The HoseMaster of Wine™ Among the Wine Illuminati at Dalla Valle Vineyards: My Oh Maya

A friend of mine in Los Angeles was an annual seat filler for the Grammy Awards. Awards shows hate for there to be an empty seat when they cut to a shot of the audience. They want to give the impression that their inevitably tedious production is riveting. Yet, as it turns out, even famous musicians need to urinate. The wealthiest rock musicians hire underlings to urinate for them, of course, but, for the most part, urinating is the rare instance they unpack their own instruments. My friend Joe worked the Grammys as a seat filler every year. Eventually, he became a seat filler for the biggest stars, the stars who sit down front. One memorable year, he was the seat filler for Sting. He never did get the pollen out of his suit pants.

That year, I arrived home from work in time to watch the end of the Grammy Awards. I don’t remember the year, and I don’t remember why the hell I was watching such a stupid award show. What I remember was that Carlos Santana was presenting the big award of the night—Best Album. The tension was palpable as he read the names of the five nominees. Santana opened the envelope, which had been sealed in a glass jar on the porch of Funk and Wagnall’s until noon that day where no one could ascertain its contents, and said, “And the Grammy goes to…” The crowd gasped and cheered at the winner’s name (I have no idea who it was), and the television director cut to Sting for his reaction. Only Sting was draining his stinger, and he had cut to Joe.

I imagine 20 million people watching the Grammys at home saying to themselves, “Who the fuck is that guy?” Me, I leapt from my couch screaming, “It’s goddam Joe Lozano! Oh my God, it’s goddam Joe Lozano!” Joe had no idea he was on camera, but there he was, nicely tuxedoed, smiling, and applauding vigorously for whomever had just won the big Grammy of the night. It was his five seconds of fame. It was the Seat Filler’s Wet Dream.

In Napa Valley, the third week of February is when the Napa Valley Wine Writers’ Symposium is held, and on the following Saturday, it’s Napa Valley Premier, a barrel tasting and charity auction of some of the best wines in the Napa Valley. There are a lot of wine writers and other disreputable people around, so many wineries schedule other private events. I was kindly, if inexplicably, invited to Dalla Valle Vineyard for a special vertical tasting of both their estate Cabernet Sauvignon and of Maya, their proprietary blend. Among the dozen or so wine writing Illuminati gathered at the vineyard, I was, by all measures, the seat filler.

Gustav Dalla Valle was a legend in the diving business, like Jacques Cousteau or Jake LaMotta. He spent more time underwater than New Orleans homeowners. In the early 1980’s, he and his wife Naoko purchased a 25 acre property in the hills to the east of Oakville intending to build a luxury hotel on the property (the Dalla Day Inn, I imagine). Instead, the Dalla Valles planted a vineyard, though with a free buffet breakfast. The first winemaker for Dalla Valle was Heidi Barrett, and, if I’m not mistaken, it was Heidi’s first consulting job after she left winemaking duties at Buehler Vineyards. It was Heidi who put Dalla Valle on the map, though she had trouble folding it afterward. And it was Gustav, I believe, who recommended Heidi go directly down the hill from the estate and help the woman who had been Gustav’s real estate agent, Jean Phillips, make wine from her property. That vineyard was Screaming Eagle.

In the 1992 vintage, Heidi managed what was then a very rare feat. She received two perfect 100 point scores from Robert Parker. One for the 1992 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, the other for the 1992 Dalla Valle proprietary wine Maya. Parker anointed Heidi Barrett “the first lady of wine,” but I’m thinking that may have been some sort of weird marriage proposal. Thanks to Heidi and Parker, Dalla Valle Vineyards, and especially the Maya bottling, was officially a cult wine.

The definition of a cult wine is, “You can’t get it, and if you could, you can’t afford it.” You post pictures of a cult wine on your Instagram account, and everyone knows you’re lying when you claim that you actually drank it. I’m looking at you, Raj. In order for me to believe them, photos of rare wines on Instagram need to be accompanied in the picture by a newspaper with the day’s date prominently featured, and/or, even better, the severed finger of the person who purports to have consumed said cult wine, as proof. That’s how you know it’s a cult wine. You drink it and give everyone else the finger.

