I’ve been closely following this brouhaha about sexist sommeliers and the raging debate it’s inspired about topics ranging from wine snobbery and elitism to employment opportunities for women in the wine business.

Given my long involvement in the wine business, which included exceptionally close contact with sommeliers, and given that I’m a gay man in an industry that traditionally has sidelined gay people, I feel entitled to speak my mind when it comes to questions of equity and abuse. The first thing I want to say is that this is a good debate. The wine industry—on the growing side, the production side, and the hospitality/service side—has been heavily dominated by men—specifically, straight white men–for too long. On the marketing-public relations side, that’s less true; women traditionally have been very powerful in P.R. But for that very reason, P.R. has been viewed (mostly by men) as the less important side of the wine industry, the province of “the weaker sex.”

I’m not big on quotas; no industry should be compelled to hire in the exact percentages of the U.S. population by gender, ethnicity, race, sexual preference, or anything else. Still, when a group has historically been excluded from participating in an industry, it should surprise no one when representatives of that group complain. It also should not surprise anyone that, where there is exclusion, there exists the possibility of abuse: some groups perceive themselves (and are perceived by others) as being more “worthy” and “talented,” and those groups—usually white men–believe they should support the existing power structure which, of course, benefits them.

I look back over my decades of involvement in wine and restaurants here in California and elsewhere, and I’m surprised that I didn’t realize sooner that the wine industry had serious equity problems. Back in the 1980s, when I was getting started, men ran everything. They made the wine at the wineries. They worked at the restaurants, both as chefs and as sommeliers. They ran the tasting groups, and they dominated the media, in books, newspapers and newsletters. Women were relegated to the sidelines. I remember Merry Edwards telling me the story of when she applied for a winemaking job at Schramsberg, in the 1970s. Her resume read “Meredith Edwards,” so the owner, one of the Davies, assumed the job applicant was male. When he met Merry for the interview, he was clearly taken aback. Merry asked him, “Would you have brought me in for an interview if you’d known I was a woman?” The answer was no.

I heard similar stories from a wide variety of women: Genevieve Janssens, at Robert Mondavi, described how she feared she’d be fated to work in the lab, not as a winemaker. The story on the restaurant floor was similar. Were there any female sommeliers or wine service people at top San Francisco restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s? If there were, I don’t remember any, but I remember male somms at Square One, Lulu, Rubicon, Farallon, Fleur de Lys, Postrio, Aqua, Boulevard, Hawthorne Lane and others. How come I didn’t find this overwhelming dominance by men weird or discomfiting? Because, I suppose, I wasn’t sensitive to the issue. Sometimes we have to forcefully be sensitized to these things; otherwise, we accept them blindly and blithely.

I was, on the other hand, acutely aware of the void of gay people in the wine industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Or, to put it more accurately, I knew people who were gay—or were said to be gay—and in some cases they were quite famous. But there was a silent agreement to not say anything. You couldn’t really come out of the closet; despite the wine industry’s supposedly liberal orientation, the actual towns of wine country were (and are) socially conservative. You couldn’t ask anyone if he or she were gay; that would have been unprofessional. And, as a writer, I knew for certain I couldn’t say in an article that someone was gay (not that it made a difference to the wine). Gay people (including Lesbians) were therefore hidden away, like the mad aunt in the attic. I’m not sure that, even now, things have changed that much.

The male sommeliers I’ve known and worked with have been in general a friendly, kindly bunch. But, again in retrospect, when I look back, I can see how thoroughly they dominated their local scenes. They were highly respected, especially if they were Master Sommeliers. They were looked upon by us lesser mortals as almost divine in their authority and knowledge—indeed, this is how they saw themselves. We all deferred to them, and they took advantage of it and acted in very royalist capacities. When I quit Wine Enthusiast to work at Jackson Family Wines—which, in my time (2012-2016), employed more Master Sommeliers than any other company in America—my feeling about them was that they were quite happy to be the resident muckety-mucks. They were a separate priesthood within a large, diverse employee community. This isn’t to say that I ever knew any sommeliers, Master or not, to engage in inappropriate sexual activities. I did not. But then, I wasn’t a woman, working alongside and for a somm. Nobody was making “moves” on me. And men in power were inappropriately compromising women in many industries, not just wine. So it would be unfair to single out the wine industry for sexism. The wine industry, like nearly every other industry grouping in America, was simply doing what America itself was doing.

