Of America’s 50 states, 18 are control or monopoly (as of 2005), meaning that their citizens can buy alcoholic beverages, including wine, only in state-owned stores. This is a result of the Repeal of Prohibition, when Congress decided on a states-rights approach, as opposed to a national policy, for governing the sale of alcohol.

The system of state monopoly stores has never worked well, depriving consumers of choice and, in many instances, resulting in drab, poorly run venues. It’s odd, too, that so many monopoly states are solid Republican, given that party’s traditional defense of free markets and suspicion of Big Government. For many complicated reasons (not the least of which is that the public hasn’t clamored for an end to monopoly control), changing the system was never high on anyone’s agenda.

That has now changed, for a simple reason: The economy. Nearly every state in the union is bankrupt or close to it. Governors and state legislatures are desperately seeking new sources of revenue. Loathe to raise income taxes, they’re looking at “creative financing,” such as fee and license hikes. Some officials in control states also are thinking what once was the unthinkable: privatizing alcohol sales.

In Washington State, lawmakers have introduced a bill “that would have Washington get completely out of the liquor business, allowing an unlimited number of people to buy licenses to sell liquor, as is done in California.” The idea is that, by selling the state’s warehousing facilities, and by allowing the market to determine prices, Washington could nearly double the $320 million alcoholic beverages brings in annually.

Down in Mississippi, which is suffering from its worst budget crisis since the Great Depression, Republican Gov. Haley Barbour has called for legislation “to privatize the wine-sale functions” of the state’s Alcohol Control Division. In Vermont, a state Senator has introduced a bill “to disband the department of liquor control.” In Virginia, “Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s new Republican governor, made privatization of his state’s liquor stores a key plank of his campaign last year,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which also reports that McDonnell’s idea “is opposed by the Virginia Assembly of Independent Baptists.” And in neighboring North Carolina, the state’s Republican candidate for Governor, Pat McCrory, similarly “said it’s time for North Carolina to get out of the liquor business.”

Sounds like a road to Damascus moment for Repubs. One of the reasons opponents are against this entirely rational, self-interested plan to privatize alcohol sales is that minors would supposedly have easier access to liquor. If you think about it, that’s a bogus argument. It presupposes that a state store employee is less likely to sell liquor to a minor, and that a private store employee is more likely to. It seems to me the chances are about equal in both cases, and incapable of resolving further.

It’s time for America to do away with state-run liquor stores. I mean, where are we, the U.S. or Syria? It would harm no one, and will help financially embattled states raise a little extra cash. I am calling on all politicians in control states to put their money where their mouths are. Are you in favor of market-based capitalism, or of the heavy, controlling hand of government?

Most of the chatter about wine blogging has been from the point of view of the amateur wine blogger: how can he or she monetize the blog? Who’s writing the best blog? Who’s on what panels, who’s got the latest book deal, who’s got the most visits, who’s the new kid on the street, who’s the coming star?

All good questions, but we sometimes forget that there’s another source of blogs out there: winemakers. Their blogs may not be as widely read as the amateur wine blogs, but an argument can be made that they’re more educational. Because, after all, what do most wine bloggers know about wine, except (a) they drank something last night and (b) they’re going to tell you about it. But winemakers live and breathe wine. They have great stories to tell.

I’ve urged winemakers for years to blog. Usually their reply is “I don’t have the time” or “What would I say?” Both of those concerns are baseless. Blogging takes very little time — you can put up a post in 10 minutes. As for what to say, if you’re a winemaker, all you have to do is describe what you did yesterday or this morning. “Woke up before dawn to the sound of the frost alarm going off.” “Had a little earthquake that popped a few bungs in the cellar.” There’s always something interesting going on in a winemaker’s life.

Now, the wine world welcomes a new winemaker’s blog. It’s called “Making Dom Perignon” and it’s the personal blog of Dom’s chef de cave, Richard Geoffroy.

The blog was just born, in late January; so far, Geoffroy has written 3 posts. It’s unusual for a highly-placed winemaker to write a blog, especially in Europe, so Geoffroy is to be congratulated for taking this step.