The Illuminati and I sat down to taste seven vintages of both the Dalla Valle Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and the Maya. The vintages were ’92, ’01, ’08, ’09, ’13, ’15, and the unreleased ’16. I was filling the seat between the inimitable Karen MacNeil and urban legend Elaine Brown (California correspondent for Jancis Robinson, but you knew that). Next to Karen was Deborah Parker Wong, seated next to Elaine was Tina Caputo, and across the table was The San Francisco Chronicle wine critic Esther Mobley and Laurie Daniel, who was in the San Jose Mercury News weekly for 30 years for a crime she did not commit. Like my old friend Joe, you’d look at that group shot, spot me, and wonder, “Who the fuck is that guy?”  

Maya Dalla Valle was also in attendance, as was the current winemaker for Dalla Valle Vineyards, Andy Erickson. I’d never met Maya before, but I used to sell her. Insert Robert Kraft joke here. Maya has a wonderful energy, an obvious intelligence, and a welcoming and warm presence. It can’t be fun to have your first name on a bottle of wine and have so-called “influencers” making Robert Kraft jokes at your expense, but Maya radiated a sweet but firm authority. Her father Gustav, who would have been justifiably proud of such a lovely and brilliant young woman, was a larger than life figure, a man who didn’t just take over a room, he damn near dismantled it. Maya didn’t inherit that gift. Rather than dismantle the room, she brought it light and warmth. It was a pleasure to meet her.

I remember obtaining a few bottles of the 1992 100 Point Maya for my wine list back in the day, but they vanished quickly from the list. I was eager to taste it 24 years later. (Spoiler Alert! It didn’t disappoint.) We tasted quietly, then Maya opened the table to discussion.

It’s safe to say that the Illuminati and I were suitably impressed by the wines. The vertical of Maya bottlings was brilliant. I’m sure that many of the writers and wine critics there will also write about the experience, going into great detail about the wines, their ABV, their flavor profiles, the terroir of Dalla Valle and other technical data. While I understand all of that, when I write about it, I come off like Jamie Goode writing satire. Jaws drop in disbelief and shock, as when one sees a baboon in a wedding dress. It seems funny, but, really, it’s just a monkey more reluctant to wear a wedding dress than Andrea Dworkin. You feel sorry for the primate. That might be the weirdest analogy I’ve ever done. You’re welcome.

I also don’t award points to wines when I write about them. I think it’s safe to say that my writing about wine is completely pointless. I’m not good with points. I find them useless, like music in pornography. Why the hell does this have a score? I don’t need a score. I’m not interested in the score. I just want to put my nose in it.

The flight of Cabernet was, I thought, pretty erratic, like a Mexican free-tailed bat. The wines were all over the place. Yet there was an iron-rich character that ran through all the wines that one would have to think emanates from the site. The vineyard is currently organically farmed, and Maya mentioned that she intends to begin biodynamic practices. Oy. There’s enough pseudo-science in the world, the results of which lead to climate change deniers and Reidel stemware, so why does the wine business so love biodynamics? If the result of being certified biodynamic is that you pay more attention to each grapevine, you pay more attention to the health of the soil, you pay more attention to your entire biosphere and its health, why don’t you simply do all of that and leave out the magic tinctures, the selenophilia, the stuffed cow horns (I’ll have mine lightly breaded), and the rest of the hogwash that crazy Rudy Steiner invented? Steiner was famously a teetotaler. As is Trump. Two of a kind, both residents of the Offal Office. Can we just lose both of them, please? But I digress.