The good thing about our modern society is that situations of such rampant inequity can’t exist for long. They’re exposed in the media; people naturally take umbrage at such outrages. Demands are made for reform, and industries must accede to these demands, or suffer the consequences. I think there are probably excesses: not every male who’s accused by every female of inappropriate behavior is guilty. There are two sides to every story. But overall, this scandal that erupted in the Court of Master Sommeliers is good news. It will make the wine industry fairer and more responsible. It might even make it less elitist. I’ve said for decades that there is way too much snobbery in the wine industry. I “get” it; I know why that is, and I confess to having done my part to aid and abet it, albeit unconsciously. But I always thought that, when it came to “Master” Somms and “Masters” of Wine, things had gotten a little out of hand. I think, although I can’t prove it, that women somms are less authoritarian, less given to power tripping than male sommeliers, and certainly less prone to sexual harassment. So if the field of wine service is more open to women, that will benefit the dining public. Women may be able to demystify wine (a rallying cry for the last 80 years) in a way that men could not—or did not want to.

I was shocked and immensely saddened to learn of the death of Milla Handley, the co-owner and winemaker at Handley Cellars.

We met a long time ago; I can’t remember the year, but it was when I was working at Wine Spectator, so it must have been around 1990. It was my first trip to Anderson Valley, the Mendocino County wine region, where Milla had founded her winery, in the hamlet of Philo, in 1982.

I liked Milla instantly. She was a rare combination of earthy, country common sense and what I thought of as an Old World dignified charm. A woman of few words and a soft voice, she always had a sparkle in her eye, and a sense of humor that was restrained, but once you learned to detect it, you couldn’t miss it. But of more importance to a wine critic were Milla’s wines.

She specialized in Burgundian varieties—Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that did so well in Philo’s cool, foggy climate—and also in the sparking wine she made from the same grapes. She also was an early enthusiast of Alsatian varieties—Pinot Gris, Riesling, Gewurztraminer—which thrive in Anderson Valley. Over the years, I’d run into Milla over and over, because as proprietor of a small, rural family winery, she had to get out there, in front of the public and merchants, and hand-sell her wines. I’d see her at nearly every event in the Bay Area, standing there quietly behind her table, pouring, answering people’s questions, busy; but whenever our eyes met, there was that silent smile, as if to say, “Hello there, old friend.”

Milla, who died of COVID-19 at the too-young age of 68, was a Grande Dame of California wine. She will be missed, and long remembered.

* * *

Too often, these days, they’re leaving us, these pioneers of the boutique era of California wine. What a privilege it was to grow up during it and find a place in the burgeoning industry that was about to take its place on the world stage. Almost everyone you met “back in the day” was famous for one thing or another. Everybody had a compelling story. By 2000 or so, “the story” had become, all too often, a fabricated or exaggerated concoction dreamed up by P.R. specialists. But early on, the stories were real, the characters straight out of O. Henry. Most founding winemakers of the 1970s and 1980s were authentic startups, with little money but big dreams, as opposed to a later era, when the winery “lifestyle” became buyable by rich outsiders. Milla was the opposite of the rich outsider, but she came up in wine in high-class style, working, straight out of U.C. Davis, for Richard Arrowood at Chateau St. Jean (which invented the concept of single-vineyard Chardonnay) and Jed Steele at Edmeades, just down the road from Philo; and if Milla’s Zinfandels lacked the elegant sophistication of those from Edmeades, they were gulpable and affordable.

The wine press today rightfully is headlining Milla’s demise. She wasn’t the best-known winemaker in California, but she symbolized the grit, integrity and can-do spirit of amateurs who succeeded in the industry when it was still an adventurous frontier that rewarded innovation. She symbolized, too, a quality that is fast disappearing in our multi-billion dollar wine industry: humility. Rest in peace, old friend.

I do a lot of reading in these shelter-in-place days. In fact, I’m cannibalizing my library—reading the same books over and over. One that I started yesterday is an old standby: The Wines of California, The Pacific Northwest & New York, by Roy Andries de Groot (1982). De Groot, a kind of minor James Beard, was a New Yorker with a reputation for being a gourmet and wine lover; he also was blind. In this book he developed what he called “the first classification” of the vineyards and wineries in the three states, a task he modeled after the 1855 Bordeaux Classification.