The blog shows promise. Geoffroy obviously is smart and a good writer. I would offer a few suggestions to make the blog better. For one, the posts are not particularly long, and there is an atmosphere of marketing around them, as though Dom Perignon’s P.R. people went through Geoffroy’s originals with a red marker, deleting here, adding there. Then, if you click on the “read more” section to learn more about Geoffroy, you come to an “About the comments” section written by someone called “The moderator” who, it would seem, is someone other than Geoffroy. Who is “The moderator”? Why is Geoffroy letting someone else into his blog? The moderator writes: “Please be assured that Richard Geoffroy will read [all submitted comments], even though it will obviously not be possible for him to react to all of them.” Why not? I don’t react to all comments on my blog, but it’s certainly possible for me to do so. As soon as you tell readers upfront that it’s not possible to reply to all comments, you’re telling them, in effect, “I don’t really care all that much what you say, so don’t bother to write in.” And believe me, under such circumstances, they won’t. Besides, when I read the blog (this morning), there was exactly one comment up. Is that too many for Geoffroy to reply to?

Still, it’s a good thing that Geoffroy is writing his blog. I hope he gets into more detail about Dom Perignon and sparkling wine in general. Tell us, Richard, more about your job, your travels, the great meals you have, the people you meet, the places you go. We want to hear all the behind-the-scenes stuff. Your blog can be a real hit, if you don’t allow the marketing and P.R. people to censor you. They’ll try to, you know. That’s what marketing and P.R. people do: control messages. (It’s not a bad thing, it just is.) A blog, on the other hand, is pure spontaneity. It’s a peek into the blogger’s id, without the restraining filter of the superego. The best blogs feel pure and untrammeled, not like they’re the product of a carefully-calculated message.

Ever since I started blogging (two years this May!), some people have painted me out to be some kind of dinosaur who’s afraid that my world — that of the old-fashioned, top-down, print-based wine critic — is fast disappearing.

Trying to defend a system whose time has come, they say. Refusing to recognize that ordinary consumers no longer want or need “experts” to tell them about anything. And whenever I rise to my defense (and the defense of wine critics in general), I’m answered with something like this: “You’re just an industry gatekeeper, pushing back out of fear against the new world wherein every wine drinker is entitled to his own opinion.”

That’s how the well-known M.W., Tim Hanni, has been putting it, mostly lately in this article, in today’s online Guardian, out of England. Tim once again criticizes the “snobbery” and “prejudice” of those of us who dare to make wine suggestions and recommendations, a sin he believes “costs the wine industry billions of dollars a year” (for some undefined reason). Along the way, he also “debunks” one of wine’s most cherished assumptions: that certain wines and foods pair well together while others don’t. “’Matching’ wine and food is lazily unchallenged bunk,” the Guardian writer paraphrases Tim as saying. And, a little later: “For years, Hanni taught that wine had unassailable, objective absolutes; that certain foods are best eaten with certain wines – oysters with muscadet, say, or chablis.” There followed for Tim, in the mid-1990s, “an epiphany or a nervous breakdown” that made him reconsider “everything he had formerly believed.”

Well, I’m not big on epiphanies, although I’ve had my share of surprises that have made me reconsider lots of things. But I can’t imagine anything that would make Zinfandel taste good with oysters. Or a big, oaky Cabernet Sauvignon. Can you? Uggh.

Sure, it feels great to reassure people that they can drink anything they want with any food. People love reading that. It frees them from the very real tyranny that too often surrounds the wine-drinking experience. Tim argues that his mission in life is to liberate consumers from formulae, including pairings that are very old and well-understood. It’s what he calls “this profoundly modern, compellingly individualist approach,” which stands in utter contrast to tradition. And what better time to trash tradition than today, when everything we’ve known for so long seems to be coming undone?

I don’t agree with Tim’s premise, though. He can call me a dinosaur, an industry gatekeeper pushing back furiously against the onslaught of change. But none of that changes the truth. A winetaster can learn to understand and talk about wine. The longer you study it, the better you get. A wine critic who tastes his way through thousands of wines a year is in a better position to make judgments than the ordinary consumer. Food and wine pairings are not arbitrary.