Of the seven Cabernets tasted, my heart was won by the ’09 in particular, as well as the ’15 and the ’16. The ’09, it seemed to me, was a sort of benchmark for what Dalla Valle represents, or could represent. Of all the Cabernets, it displayed the most restraint, walked that perfect line between power and grace. There was intensity, but it wasn’t showy. It was poised and beautiful; Misty Copeland in a bottle. And that’s what I love in great Cabernet. Ballet analogies! I think the ’15 and the ’16 will get there, too. The ’15 showed clearly the iron rich nose of Dalla Valle Cabernet. The note I wrote for it read, “Flirtatious.” Mind you, I was sitting next to Karen MacNeil, and she rubs off on you. The ’16, not yet released, was full of energy, a Jack Russell terrier on dog crack. It will settle down, I feel certain, and achieve that achingly beautiful elegance of the 2009. Many of the Illuminati loved the ’92 Cabernet. It was my least favorite of the day, and, I thought, had the least in common with its siblings. Whereas the ’92 Maya was splendid.

Maya blends Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, and is one of Napa Valley’s greatest wines to feature Cabernet Franc, if not the greatest. I think of Crocker and Starr’s Cabernet Franc as its main rival, as well as the more Loire-styled Lang and Reed wines (if you’ve never had either of these two wineries’ wines, just go out and get some) but there may be others as well. Nevertheless, Maya really shines. Cabernet Sauvignon, the most full-bodied of the Cab on the property according to Andy Erickson, slightly dominates the percentage in the blend, but it’s the Cabernet Franc that makes it so ineffably sexy and seductive.

The 1992 Maya, which received the 100 points from Robert Parker (I think it was the second
California wine to receive those pointless points), was glorious. At 27, it still possessed a wonderful sweetness of fruit, and didn’t strike me as particularly tired at all. One of my notes reads, “Cheval Blanc?” Though I’m far from an authority on Bordeaux (I’m more of a bridal baboon), something about the ’92 Maya reminded me of Cheval Blanc in its prime, there's a richness that both possess, and a sense of soil that is hard to express but easy to pinpoint when you taste it. I thought about the ’69 Chappellet I was lucky enough to taste a few years back because the ’92 Maya strikes me as a wine that just might achieve that legendary status. I wish I owned a bottle.

Yet all the Mayas were splendid. Esther Mobley remarked that compared to the Cabernets, the Mayas had a “quiet” about them. I think I know what she meant, which can be frightening. They’re centered. They have an innate balance that astounds you, the unwavering sense of a Wallenda walking a tightrope. As great as the ’92 was, I think the 2016 is its equal. The density and purity of its fruit is breathtaking. There’s the floral quality of great Cab Franc in its nose, the spice box, the whisper of pyrazine. It sings on the palate, the notes carrying on and on like a string quartet holding the last note of a Beethoven concerto. Yup, it’s that good. But it’s a cult wine, so if you can get it, you can’t afford it anyway.

That’s the thing about being a seat filler/influencer. I don’t think any of the Illuminati at the table could easily afford a bottle of 2016 Maya (it’s somewhere near $400 per bottle). We were there to praise it in print so that our wealthy readers will want to buy it. Though why anyone thinks the wealthy read my blather is beyond me. It’s often been said that my writing is poverty defined. We, at least, were able to taste both the ’92 and the ’16 Maya. Readers have to take our word for their greatness. But we’re influencers, dammit! You can trust us. We all drink.

The Way I Love Wine

I didn’t choose wine as a career. Wine chose me. How many of you feel the same? I woke up one day and I was beginning a job as sommelier in a prestigious old steakhouse in Los Angeles. How did that happen? I haven’t any idea. It’s not something I set out to do. It wasn’t a lifelong goal. I wanted to be the next Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, or Mel Tolkin, not the next, well, pretentious wine dude in a bad suit.

In much the same fashion, I don’t feel that I chose to be a wine satirist, either. When I sat down five years ago to begin writing the blog you’re reading, satire was just what seemed the most appropriate. When it began to catch on, when I began to gain some notoriety, I knew what I was in for. Plenty of adulation and an equal amount of hatred. Frankly, I’m not fond of either. But if you have any success as a satirist, if you manage to do your job and make people laugh at uncomfortable truths, as well as make people angry at the way in which you do that, that’s what happens. I learned a long time ago, in a previous life as a comedy writer, to never take the admiration or the anger to heart. If I use them as any sort of measure, and I am loathe to, I think about which people love what I do (or profess to), and which people actively hate me. For the most part, I’m very comfortable and proud to say that I’m happy with the folks that are in each camp. I love my fans, and, perversely, I treasure those that despise me. They all make the job worthwhile.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Garry Trudeau quote at the top of the page. “It’s not personal. It’s a job.” Wherever I go, I am constantly reminded by wine folks that it’s an important job. Though I am not an important writer.

