Lord knows I haven’t been a big fan of California Sauvignon Blanc over the years. I thought that, compared to white Bordeaux, Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé, and even Marlborough, my state has been a distant second, or third. The wines have tended to be either overly sweet, or green, or just plain thin and acidic.

But in the past year, I noticed I’m giving some pretty good scores to Sauv Blanc. I gave a little thought to blogging about it, but the moment never seemed right, until yesterday, when, by coincidence, two things happened. First, I got an email telling me I was mentioned in a Facebook post, so I clicked on the link, which took me to the feed page of a winery, Vellum, where the poster had written: “The 2010 VELLUM White was awarded 92 points from our friends at Wine Enthusiast Magazine. A wildly high score for a white Bordeaux blend!!” (The wine actually is 80% Sauvignon Blanc and 20% Semillon, and was raised in neutral oak.)

At the same time, I was about to review a bunch of Sauvignon Blancs that had come in from Flora Springs, Dutton Estate and J Ludlow. I enjoyed that flight very much, for the most part, and once again found myself giving out some pretty good scores.

I checked out Wine Enthusiast’s database for my highest scoring Sauv Blancs over the past 365 days and found about 40 that got between 90 and 93 points. The four 93 pointers were Trione 2010 River Road Ranch (Russian River Valley), Duckhorn 2010 (Napa Valley), Robert Mondavi 2008 I Block Fume Blanc (Oakville) and Hall 2010 T Bar T Ranch (Alexander Valley). Except for the Trione, the others are wines I’ve known and praised for years; Hall bought T Bar T from Iron Horse some years back. Iron Horse,  I believe, used to jazz their Sauv Blanc up with a little Viognier, to brighten it and give it some uplifted floral notes. I don’t know if Hall still does. And then, of course, Mondavi’s I Block always is triumphant. And by the way, that wine ages.

Anyway, people sometimes ask me why I don’t give Sauvignon Blanc scores as high as Chardonnay. For example, in the past year I’ve given two 96s, to Shafer 2009 Red Shoulder Ranch (Carneros) and Foxen 2010 Block UU Bien Nacido Vineyard (Santa Maria Valley). The answer probably won’t satisfy everyone. It’s simply that I don’t think Sauvignon Blanc–at least in its California incarnation–has the depth and richness of Chardonnay.

I admire Sauvignon Blanc more than I love it. I respect its dryness (when it is dry, which too often it isn’t), its acidity, its streamlined minerality, its spiciness, its exotic range of flavors, its palate-cleansing properties. Those are all good things, especially at the table. Sauvignon Blanc is probably the most food-friendly white table wine in California. But when I’m in the mood for a cold white wine, it’s almost never a Sauvignon Blanc that I grab, but Chardonnay. That’s why they call Chardonnay a “noble” variety, but not Sauvignon Blanc. Even in France, Sauvignon Blanc never elicited the profound excitement that white Burgundy, including Chablis, did and still does.

I am, as many of you know, something of a student of the history of wine, and of California wine in particular. I’ve always had a hankering for history–any era, any country–although I do have my favorites: World War II is one (I have almost as many books on that as I do on wine), and I also enjoy the history of science, especially of modern physics. But my wine education began with a study of California’s wine history, and it’s still going on. That’s the thing about history: it keeps on happening.

I’m mindful of this, because I’ve been thinking about how Francis Ford Coppola is engaged in restoring the historic Inglenook name, which really had been dreadfully mauled over the years, since it passed from the hands of the great John Daniel, Jr. to a series of corporate owners, including United Vintners, Heublein, Constellation and The Wine Group. No disrespect to any of those fine companies, but that’s a pretty sad track record for a winery that had been as great as Inglenook, which was founded in 1879 and therefore has a legacy as important as any winery in California.