Look, if you want to drink Harlan Estate with your oysters, be my guest. Not gonna lose any sleep over that one! If you want to say that all wine critics are full of it, go right ahead! Sticks and stones and all that. If you want to take the view that everybody’s palate is equal, feel free. I’m not gonna argue with you. If you tell people not to worry so much about wine, I’ll be right there beside you. In fact, I’ll say it now: People! Don’t worry so much about wine!

Still, having said that, I do think there’s a movement afoot in America driven by the “de-mystification” crowd who hope to make a living by doing that professional “de-mystifying” the public so deserves. Ironic that the people leading that movement are former critics and “snobs” themselves. Like Twelve-Steppers, they claim to have “seen the light” or “seen the error of their ways” (or, in Tim’ case, to have had “an epiphany”). But I’ll tell you the truth: Anybody who says their goal in life is to make simple what we wine critics over-analyze is giving you a simplistic explanation and one moreover you should take with a grain of salt. Beware the demystification industry. It’s not as pure and disinterested as you might think.

I am just getting around to reading Hugh Johnson’s 2006 memoir, A Life Uncorked, which was published by my publisher, The University of California Press. It’s a good read and I recommend it especially to younger bloggers who are considering careers in wine writing and criticism.

Johnson is of course one of the most famous living wine writers and has been for a long time. One of the topics that fascinates me personally concerns longevity, or, more precisely, how is it that somebody can make a good living, over many years and even decades, from writing about wine. It’s something I’m sure a good many wine bloggers wonder about. It must seem daunting at the outset: so many would-be wine writers, so few spots available for actually getting paid for it.

When Johnson started writing, the field was considerably more open. He experienced what he calls his “Damascus moment” in college (Cambridge University), where he was able to drink (because colleges back then had their own cellars for undergraduates) such wines as Lynch Bages ‘53 and Lafite ‘49 (which Penning-Rowsell described as “delicate, distinguished but perhaps over-light”). That persuaded him to join the University Wine & Food Society. His first job, after graduating with what he calls “a gentleman’s degree” [i.e., more or less useless, like a B.A. in humanities] was as a staff writer for Condé Nast, at Vogue. One of his earliest assignments was to write an article about turkey, and what wines to pair it with.

“I knew, of course, very little about turkey or what wine to drink with it,” Johnson writes, adding, “but ignorance is the safest starting point for a journalist. I identified authorities. I rang them up. I wrote down their answers, and my name appeared at the bottom of the article.”

From there, Johnson was off to the races, so to speak. “Once a writer has been identified,” he writes, “…you can imagine what happens. ‘This Hugh Johnson, who is he? Never mind, he writes about wine in Vogue.’ Could I have lunch? Would I like to visit Champagne? It didn’t take long.”

There are several elements of Johnson’s story that are relevant today for wine writers. Even though the times are very different, the fundamentals still apply. For one, Johnson as a young ambitious writer recognized authority. He understood that his knowledge of wine was necessarily limited by his youth and inexperience — not a bad thing, as his remark about “ignorance” suggests, because that realization allowed him to open the empty vessel of his mind to every source of information that could possibly fill it, beginning with established experts. (Johnson testifies to learning from the “handful of regular wine writers” then working in Britain, including André Simon, Cyril Ray and Elizabeth David.)

Johnson not only turned to established writers to inspire and teach him, he began forming relationships which were to last a lifetime, and would later help him in his own career. Part of the secret of longevity at any job, but especially one so evanescent and creative as wine writing, is for people to like you and want to help you. But that’s only part of it, and maybe not even the greater part. What’s central to longevity is excellence in your writing, and that in itself is the product of several components. One is a thorough knowledge of your field. Johnson specialized in the wines of France (although, as a talented writer, he could make sorties through other countries and not be embarrassed). I specialize in the wines of California. Once the wine writer becomes well-versed in his or her field, she must develop a lucid, friendly writing style that people find accessible and enjoyable. It can be tricky to take as complex a subject as wine (which involves organic chemistry, farming, technology, history, geology, politics, psychology, economics, business and fashion) and then translate it into written words that are simple to comprehend. It’s not exactly turning a sow’s ear into silk, but something along those lines. Here, too, Johnson benefited from being heir to a long line of British writers who took the written word as seriously as they took their Monarchy. From Elizabeth David, for instance, Johnson writes: “[S]he taught me how to stickle; there was never a more pinpoint stickler for accuracy and honesty. It slowed her writing down to a crawl, all the checking and delving.” For the writer, to stickle (from Middle English, to rule, order, dispose; to raise objections, haggle, or make difficulties, esp. in a stubborn, narrow manner and usually about trifles) is as necessary as oxygen is for breathing. The writer stickles, not others, but himself.

