None of them is complete in itself.”

Kirby: “Mix the Pommard with the 114.”

I did so, and said, “A more complete wine. Fuller, richer. But still, something missing.”

Kirby: “Add a splash of Swan.”

I did, and said, “The most complete wine yet. Very nice. But still, something missing.”

Kirby: “What’s missing?”

I thought. The middle was a little hollow, and the wine, good as it was, trailed off to a quick finish. I said so, and Kirby said, “Good. So what is it missing? How would you fix that?”

I thought. What’s he driving at? Does he mean it needs a splash of Swan? Or some other clone? My mind went blank. In such circumstances, with others around the table watching the wine critic suddenly being critiqued, there was dead silence. Of course, all you can do is be honest — transparent, in our current vernacular — and admit bafflement.

“I don’t know, Kirby,” I said. “You’re the winemaker. You tell me.”

“Oak!” Kirby beamed, triumphantly. He’s got great twinkly eyes and a dazzling smile but now his eyes were twinklier, his smile more dazzling than ever.

I had thought he was asking me how to fatten and length the barrel sample through the addition of other samples, but of course he was entirely right. The wine needs the 8 or 10 months of partially new oak barrel aging that will complete it. I just hadn’t been thinking “outside the envelope” or, as it were, beyond the table. I asked Kirby to tell me 4 things that oak barrel aging does to Pinot Noir to make it better. Kirby gave me five:

- texture
- richness
- structure
- weight
- length

I’ll say one more thing about the Gainey tasting. They know that, with rare exceptions, I have never liked Santa Barbara Cabernet Sauvignon from anyone (although I’ve been praising Gainey’s Merlot since the 1990s; Merlot doesn’t need as warm a temperature to ripen as Cabernet). But this time they had a bunch of barrel samples of Cab and they also had assembled their entire Cab team around the table: John Engelskirger (the longtime Napa vet who consults for them), viticulturalist Jeff Newton, and their Cabernet winemaker, young Jeff Lebard. And, of course, Dan Gainey was there. Hmm, I thought, this could be ugly. If I have to complain about the Santa Barbara veggies, it will be embarrassing to everybody.

Well, I didn’t. The clone 337 and clone 15 Cabernets were very fruity and rich, not a trace of veg. Then they gave me a barrel sample of a blend of ‘09 Cab and Petite Verdot. I swirled, sniffed, tasted, repeated, repeated a third time, and looked up. All eyes were upon me.

“This is, quite simply, the best Santa Barbara Bordeaux-style red wine I’ve ever had,” I said. They told me it will be even better when they’re finished with it, after probably adding Merlot (a no-brainer) and maybe some Cabernet Franc, then aging it for 16-18 months in 50% new oak.

Lots of things can happen between cup and lip, so we’ll see. But the 2009 Gainey, which will probably have a proprietary name, is a wine I hope I’m going to be able to review someday.

But then it was on to dinner, another barbecue, this time up at Fess Parker with two of my favorite Santa Barbara people, Eli and Ashley Parker, who had another trio of chefs — Joanne and Eddie Plemmons and Kevin Hyland — pile on an incredible, amazing, unbelievable table of grilled chicken, tri-tip, you name it. I’ll be writing all about Santa Maria-style barbecue in an upcoming issue of Wine Enthusiast.

I’ll have more to say about World of Pinot Noir this week, but now it’s off on this cool, partly cloudy morning to the south, and a few days in Santa Barbara County.

(I will also have more to say soon about the movie I’m in, Blood Into Wine, and the way they portrayed — or didn’t portray — my blind tasting. Stay tuned.)

I was reading the L.A. Times this morning over breakfast (oatmeal for health, bacon in hommage to Homer Simpson, and also because there’s been a lot of talk about bacon at this Pinot Noir event) when I came across yet another article on that big fight in New York State over whether to permit grocery stores to sell wine.

Like you, I’ve been kinda sorta keeping up with that story. I understood the issues. I just wasn’t sure which side I agreed with. One the one hand are small, mom and pop liquor stores, who fear that if grocery stores are allowed to sell wine, it will hurt them and maybe drive them out of business. On the other hand are groceries, who argue, Why shouldn’t we be allowed to sell wine? It would be a great benefit to our customers, particularly those in rural areas, who won’t have to drive 5, 10 or more miles just to buy a bottle of wine.

Both sides have a point, as is often the case with tricky social, cultural and legal issues, which is why they’re hard to decide. For example, Napa’s winery ordinance is tricky because it pits wineries, who want an extra income stream, against some of their neighbors, who don’t want more traffic, etc. But in a democracy, somebody has to win. In the New York case, I’m siding with the grocers. They should be allowed to sell wine, for several reasons.

For one thing, it’s difficult for a state — in this case, New York — to present a coherent reason for intruding into private, commercial enterprise. Granted, alcohol is a regulated product, but it’s not clear that a State, or county or city, has the right to decide who should and shouldn’t be allowed to sell wine. Yes, States have the power to grant liquor licenses, but all things being equal, they shouldn’t be in the position of picking winners and losers. (The one exception I’ll make is that cities should be allowed to limit the number of liquor stores in ghetto neighborhoods.)