When I first started learning about wine, Inglenook already was in its dog days. It was mainly known for the Inglenook Navalle bottling, which hardly was great wine. Those of us who knew history appreciated and respected Inglenook for what it had been, not what it was. We hoped that, someday, the glory that was Inglenook would be restored. But that seemed impossible. Even after Francis Ford Coppola successfully repatched together the original Inglenook estate vineyard, in Rutherford, with a series of purchases, the name “Inglenook” seemed deader than a doorknob. Coppola named his brand Rubicon, not Inglenook, because he didn’t own the rights.

That’s now changed, and is why it was so exciting to hear that Coppola had bought back the Inglenook name (from The Wine Group) and plans on resurrecting it for the wines that had been Rubicon Estate.

Inglenook was one of the Big Four that kept the reputation of Napa Valley for Cabernet Sauvignon going, post-Prohibition. The others were Louis M. Martini (now owned by Gallo), Beaulieu (Diageo) and Charles Krug, which thankfully remains in the hands of the Peter Mondavi, Sr. family. Each of these wineries is doing fine, although concerning Martini, I think the jury’s still out on precisely where the Gallos aim to take it. Beaulieu has been left marvelously intact by Diageo, who understands the truth of the old adage, If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, and Charles Krug remains an outstanding exemplar of how good Napa wine can be at relatively affordable prices. Still, I think it’s fair to say that none of those three wineries has aspired to be the very best in Napa Valley.

Which leaves Rubicon/Inglenook. Can Coppola push it back to the top? I, personally, have always thought a great deal of Rubicon, the Bordeaux blend that was the Rubicon winery’s flagship wine. The old estate vineyard, west of Highway 29 on the Rutherford Bench, is one of the glories of Napa Valley, just beautifully situated. I’ve always given very high scores to Rubicon (culminating in 95 points for the 2008, which I reviewed last October), and I’ve also always enjoyed the Cask Cabernet Sauvignon, which is consciously modeled after Daniels’ Cabs, made during Inglenook’s glory days in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. That Cask Cabernet, for my money, is pretty much right up there with Rubicon, although it’s a different kind of wine, more closed in youth and, overall, more elegant. But it’s also $100 less.

When I think back over Napa Valley’s amazing history, I’m grateful to those who came later, but advanced the cause. Robert Mondavi clearly stands out, head and shoulders above anyone else in the second half of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of André Tchelistcheff. But we don’t have to choose between them. I also give great credit to Bill Harlan. He came along at a point when pretty much everybody thought Napa Cabernet was as good as it can get, and then he made it better. Without Bill, I wonder if there would be Screaming Eagle, Araujo, Staglin, Hundred Acre, Colgin and all the rest of what we nowadays consider “cult wineries.” Bill Harlan showed that Napa could reinvent itself, even when nobody thought it needed reinventing.

Sodden thought: I wonder what Napa’s next reinvention will be, and who will lead it?

It must drive wineries crazy to read stuff like Joe Roberts’ post today at 1WineDude.

Winery owners are doing everything they can to keep afloat in this dour economy. Most of them are tinkering with social media to some extent; some of them even have dedicated employees for it, if they can afford it. Inbetween buying corks and capsules, hoping the bottling line doesn’t break down, filling out employee forms, patching up hoses, worrying about drought or swamps in the vineyard, pruning, staking, riding the mule around the vineyard, topping off, racking, tinkering with valves and dials and switches, deciding on blends, driving to the hardware store, going on the road to sell wine, meeting with distributors and wholesalers, having staff meetings, and, oh, trying to find an hour to spend with the wife and kiddies, here’s Joe telling them they need to “just start using that time on social media to connect with customers already.”

What time? You mean those few hours between midnight and dawn when everyone’s entitled to a little sleep?