I want to write about wine from a skewed perspective. So much wine writing on the internet focuses on tasting notes. Nothing is more worthless to wine writing than tasting notes. Taking notes for yourself is very worthwhile, and forces you to actually think about the wine you’ve just consumed. I have 30 years of tasting notes. Believe me, my tasting notes make “The Fountainhead” seem brilliant. My notes have no value to anyone but me. Yes, if you’re a wine critic, tasting notes are your preferred medium, and I feel sorry for you. Assigning scores is easy, writing coherent tasting notes is hard. And tasting notes never capture why we love wine any more than a list of qualities can capture why we love another person. “Honest, compassionate, kind, beautiful, with just a hint of trashy” might be an adequate description of a person’s character, but it doesn’t explain why we love that person. Not at all. Tasting notes are a clinical approach to what is, at heart, an emotional connection. I can describe my favorite wines, but that will not explain why I love them. Yet that’s what matters.

It’s a wine business cliché that stories sell wine. Scores also sell wine. No one claims that tasting notes sell wine. Are tasting notes necessary? At all? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t miss them. I used to think pay phones were necessary, but I don’t miss them now. And too often, tasting notes make me feel ignorant. For example, I’m not sure I know what cardamom is. I thought it was what bartenders do to get better tips. I described Gewürztraminer as tasting of lychee for fifteen years before I ever tasted a lychee. Turns out that’s an accurate description much of the time. But I was faking it. I’ve still never had a gooseberry, but I swear Sancerre can smell of them.

To a great degree, we learn to talk about wine by imitating tasting notes, much as we learned language by imitating adults. Slowly, the more we practice, we begin to understand what we’re saying, and we begin to understand wine. And then, it seems to me, it’s time to move on to greater forms of expression. Tasting notes will always be a part of wine writing, but it’s the least important part. We learn simple language so that eventually we can begin to express ourselves in a meaningful way, not just parrot others. Tasting notes teach us the language of wine, but eventually there has to be more. Stories. We make up stories. We’re human, it’s what we do.

The stories we tell about wine are so often false. More often false than true. The wine business is always selling you romance. Which makes sense. For most of us, wine is about our love for wine, and our love of how alcohol makes us feel, why wouldn’t we fall for romance? Apart from the wine business, on a personal level, wine, for us self-proclaimed wine experts, also becomes part of our identity. A part we cherish and brag about. And what is the internet if not a place to create a new, completely fabricated, identity. The place is littered with people who want to be recognized as authorities on something or other. Wine attracts its share. Eventually, we begin to believe our own stories. We believe we’re right. We believe we're talented. We believe we're fascinating. We must be. We’re experts. Hell, we have our own blog! What we say must be true, it must be right. We have a President like that. He’s as much an Internet creation as the HoseMaster of Wine™, only a bit more dangerous. Yeah, but I’m more delusional!

Satirists go after the stories that have come to be seen as truth. Everyone knows that Bordeaux en primeur is a fraud. The critics know the wines are doctored, the wineries know the wines are doctored, the scores that are published are aimed at self-promotion for both the wineries and the critics, but no one says anything. Except the satirist. Truth is hard for everyone to swallow. The dull don’t like to be called dull. The hypocrites don’t like to be pointed out. The talentless don’t like to be told so. They often react with indignation. But it’s the job. I must like the job, I’ve been at it for a while.

I started out to write a piece about how tasting notes are inadequate and nearly useless by definition. That every great wine writer worth a nickel has to move on from tasting notes to something better, something different, in order to adequately express what she loves about wine. The wine writers who engage me express their love for wine in many ways. With stories of how wine has changed their lives, with insights earned through years of tasting and paying attention, with honesty about the wines they love and the wines they hate, and with truth, not marketing stories. They are few and far between these days, but well worth seeking.