What is striking about The Wines of California is how dated it is. De Groot used a numerical rating system based on 50 points, and classified the wines into eight tiers; the top ones he called Noble, Superb and, at the pinnacle, Great. A good many of the wineries he included no longer even exist. Others, such as Beaulieu, have undergone corporate changes and are no longer what they used to be. And obviously, there are now hundreds of wineries in California alone that didn’t exist in de Groot’s day. For these reasons, de Groot’s classification is of no value today.

But it does make for interesting reading. I have to give him credit for at least attempting the task. Forty years ago, when de Groot was compiling his research (which meant traveling the country tasting wine), he had no reason to think that the wine industries of California, the Pacific Northwest and New York would not settle down and become as fixed and immutable as in Bordeaux itself. Bordeaux, after all, had remained relatively stable for 400 years of turbulent European history; there had been minor shifts in chateau ownership and vineyard holdings, but for the most part, the wineries and vineyards of Bordeaux in 1980 were much as they had been a hundred and fifty years earlier.

California looked to repeat the pattern. There were a handful of high-quality wineries of longstanding pedigree (Inglenook, Beaulieu, Louis Martini, Charles Krug) and, more interestingly from de Groot’s point of view, there had been a rash of new “boutique” wineries from the 1960s onward: Joseph Heitz, Robert Mondavi, Burgess, Carneros Creek, Fisher, Matanzas Creek, Chateau Montelena. De Groot was well aware of the burgeoning nature of California wineries: how relatively easy it was for a young winemaker, especially one of means, to plant a little vineyard and start a winery. Still, he believed that the California wine industry was settling down, the same as Bordeaux had, and that the U.S. consumer needed a reliable guide to choosing its wines.

De Groot had a good palate and a deep understanding of viticulture, enology, cuisine and history. Despite the book’s datedness, it’s fun to read for the snapshot it gives us of what the wine landscape looked like in the early 1980s. But it also is an object lesson in what not to attempt in a wine book. No wine writer in his right mind would attempt to classify the “wineries and vineyards” of California today; if one were to try, no publisher would be interested, for such a book would be an anachronism before the ink was dry.

De Groot noted, correctly, that the 1855 Bordeaux Classification had been based partly on the prices then obtained for the wines, and partly on the wines’ reputations among people of knowledge: brokers, mainly. Today, we still unofficially “classify” wines based on the same or similar criteria. Ask someone with a fairly good understanding of California wine what the “top” Cabernets are, and he will likely include Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, Bryant, Abreu, Phelps, Diamond Creek, Dalla Valle and perhaps a few dozen others. Has that person tasted all these wines? Probably not. Few have. He will have based his conclusions on what he’s heard of the reputations of those wines as well as what he knows of their prices.

That’s the way human judgment works. Reputation is everything. The Bordelais proprietors of the 19^th century knew this as well as the owner of Screaming Eagle knows it today. Their methods are similar, although the details have changed. You have to identify the tastemakers and then get them to authenticate your product. You spread the news via word of mouth or, in these modern times, through print media and social media. You induce the best restaurants to carry and promote your wine. You introduce the notion of scarcity: there’s not much of this, folks, and everybody wants it, so you better get yours while to can.

Back to Bob Thompson’s “rabbit hutch.” Just as it’s nearly impossible to take a census of, say, 1,000 bunnies in a pen, because they’re reproducing so fast, so it’s nearly impossible to count the number of wineries in California. Some are “virtual” wineries, possessing no “bricks and mortar” facilities, merely buying grapes, must or finished wine from someone else and bottling it under their brand. The same wine might appear under a dozen labels. There are probably fewer wine brand startups these days, with the pandemic; but before the era of the virus, the explosion of labels, some tiny to the point of vanishing, was significant, and the explosion likely will begin again once the pandemic is over (may it happen soon).

All these factors mitigate against formulating a new classification, but somehow, we humans end up classifying wineries anyway, in more indirect, subtler ways. There’s something in our brains that longs to create order out of chaos. We’re uncomfortable with thousands of winery brands in California; it’s too messy and incomprehensible. So we classify and rank and compare in any way we can and, as the saying goes, perception is reality. Is Screaming Eagle really the best Cabernet in California because it’s the most expensive? No. But if enough people—people who count, that is—think it is, then it is.