I pity these poor vintners. Everybody’s telling them to do social media, “to reach younger wine consumers” through the Twitter machine, to check their Facebook feed every three minutes, to blog, to make YouTubes and put them up on Oinga-Boinga or Diddly-Squat or whatever the hot new social platform is that’s about to go public. And those vintners are just sitting there, like, What? What are you talking about? It’s easy for someone who doesn’t have a real job to tell them to hang out on social media all day long, as that will magically solve all their problems. It’s also easy for that same blogger to tell winemakers “But if I were a small-production winery, I’d be worrying a hell of a lot more about how to reach, engage, and keep customers I had (as well as engaging new ones) than trying to get a crazy-good review with critics.” Why would a blogger tell winemakers not to be concerned with the critics? That’s crazy talk. And it must drive winemakers nuts (like I said) to think that they’re not doing enough to “engage and keep” their customers. When you accuse a hard-working vintner of being lazy when it comes to engaging customers, it’s like asking a guy when he stopped beating his wife. There is no answer that’ll get him off the hook. If he admits he’s not reaching out enough to potential customers, he subjects himself to feelings of guilt and suffering, because he knows that, no matter what he does, it can never be enough.

I agree that winemakers or owners should play around with social media, if they want to and like it. I spend a lot of time at it myself. But I don’t think it’s helpful to tell them that they’re bad if they’re not living online. When Joe (whom I like a lot, I really do and he knows it) says, “Honestly, I’ve got no idea what producers (especially smaller wine producers) are waiting for when it comes to outreach,” he’s really doing a disservice to the people he says he’s trying to help. How does he presume to know that producers are “waiting for” something? He doesn’t know the myriad ways that each producer is reaching out and engaging, whether it’s through a wine club, or working the tasting room, or hitting the road for a winemaker dinner, or writing thank you notes to valued colleagues, or visiting Wine Enthusiast’s headquarters in New York and tasting with the staff. Winery people work really hard, long hours. Telling them they have to put social media at the top of the list of things they’re already overwhelmed with is really no help at all.

There’s always some tension between wineries and the associations that represent their regions. The association acts on behalf of its members, but ultimately, on behalf of itself: any organization’s #1 Darwinian duty is to survive. A winery, on the other hand, has first and foremost to promote its own interests. Sometimes, the interests of the association and the winery do not coincide.

There’s another problem, too. In some cases, winery members pay association fees based on their case production. That means that larger members can have more say in how the association is governed–or at least, be perceived as having more say. This can lead to sore feelings at little wineries, who may feel that their voices aren’t being heard at management level.

I’m not going to name any specific regional associations here. But I will say I’ve worked with them all, through many of their changes in personnel and strategy. I’ve gotten to respect some for their effectiveness, while not having a whole lot of respect for others that seem to just limp along year after year. So here’s my advice: six things a successful winery association should do.

1. Represent all your members without appearing to favor any of them. The worst thing that can happen to a regional association is to become riven with internal political strife. I’ve seen it happen. An association can go from relevant to irrelevant overnight, and it can take years to recover–if it ever does. The best association executive directors will stand up for what they think is right, even if it means disagreeing with powerful members.

2. Work hard to earn the trust of the media. The media, after all, is your amplifier to the consumer. You, the association, don’t communicate directly with the public, for the most part; the media does that for you. If the media likes and respects you, and if you’re helpful to them, they’re more likely to want to write about your region.

3. Understand things from the winery’s point of view. An association might believe its function is to promote the appellation it represents. This is only partially true. Yes, you want the public to know and trust the region, be it Dry Creek Valley, Santa Barbara County or Fort Ross-Seaview. You want to communicate the unique traits of your region, everything from the climate and restaurants to various recreational things to do. But individual wineries sometimes fear, and rightfully so, that promoting the region has the unintended consequence of promoting their competitors. This is the concern of proprietors. The successful executive director must combine the empathy of a mom for her child with the hard head of a corporate CEO.

4. The way people look for information these days is through the Internet, so why do so many regional winery associations have such boring websites? Granted, things are better than they used to be. But still, some websites are hard to negotiate. They’re clumsy looking, confusingly organized, with inadequate search functions. They’re not places that people want to return to every few days or weeks to see what’s up.