I express my love for wine through satire. Satire, without exception, relies on outrageousness, profanity, raucousness, venom, anger, and, one hopes, wit and laughter. I’ll admit that I often miss my target. Which can be embarrassing. I often make people angry. That’s pretty much the point. Angry people unfailingly betray who they really are. SNL helped show the world Trump’s character. But as much as anger drives comedy, it’s love for wine that drives me to lampoon the stories we tell ourselves about wine and the wine business. When I do hit my target, I’m proud and I’m energized. That makes it worth it. I guess I could have published a little blog filled with tasting notes and podcasts, but that would mean nothing to me, that would have been entirely unsatisfying. Satire makes me happy.

Satire isn’t about telling truths. It’s about examining truths, and seeing the absurdity underneath. It doesn’t take courage, it takes fearlessness. It isn’t about hate or prejudice, it’s about love. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t make you laugh.

EPHEMERA: The Spirituality of K-Y Jelly

I find myself tuning out the news lately, and reaching for a book. A great book, not brain candy, a work of art. The news is filled with death and stupidity these past few weeks, a gory litany of massacres, assassinations and murders, fueled by our old friends hatred and ignorance. I have been having hard times of my own. Nothing unmanageable or tragic. More the unbearable triteness of being. I don’t have the heart to tune in to every day’s latest expression of hatred, hear how yet another man decides the best way to obliterate the anger and fear in his head is to kill as many people as he can before he himself is blessedly relieved of duty here on Earth. I was an emotional wreck. I felt completely abandoned and worthless. Which is terrible for every day life, but wonderful for writing satire.

You’d think that the uglier the world gets, and it’s particularly ugly now, it might be harder to write jokes. I write about wine and the wine business. Almost nothing could be less important. Maybe awards shows. Or Pokemon. Or cat videos. You know, shit that pinheads like. In the big picture, the picture that includes the ugliness of racism, homophobia, climate change, gun violence, a big dishonest narcissistic prick running for President, religious fanaticism, and Bill Cosby, wine is the playground, it’s never the classroom. It just doesn’t matter. Not the lies of Riedel, not whether wine is natural or not, not whether ratings have meaning (they do not),  and not how many fucking initials are after your sad, forgettable name. On HoseMaster of Wine™, I’m just kicking down sand castles in the playground sandbox. None of it matters. Which is why, of course, this blog doesn’t matter either.

In my desperate hours, as I mentioned, I reach for art (if you are a literary sort, and you haven’t read Elena Ferrante’s four novels in her Neapolitan Quartet, you must—her brilliant works of literature changed me forever). I don’t instinctively reach for a glass of wine. I’m not someone who has ever believed that winemaking is art. It’s not art any more than fixing automobiles is art. Though, to their credit, I’m not sure I have ever heard a winemaker, not a talented winemaker anyway, claim that winemaking is art. And if one did in my hearing, I’d probably laugh like the maniacal madman I am. In my mind, art needs at the very least to be transformative to the person experiencing it. Inebriation doesn’t qualify. Winemaking is certainly harder than it looks. Anyone who has judged wines as often as I have can tell you that. I hear people parroting all the time the opinion that wines are better than ever. Not in my experience. I’d say that wines are far more mediocre than ever. Maybe I mean there are more mediocre wines than ever. I guess I mean both. There are countless sites that write about “Great Wines Under $20.” Let’s be clear, there are no great wines under $20. None. Must we devalue the word “great” at the same time we devalue “art?”

That winemaking is an art is most often expressed in marketing material. If there is a group of humans less qualified than wine marketing people to be the judge of what’s art, I’m not sure what group that would be. Bodybuilders? Members of NAMBLA? The wine marketing business has always been about selling wine as romance (so, like NAMBLA). I guess you can’t sell it as a really good way to get drunk, though that’s why all of us drink wine. Romance sells. Not as well as sex and fear and death, but pretty well; and winery owners are sensitive souls, just ask them. Well, maybe not the Resnicks, but you take my point. And nothing is more romantic than an artist. So winemaking is an art. Trust me. If you believe Madison Avenue, so is making cars and producing little blue pills that get your dick hard.