For another thing, this notion of letting only liquor stores sell wine is so antiquated, it’s pathetic. A holdover not only of Prohibition but of 19th century attitudes toward Demon Rum, it fails to recognize that wine is now a mainstream, respectable food. Most people who drink wine do so with meals, and in the company of friends and family. Wine is not some narcotic drug whose dissemination must be limited only to certain restricted areas, like prescription medicines sold in a pharmacy. (And even supermarkets, which are just giant grocery stores, contain pharmacies.)

Finally, we have only to look at our state of California to see that letting grocery stores sell wine seems to be doing little harm, if any, to wine stores. At small grocery stores, like 7-Eleven, all they stock are the big distributor brands that most mom and pop wine stores wouldn’t think of selling anyway. At larger supermarkets like Safeway, the selection is bigger, and there may be some overlap between what they sell and what a little wine shop sells, but if there is, it isn’t much. No, what small wine stores sell tends to be either rarer, more expensive wines or inexpensive imports that most grocery stores would never feature. I think of a wine shop like Paul Marcus, in my neighborhood, where you can get wonderful Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian wines for under $20. You’d never see them in a grocery store.

So I don’t think the New York liquor stores, who are organized under a group called “Last Store on Main Street” (an apocalyptic name meant to frighten) really have a case. I suspect New York State will eventually agree to let grocery stores sell wine, if for no other reason than that it will generate a quarter-billion bucks in new license revenues. If there are some liquor stores who feel threatened by open competition, let them upgrade to quality stuff. Consumers will shop wherever they think they can (a) get the best wine (b) at the best price (c) with the best customer service (d) and with the most convenience. They really don’t care if it’s a grocery store or a liquor store, and neither should New York’s (dysfunctional) government.

Old farts? Or rock stars?

At World of Pinot Noir, I introduced a friend of mine, a good-looking ultramarathoner without an ounce of bodyfat on his lean frame, to Richard Sanford, who is the Dean of Southern California winemakers. Hell, Richard is one of the Deans of all California winemakers. When Richard and I get together the conversation occasionally turns to Olden Times, and so it did there under the tent by the sea, where Richard was pouring Alma Rosa for the WOPN crowd. He was telling my friend about the old Sanford label and the Sanford & Benedict Vineyard when my friend — whom I like a great deal and admire for his creativity, not to mention the fact that he can run for 100 miles — said something about “you old farts.”

He meant it, I’m entirely sure, affectionately and without malice. We all say things that pop into our heads without thinking. I do every day, and I know it was that way with my friend. Still, it hurt, a little. Maybe it tapped into so much of the crap about dinosaur print writers who don’t get it versus cool young Twitterers who are the wave of the future, yadda yadda. At some point in one’s life and career, you have to start wondering if you’re still relevant — and maybe you find yourself trying a bit harder to prove you are.

So here I am now, in a coffee shop in “downtown” Santa Ynez, nursing a non-fat latte, when I pick up a copy of last Nov. 26’s Rolling Stone. Therein is an article on “the historic concerts for the 25th anniversary of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.” The musicians included such old farts as Mick Jagger, Bruce Springstein, Aretha Franklin, Bono, Patti Smith, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkle, Stevie Wonder, Bonnie Raitt, Lou Reed, Ray Davies, Jackson Browne, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sting — and on and on.

You know, I’ve read and heard younger rockers, like Fergie, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Trey Anastasio, Will.I.Am, Shakira, Pink, Sheryl Crow, Foo Fighters, Taylor Swift, even Adam Lambert credit their musical forebears with blazing paths, breaking down barriers, opening entirely new genres and whole new universes of possibilities that enable pop music to forever stay vital, and to be one of America’s enduring contributions to world culture. And if you ask Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder and their generation, they always and happily pay their propers to the likes of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, Elvis, Cole Porter, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Sinatra, Fats Domino — that list also goes on and on.

For the life of me I don’t know wine writers seem more hung up with generational divisions than rock stars. Professor Saintsbury inspired Harry Waugh and Michael Broadbent, who inspired Hugh Johnson, who inspired Oz Clark and Jancis Robinson, who has inspired God knows how many women to believe they can be great wine writers. The writers of the 60s and 70s even inspired Robert Parker, even if it was in the negative sense that he decided to be unlike them, as Elvis decided to be unlike Pat Boone and the Sex Pistols decided to be unlike Journey. Parker, Johnson, Waugh, Bob Thompson, Charlie Olken and, yes, Jim Laube inspired me. I have some reason to think, or at least to hope, that I have inspired younger writers, and I know that Richard Sanford has inspired a generation of younger winemakers. Even now, there are brilliant young vintners working up and down California who keep one eye on the venerable past, with all its lessons and wisdom, as they stride into futures filled with hope and promise.

Old farts, or rock stars? Richard Sanford still has a few tricks up his sleeve. So do I.

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?”