5. Figure out how to keep the association relevant. Wineries today have Twitter, Facebook and other social media outreaches to the public. They blog, make YouTubes, stage events (both virtual and “real”), and in general do a better job of getting out there onto the streets to greet old friends and make new ones. In a certain sense, they no longer even need a big winery association to help them with promotion. Granted, an association with clout can be influential in legislative, international trade and marketing areas, but not all associations have the clout to hire lobbyists or have an office in D.C. or overseas. So the smaller associations in particular really have to offer wineries a reason to support them.

6. Reach out to other, non-wine regional associations in your area and partner with them. Many regions have tourist, convention and other kinds of associations to promote their restaurants, recreational opportunities and the like. This is the age of networking. Nobody makes it alone anymore. It takes the power of collaboration to make things happen, to smash through the clutter of noise out there. As an example, consider ZAP’s (Zinfandel Associates & Producers) partnerships with businesses,  such as The Saint Francis Foundation, Lot18, Wine Enthusiast, BevMo and KQED television. Granted, ZAP is not a regional organization, but it behaves like one. ZAP shows how the power of “we” is greater than the power of “me.”

I like brie, that famously runny, aromatic cheese that comes from the Brie department of central France. Brie and Chablis wine, which hails from the Yonne department just to Brie’s south, have been a historic pairing for centuries (although Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, “we wouldn’t say we’re crazy about the combination of Brie and Chablis”).

Yet “brie and Chablis” (or “wine and cheese”) has long been a derisory term for liberals, and no liberals in America arouse the wrath of the right more than San Franciscans. When did wine and cheese become the odious signifiers of those unpatriotic, deviant, nattering nabobs of negativity, the liberals?

I trace it back to the split between wine and beer cultures that Europe saw in the Middle Ages. Where winegrapes could be cultivated in the warmer Mediterranean south, people were Latinized: less warlike, fond of siestas, food, dancing, conversation, good living and lovemaking. In the north, where it was too cold for vitis vinifera to grow, people turned to beer; they were Continental tribes, descendants of Huns, Vikings and Slavs, a warrior society not keen on art or philosophy. They preferred drinking beer from the skulls of their enemies.

We see this split echoed today in America, where Dr. Vino last week wondered “…how did light beer come to be the choice of NFL viewers?” Simple. The NFL reflects the Prussianized, warlike, hyper-masculinized psyche many American males believe themselves to embody (or wish they did). Wine is more the beverage of effete people who go to the Opera.

Wine and cheese receptions have been a mainstay of politics on both sides for a century. When the Harvard Crimson wrote about a Stuart Udall fundraiser in 1976 (Udall, a Democratic Arizona Congressman, was running in the primaries against Jimmy Carter), the writer described an event he went to as “a typical wine-and-cheese gathering.” Nothing Republican or Democratic about it, just bipartisanly political. But by 1980, the phrase somehow had become anti-Democrat, although when “cheese” was replaced by “brie” and “wine” by “chablis,” I will leave to future historians to figure out. When John Anderson, a Republican congressman from Illinois who was a sort of Ross Perot-style maverick, was running for President, he was portrayed by the right as not conservative enough. A columnist for the Washington Post, Mark Shields [himself a moderate Democrat], wrote: “For John Anderson to be a true challenger for the presidency, he cannot be either a ‘spoiler’ or simply the favorite of the brie-and-chablis set.” Did Shields pluck that phrase out from the ether? Undoubtedly it had antecedents. Some think that Leonard Bernstein’s famous party for the Black Panthers, in 1966, was the prototype; that fête was endlessly parodied by Republicans as bleeding heart “limousine liberal” pretension, and, after all, Lenny (the ultimate liberal Democrat), was a Jew, plus he was bisexual, and his beautiful foreign-born wife, Felicia, the quintessential Upper West Side hostess, served wine and “Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts,” according to Tom Wolfe, who wrote about it.