If winemaking isn’t art, then is wine art? No, I don’t think it is. Nor do I think it matters. I won’t enjoy Cheval Blanc any less because I don’t think it’s art. Actually, I think I could effectively argue that what’s really art are the fake bottles of wine that have flooded the marketplace in recent years. Maybe Rudy Kurniawan is the wine world’s greatest artist. Vincent van GoghDirectly to Jail, Do Not Collect $200. Wine itself? It’s an alcoholic beverage made from grapes. The greatest beverage known to mankind, with the exception of water, but a beverage still, no more and no less. Oh, we make a fuss about it, but that’s what drunks do. I’m even of the opinion that the overwhelming acceptance of the 100 Point Scale proves that winemaking isn’t an art, and that wine isn’t art either. Art isn’t measurable. That’s stupid on the face of it. If we accept that the 100 Point Scale is meaningful, we must also accept that winemaking isn’t art. It’s as stupid as me giving Ferrante’s great Neapolitan novels numeric scores because great literature is, most certainly, art. Only a pretentious asshole would assign a number to a great work of literature. Volunteers?

I like wine to be wine. I want to love it for what it is, not for some mystical or spiritual reason, not because knowledge of it grants me social status in the world, not because wine is art. I want to love wine the same way I love my wife and my closest friends, unconditionally. I don’t need wine to be more than what it is—a wondrous product of grapes that acts as a social lubricant and brings joy to my life. K-Y Jelly without the guilt. I don’t know why so many wine writers want to hoist wine onto a pedestal, except that it gives the writers more importance. Isn’t it strange that there are so many wine writers who once wrote about sports, or restaurants, or some other less prestigious subject, but yet there aren’t any wine writers who quit to start writing about college hoops, or politics, or vegan Nobel Prize winners. It’s cool to be a wine writer because wine writers venerate wine. Sports writers are Oscar Madison. Food writers are Oscar Mayer. Wine writers are Filet Oscar. I have no idea what that means.

Having an extensive knowledge of wine isn’t something to be particularly proud of. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it hardly makes you special. Except among other wine dweebs, it’s a surefire yawn-inducer. Being educated in the history of music would seem more worthwhile. Have the ability to rate Beethoven’s Fifth a 97 and not look like a jackass. Knowing how to nurse babies back to health—that seems undervalued. Writing a blog and pretending you’re a wine authority? You’re just Donald Trump with a drinking problem, truly Wine Folly.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to get at. Maybe it’s that the older I get, the more wine experience I’ve accumulated, the less I enjoy wine writing, and the less I see wine through rosé-colored glasses. I just want to drink my wine. Wine writing these days (especially mine) reminds me of going to see a film I’m really looking forward to seeing, and there are five other people there talking all the way through it, telling me what to look for, telling me how I should be enjoying it. When I read wine writing these days, the words I think of the most often are, “Shut the Fuck Up.” I’m trying to enjoy my wine.

The world and I both had a miserable couple of weeks. So much loss. I reached for a great book to help me though it, and, because I’m the luckiest man on the planet, I found one that did. I also reached for wine, but not because it was going to soothe my tired old heart, not because it could speak to me and help me to understand the currently miserable human condition. I just needed a drink. I didn’t give a shit how many points those wines received. I didn’t care who the artist was who made them. I cared about the amazing people with whom I shared the wines. It’s not the K-Y Jelly, after all, it’s who you lube up with.

Now, I’ll Shut the Fuck Up.

The HoseMaster of Wine™ is Short Listed for a Roederer Wine Writers' Award

I’d forgotten that I’d entered my work on Tim Atkin MW’s site for a Roederer International Wine Writers’ Award. Every year that I’ve written for Tim, he has requested that all of his regular contributors make sure to enter the competition. It seems to be a self-nominating process, for the most part. I’m not comfortable with nominating myself for anything, except, perhaps, being an organ donor for a charity barbecue. And, I would always say to Tim, what chance does a scatalogical, raucous, tasteless satirist have in such a prestigious competition? It’s like a narcissistic buffoon trying to get nominated for President of the United States. Are people really that crazy?