I spent the better part of 30 years living and working in 100-point land: the wine-rating system used by my two former employers, Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast, as well as by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate.

The 100-point system surely is the most popular in the world. It has survived decades of often fierce criticism. Critics said it was arbitrary and capricious, that it presented itself as scientific when it was anything but, that it had a deleterious effect on wine style because the most powerfully extracted, oakiest wines got the highest scores. All these things were true, but the 100-point system proved remarkably robust. When I retired from formal wine tasting eight years ago, it dominated the market, and, as far as I can tell, it still does.

The 100-point system looks like it’s here to stay, at least in America. There’s nothing looming on the horizon to replace it. Oh, sure, a new generation of wine drinkers has increasingly turned to peer-reviewing on social media; they no longer care what some (usually white) wine critic says, and that’s fine. But in that sense, the market may be ahead of the industry. Winery P.R. communications continue to tout high scores (anything over 90 points) in their campaigns. As long as that’s the case, wine samples will continue to be mailed to wine critics, who will continue to publish reviews using the 100-point system, which will continue to be touted by winery P.R. people, and on and on…It’s a cycle, and like most cycles, it’s hard to stop.

But a new development in China throws all this into an interesting perspective. Mike Veseth, the respected wine economist, just published an issue of “The Wine Economist” that reports on “China’s 10-Point Scale.” That gigantic country apparently is launching an official, national rating system of 10 points that will “score…each wine on the market taking into consideration…Chinese tastes, cuisine, and culture.” The new system is being rolled out in stages. It was introduced late last year, but The Drinks Business publication reports it “is not yet compulsory for all wines sold inside China [and] may serve as a base for formulating a national [wine] recommendation system.” That article quoted a Chinese expert as predicting that, eventually, “[the] majority of wines sold in China will adopt this system.”

Now that I’m not living and working in 100-point land, I have the benefit of hindsight about the 100-point system that provided such a nice job for me for so long. And the more I think about it, the sillier it seems to be. I used to be quite sincere when people asked how I could determine the difference between, say, 87 points and 88 points.. I would say, “Easy. To me, it’s obvious.” And I could go into great detail, if they wanted. At the same time, I always admitted that, if I tasted the same wine (from different bottles) on separate occasions, chances were good that I’d give it different scores. But, I argued, in general the scores would be close together. In the end, I always said, a wine review ought to be looked at as the taster’s impression of that wine, at a particular moment in time, and consumers were free to accept, reject or ignore the review.

Nowadays, I often cringe when I see how wine scores are used. There are so many critics across this land (and elsewhere) that a P.R. person has her pick of dozens of reviews to use in an advertisement. We, the consumer, often don’t know the qualifications of the reviewer, or the circumstances under which he reviewed the wine (blind? Open?), nor do we always know with precision what the relationship is between reviewer and winery. Has the reviewer been paid? These are important considerations. (Of course, the new Chinese system suffers, I would think, from the same drawbacks.) I turn to critics and scores to inform my own buying decisions, but I always feel a little guilty about it. I wish that all numerical rating systems would go away, and be replaced by something more esthetically satisfying: a short essay, for example, that showed real writerly qualities.

I think there’s a place for more intelligent, nuanced wine reviewing. As we emerge from the pandemic, it’s going to be a different world. After all these months of sheltering in place, people may well be more reflective, and less reflexive. I know that social media tends to work in the opposite direction, making people think less; but here and there I pick up on clues that younger people are getting tired of social media. They’re reading more books and spending less time scrolling through meaningless Twitter feeds. I’m hoping to see new publications emerge that treat wine consumers as intelligent, thinking adults, instead of like cows lining up for silage.

My generation, the Baby Boomers, gets blamed for a lot of stuff, but one thing we got right was wine. We “made” the U.S. wine industry back in the 1970s and 1980s, when we were developing our esthetic and culinary tastes, and wine fit the bill quite nicely.

I speak of “esthetic” tastes, although I could have referred to “cultural” or “lifestyle” tastes. As a demographic—the largest in U.S. history–we Boomers understood by the late 1970s that we had changed the way America does things, and that anything we embraced en masse was likely to be a trend. Baby Boomers had been trendsetters since we were born, and embracing wine was simply another wave in the demographic tide we launched upon the country.