Little Roquefort cheese morsels! It was perhaps understandable that the right confused roquefort for brie, which may have been easier for them to spell. How easy for pretzel and beer loving Republicans to satirize that citified appetizer (and with crushed nuts, to boot). By 1982, “the wine and cheese crowd” had entered the political lexicon as a metaphor for Democrats: here’s The Texas Monthly describing “the hatred that the Okies from Muskogee feel for the wine-and-cheese” crowd” to explain Texas’s transition from FDR stronghold to Reagan country.

They’re still doing it. Yesterday, as the world famously knows, the San Francisco Forty Niners played the New York Giants for the NFC championship. Just before the game, a New York Daily News columnist, Filip Bondy, wrote that Niner fans are “overrated,” likening them to “Strange, exotic plants”, “not fat enough” and “softer” than Giants fans–in other words, San Franciscans are insufficiently brutal. Bondy was making a funny, of course, but the tweak was enough to prompt the San Francisco Chroncle’s sportswriter, Scott Ostler, to pen in response, “49ers fans’ courage not measured by Brie and wine,” he headlined, although Bondy used neither of those terms. But then, you can’t blame San Franciscans for being a little defensive after decades of getting their butts kicked by the right. As recently as 2008, Pat Buchanan (who knows something about demonizing his political opponents) still was ranting about “the chablis-and-brie set of San Francisco,” even though by then, the characterization was shopworn. Incidentally, being “brie-and-chablis San Franciscans” didn’t seem to hurt the 2010 Giants or, for that matter, five Super Bowl-winning San Francisco 49er teams (1981, 1984, 1988, 1989, 1994).

Yes, San Francisco lost last night. They played like mensches, and I hope after the game they went wherever they went and enjoyed some well-deserved wine and cheese.

“Pinot could be excellent,” I wrote in my vintage diary on Sept. 2, 2010. At that point in the harvest–a crucial one, when a heat wave had just blasted Northern California–everything depended on two things: the weather moderating, allowing the grapes to ripen evenly and not shrivel, and the rain holding off.

In the event, the next several weeks provided some scares, but all was well. I had gone to Santa Barbara during the third week of September and found Pinot vintners there thoroughly unconcerned about the late harvest “because,” I wrote, “it’s not likely they’ll have any rain for months.” The Pinot harvest now started in earnest. I think the overall feeling among winemakers in California that year was best summed up by something Eric Hickey, who makes the wines at Laetitia, told me on Nov. 19: “The Pinot vintage actually looks pretty good considering it all.” He was referring to the merciless ups and downs of the year and, above all, the lateness.

Prognostications concerning vintages before all the grapes are even picked are dicey, especially in California, where we really don’t have disasters, but only shades of disaster. Some pundits who slammed 1989, for example, turned out to be short-sighted. I’ve always maintained that the only way you can finally pronounce on a vintage’s character is to taste a lot of wine from that year, then study your notes and arrive at the appropriate conclusions. That’s good research, but of course it often conflicts with the goal of reporting, which is to be the first one out there with the headline–and the more shocking and controversial, the better.

Well, I’ve now tasted about 110 Pinot Noirs from the 2010 vintage. That’s only a fraction of what I expect eventually to review; I reviewed about 675 Pinots in 2009. Still, 110 is enough to begin looking for trends. What have I found? So far, things are looking good. Not great; my highest scoring Pinot scored only 94 points. After that, three 93s, two 91s, seven 90s, and everything else between 89 all the way down to a miserable 80.

My top scorers came from everyplace: Russian River Valley, Santa Rita Hills, Anderson Valley, Carneros, Sonoma Coast, suggesting that there was a rather uniform quality overall to 2010 California Pinot Noir. Prices for the best Pinots were modest–at least, as modest as top Pinot can get, averaging out around $35-$40. When you think about it, Pinot Noir pricing has remained remarkably constrained compared to the unabashed gouging that top Cabernet houses are imposing on consumers. But then, that’s the law of supply and demand. There are very, very few Pinots that retail for more than $100, such as Williams Selyem’s Estate and Lynmar’s Quail Hill Old Vines, whereas there are dozens of Cabernets, mainly from Napa Valley, that sell for triple digits.