I’ve won three Wine Blog Awards, and was nominated, I don’t know, maybe eleven times. I might be the most nominated wine blogger ever. Which is more shameful than not. I never nominated myself. I can say from experience that the Wine Blog Awards have a value equivalent to winning a Cub Scout merit badge. You get to wear it on a sash, but it’s hard to recognize what you actually accomplished, aside from wearing it on a sash. The Wine Blog Awards are inherently cynical and self-aggrandizing, and not worth the paper they are not written on. I’d give them back, but there’s not a fucking thing to give back. It’s like trying to return your order of refried beans with a melodic fart. There’s some satisfaction, to be sure, but it’s more about fragrance than substance.

The Roederers haven’t been around that long. But in a short span of time, they have become perhaps the most important award in wine writing. Granted, that’s a bit like being the most important award in hair styling, but true, nonetheless. In my mind, anyway. The James Beard Awards are prestigious, but there are more categories than the DSM, most of them eerily identical. Plus, I looked at the judges for the Roederers, and I couldn’t help but be impressed. (By the way, for you fellow cynics out there, Tim Atkin was not allowed to judge either me or Andrea Frost because he pays us to be on his site.) When I went to the Wine Blog Awards site, I could not find a list of this year’s judges. It’s as if they’d drawn profane cartoons of the prophet Mohammed and were in hiding. Je suis Cowardly.

But this isn’t a piece about the difference between the two awards. The only difference is one matters, the other is just so much marketing bullshit. Use your nose, it’s easy to tell which is which.

Tim Atkin sent an email on Wednesday informing Andrea Frost and me that we were going to appear on the short list for the Roederer Awards’ Ramos Pinto Online Communicator of the Year Award. I was a little confused. I used to know a busboy named Ramos who drove a Pinto, but that didn’t really make any sense. Why would he give me an award? Then I remembered entering the Roederers' competition. I was flabbergasted. I was sure Tim was screwing with me. I’m still not convinced it isn’t some sort of elaborate hoax to get me to London and humiliate me. Though that assumes there is some value in humiliating a nobody, like casting aspersions on a new Tim Allen movie.

Yet it’s true. I’ve been shortlisted (which always sounds to me like being shortsheeted—some sort of childish prank) for a Roederer Award. For one of the few times in my career as HoseMaster of Wine™, I’m proud.

I am proud, and amazed, because so rarely are satire and comedy awarded a seat at the Big Kids’ table. That my name is on a list with Andrew Jeffords and Jane Anson, two writers for whom I have enormous respect, is important—to me, of course, but far more importantly, to the cause and place of satire in wine writing. I have spent six years writing HoseMaster of Wine™. I try only to make people laugh, and very often squirm. I try to be interesting, fearless, and deranged. A Fool. I’m my own harshest critic. I take a back seat to no one when it comes to hating what I write. Yet that is the nature of a comedy writer. The most difficult thing for me to accept for the past few days has been the notion that perhaps I deserve the Roederer Award nomination. I’m trying to believe I’ve earned it. I’ll get there, but I don’t yet believe it.

The easiest part of this is that I will not win. I don’t care, not even the least bit. In fact, I would be humiliated to be chosen over Jeffords or Anson. My other fellow short listers are talented folks, too, I don’t mean to denigrate them by not addressing them, but Jeffords and Anson are in a league where I am not qualified to play. In that list, I’m the “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” guy. I know that. Yet Satire is there, playing in that league, with me as the Designated Hater. I think it’s something of a lovely miracle.

I’m not that good. I have fun, and I love to write, but I’m not really that good. Nor am I playing at false humility. Were it not for the unwavering support and encouragement of Tim Atkin MW, I wouldn’t even have bothered to apply. His belief in my satire, his willingness to allow me to write what I want without any sort of filter or editing, even at personal financial risk (from the morons at Riedel), is what put me on the wine writing map. While I owe the most to my beautiful wife, and to my long time common taters, I would never have been mentioned alongside such talent without the support of Tim Atkin MW. My sincerest thanks to him. He put his reputation behind me when no one else would. I won't ever forget that.