Good wine writing, like good writing of any kind, is hard. Getting and keeping a job in this industry can be challenging. Keeping it for many years, as Hugh Johnson has done, requires a kind of miraculous ability to juggle many plates at the same time. Among the hundreds and hundreds of wine bloggers working today, a very limited number actually will graduate into the front ranks and still be getting paid to write about wine twenty years from now. I have my own ideas who they will be; probably you do, too. I’m going to be talking about this later this month at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood. It should be interesting.

The contradictions in the U.S. Bordeaux market as a result of the economic crisis could hardly be more glaring than when viewed through the lens of these two dueling headlines:

Bordeaux wine industry rallies to survive in US

and

Global Market Explodes with Huge Prices for DRC, Lafite, Pétrus, Harlan, and More as Hart Davis Hart Sells 100% of Lots for $3.5 Million

The first, from Yahoo News, reports that the American market for Classified Growths is so disastrous that “Some vintners have taken the unprecedented step of buying back their own wine.” Among these are such celebrated names as Chateaux Gruaud Larose, Greysac and even — Sacre bleu! — “the iconic Petrus.” The chateaux resorted to this desperate act to protect their wines’ image, “which can be destroyed by heavy discounting” expected when supply far exceeds demand. (All these moves followed ripple-effect like after Diageo, through its U.S. importer Chateau & Estates, “began aggressively liquidating tens of millions of dollars’ worth of [Bordeaux] stock at 40 to 60 percent discounts.”)

I don’t know if ever before in the history of Bordeaux the chateaux have bought back their wines from distributors in order to protect prices. I have read Eddie Penning-Rowsell’s “The Wines of Bordeaux” and seen nothing there of the kind. Can you imagine if, here in the States, Harlan, Colgin, Araujo and Screaming Eagle had to re-purchase their own wines after they already were somewhere in the market? (Never mind that most of them never see the distributor chain.) It would be shocking.

But how to reconcile this sad reality with that second headline, which comes via a press release from the Chicago wine auction house, Hart Davis Hart?

“Global Market Explodes with Huge Prices for DRC, Lafite, Pétrus…”

Drilling down into the details, “Eager bidders participated from 41 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, as well as Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, South Korea and the United Kingdom.”

These seemingly opposite truths are, in fact, completely compatible. The kind of person who pays $71,700 for 6 magnums of 1982 Pétrus is not feeling any pain. And, rest assured, there still are plenty of such multi-millionaires. They are the bankers, high tech magnates, international businessmen and inherited-wealth crowd who are largely immune to the vagaries of the economy. The people who are hurting — who have turned with a vengeance away from buying Classified Growth Bordeaux in this country — are the ordinary middle and upper-middle classes who, in normal times, thought nothing of buying some Gruaud Larose to stash while drinking their Sonoma Cabs and Paso Robles Zins. Heck, even I used to buy Gruaud in the 1980s.

So Bordeaux is in free fall, at least here in the U.S., and “The 2007 [vintage] is basically unsellable,” a French importer-distributor told Yahoo News.

The Bordelais have apparently decided to try to do something about their declining sales. This article describes how “Bordeaux [is] courting new drinkers online and in person” by such tactics as a consumer-friendly website, enjoybordeaux.com, and “Bordeaux ‘MatchMaking’ events – tastings where people with similar wine preferences meet each other and try new wines” [see bordeauxmatchmaking.com].

If that smacks of stooping to conquer — a bit unglamorous and Madison Avenue-y for prestigious Bordeaux — well, it is; but desperate times call for desperate means. Look at it this way: At least we haven’t heard of Lafite, Latour, etc. hiring Social Media Managers! (Paging Monsieur Hardy Wallace. Please report to the Médoc.)