I expect there to be a lot more high scoring 2010 Pinots by the time all is said and done. Wineries hold the best ones back for two years or more, which means that the release of 2010s should start to pick up just about now, extending over the Spring and Summer into Winter, and then into 2013. There’s no reason why 2010 shouldn’t be stellar. It will also give us a glimpse into 2011, which was similar to 2010: chilly, damp and a nail biter until the bitter end.

I’m going to be moderating a panel at The Chardonnay Symposium next June 30. They asked me to pick my topic and after long thought I came up with this:

Given that Chardonnay is, by all accounts, a neutral grape, how do you preserve or express terroir under all that winemaker influence [barrel fermentation, malolactic fermentation, sur lies, barrel aging, etc.]?

I’ve heard that “Chardonnay is a neutral grape” almost ever since I started writing about wine. Wikipedia (which is blacked out as I write this to protest pending anti-piracy bills in the Congress) says “The Chardonnay grape itself is very neutral.” By “neutral” I always figured people meant that the grape and the wine made from it is somewhat linear, being neither strong in flavor nor spicy the way, say, Sauvignon Blanc or Chenin Blanc or, especially, Gewurztraminer and Riesling can have strong aromas and flavors.

It was a sentiment I accepted, because so many smart people said so, until the unoaked Chardonnay phenomenon began, and I found myself tasting Chardonnays that had never seen a splinter of wood that were magnificently rich and layered. Well, you might argue, they still might have been manipulated, with malolactic fermentation and sur lies aging adding things that never came from the grape. And you’d be right.

Yet of all the white wine grapes in the world, save possibly Riesling, experts say Chardonnay most reflects its terroir! Hence my topic idea. What the heck does it mean that Chardonnay displays terroir, when the winemaker has interfered so thoroughly in its manufacture? And I use the word “manufacture” deliberately.

We come here to the concept of lines. By that I mean, there must be a line between one form of winemaker intervention that smothers terroir, versus another that helps express it. But where is that line? And in asking this question, are we engaging in rhetorical flourishes when we get into these angels-dancing-on-pinhead metaphysics? So let me rephrase the question this way: Given that Chardonnay expresses terroir, what can the winemaker do to enhance that terroir–to sharpen its profile to make it more interesting and attractive to the wine drinker?

Well, each question leads to another, creating the risk of an infinite regress. Why do we not say that the most terroir-driven Chardonnays of all must necessarily be entirely unmanipulated? I suppose there are Chablisians who would take that position. So might Greg Brewer, who describes his approach to the grape at Diatom this way:

The challenge is to subtract all extraneous elements to arrive at the utmost level of simplicity, serenity and refinement. In order to maintain this desired purity, fermentation is carried out at a very cold temperature in neutral vessels to retain the most primary attributes of the fruit. Furthermore, malo-lactic is inhibited to avoid the distraction of that secondary level of evolution. The resultant wine is then aged on its non-disturbed lees for health and protection, and removed just before there is any risk of autolysis which could impart nondesirable yeast-like characteristics into the wine.

Great word, “subtract.” I’d call it “not add.” Yet Mr. Brewer remains very much in the minority in the Chardonnay world, where heavy winemaker intervention, including charred oak barrels, lees aging and the malolactic, remains the norm. So, once again, how do we reconcile this notion of “neutral Chardonnay” with “terroir” and all that manipulation?

I don’t know the answer, but it’s a great topic, and we’re going to have a great time knocking it around at my panel. I can guarantee we’ll have 8 or 9 fantastic winemaker speakers, tons of great food, and some surprises too. The Chardonnay Symposium, which will be in its third year this June, is growing by leaps and bounds, and is set to become the premier Chardonnay event in the country, if it isn’t already. I hope to see you there.