Wine suited our slightly outlaw sensibilities. It was alcohol, after all—a mind-altering drug, and Boomers knew a thing or two about mind-altering drugs. Alcohol, during the heyday of the Sixties, had a negative aura around it: Bowery bums, cheap bottles of Ripple, throwing up, that sort of impedimenta. No pot smoker or acid head with any self-respect would have been a drinker! But a new generation of vintner-entrepreneurs in California—not Baby Boomers, but older—was completely shifting wine’s rather tarnished image. Wine was no longer booze, but an upscale foodstuff, something you could talk about, study, appreciate intellectually as well as hedonistically, and it fitted in perfectly with our newfound appreciation of food. There was something authentic about wine—and Boomers prided ourselves especially for our authenticity.

It was always a question of whether we could bequeath that appreciation of wine on to the generations who came after us. The industry-wide conversation of the last twenty years, in fact, can in retrospect be viewed as trying to answer that question.

A new report by Silicon Valley Bank on the wine industry contains a mixed message. There’s good news: Yes, Baby Boomers continue to display “spending resilience,” which is a good thing for the industry, and “retiring baby boomers seem to have a long tail and fortunately aren’t quick to run to pasture,” which is also a good thing, especially if you’re a Boomer: it means we’re not all dying off!

But there’s also some bad news. Boomers’ “buying seems to be moderating, both on price and volume, as they age.” This makes sense to me: once we retire, most of us find ourselves on fixed incomes, meaning that we don’t drop $25 on a bottle as easily as we used to. (There’s also the reality that, for many of us, our doctors are telling us to moderate our alcohol consumption, if not eliminate it entirely.)

That means that the industry has “no choice except to market to them [i.e. a younger generation].” Unfortunately, “Millennials aren’t engaging with wine as hoped.” In fact, “millennials have made no move in taking share from boomers in several years.” This is really disappointing for producers. With crops continuing at record levels (meaning there’s plenty of wine in the supply chain), the industry is “at a position of oversupply…that extends through retail [outlets] and every growing region in California at every price point. For California,” the Bank’s forecasters warn, “this is the worst combination of market conditions for growers since at least 2001, and perhaps of all time.”

Scary words! But one of the benefits of advanced age is, perhaps, a more seasoned perspective on things, including disaster predictions. We’ve been here before! In the late 1980s and early 1990s, everyone was predicting the imminent demise of the California wine industry due to phylloxera. Didn’t happen. Similar dire prognostications were heard when lead wine capsules were implicated in human disease, when the dot-com collapse led to a recession, and certainly, when the Great Recession struck in 2008-2009. Then, too, the corporatization of wine signaled, to many analysts, the demise of the family winery. And even as recently as the 1990s, neo-prohibitionism still haunted the industry, as anti-alcohol forces, mainly in the Republican Party, threatened to bring back a [somewhat milder] form of Prohibition.

Happily, the wine industry survived all those threats. And here we are once again, facing another one: Baby Boomers eventually will die, Millennials will not take their place as wine drinkers in sufficient numbers to save the industry, and—the coup de grace?—these same Millennials are turning to craft beer and spirits, not wine, to satisfy their alcohol dreams.

What’s a vintner to do?

The Silicon Valley Bank forecast answers this question in an interesting way, by pointing out the truism that Baby Boomers consumed food “if it wasn’t bad for you,” while “the current generation wants to consume things that ‘are good for you.’” As a Boomer, I can confirm the accuracy of that statement concerning people born between 1946 and 1964. As for “the current generation,” I don’t know how much “what’s good for you” drives their food-and-beverage consumption. But when I see the droves of people in their 20s and 30s in the many wine bars in my neighborhood (many of which tout themselves as “natural”), I am struck by the fact that they’re leaner and apparently healthier than many of their generational counterparts, who so often are sadly obese. This suggests to me that younger wine drinkers are concerned about their physical health. They perceive wine, perhaps a bit inchoately, as somehow “healthier” than beer or spirits (or teetotalism). I’ve been critical of the hyperbole that attaches to the promotion of “natural” wine (which there’s no actual definition of), but I will give the naturalistas credit for this: they came up with a damned good marketing message that may, in fact, get wine through this current uncomfortable phase!