My mother always wanted me to be a writer. I broke her heart when I became a sommelier instead (oddly, something, in this day and age of sommelier glorification, I would not have pursued). My first thought when I saw Tim’s congratulatory email was of her. That, friends, is all the award I need.

The HoseMaster of Wine™ at a Spottswoode Vertical Tasting

The first time I tasted a Spottswoode Cabernet Sauvignon I was at Robert Pepi Winery. For all the Millennials who read HoseMaster of Wine™ (yeah, right), Robert Pepi Winery is now Cardinale, a property of Jackson Family Estates, located on Highway 29 in Napa Valley directly across from Far Niente. Pepi was once a reputable winery, though now the label is a dumping ground for some pretty miserable wine. Tony Soter was Bob Pepi’s winemaking partner at Robert Pepi Winery, and Tony had taken on Spottswoode as one of his first (if not his first—I don’t remember) winemaking clients. (Tony also sold his first vintages of Etude at Robert Pepi Winery, including, if memory serves, a pretty terrible Rosé of Pinot Noir.) The ’82 Spottswoode, their first commercial release, was being bottled at Pepi, and Bob asked me if I wanted to taste it. Does a dog lick his nuts?

Bob pulled a bottle of ’82 Spottswoode from the bottling line, we opened it, and it was damned tasty. Banged up from the bottling, maybe a bit shut down, but it was quite delicious. That’s about what I remember. So, with Bob’s blessing (though it wasn’t his wine), I took a couple of bottles. “Stole” would be the accurate verb, but let’s not quibble. At the time, I didn’t have any idea that Spottswoode was destined to become one of the great estates of Napa Valley. Imagine having tasted the very first vintage of Chateau Margaux when it was first bottled. How cool would that have been? Let’s ask Michael Broadbent, he was there. There’s a chance I was the first person to ever taste Spottswoode from the bottle. Now there’s a lede for my New York Times obituary. “Ron Washam, First Sommelier to Taste Spottswoode, Author of Stupid Wine Blog, dead at 99.” To be humble, I’m sure my obit will be below the fold. Though there won’t be any goddam folds by then. Only homeless paperboys.

On the Friday following my debacle at the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium, I was invited to Spottswoode to participate in a vertical tasting of ten vintages of Spottswoode Cabernet Sauvignon. Others in attendance included Ray Isle, Andrea Robinson MS, Linda Murphy, Lana Bortolot, and Virginie Boone. Begs the question, what the hell was I doing there? Comic relief. Spitbucket Monitor. Seat Filler. I’m a triple threat.

I love everything about Spottswoode. Mary Novak, and her daughters Beth Milliken and Lindy Novak, and the rest of their family, resurrected and elevated one of the great wine estates of California. Theirs is a remarkable achievement, and they are remarkable women. I remember the first time I visited the property, and that gorgeous old Victorian home surrounded by Mary’s beautiful gardens, I was amazed at how the wine barrels were crammed underneath the house. It looked like a dipsomaniac squirrel had stashed them there for the Winter. Which is not a nice thing to say about Tony Soter.

The vineyard itself is 40 contiguous acres, and there I was, its long lost mule. I’m not sure why, but being at Spottswoode always made me think of “Gone With the Wind.” You can gaze out over the vineyards and you can almost hear the vineyard workers singing old spirituals, like “La Bamba.” I’m being my usual stupid self, but, truly, it’s an enchanted place, and I cannot drink a bottle of Spottswoode without envisioning the magnificent estate’s warmth and beauty. Its one of wine’s chief pleasures, I think. How you are able to taste a glass of wine and travel in your mind to the place where it began, recall the way the place looked in the Fall, the way the air smelled, the palpable energy of a vineyard bursting with fruit. Beer cannot do that, nor anything distilled. Walk a great wine estate and the wines produced there never taste the same again. Wine connects us to our senses, and to the places we’ve been, and the trajectory of our life. I know of nothing else that can make that connection. Wine grounds us on this beautiful planet. Maybe if the world had more wine drinkers, we wouldn’t have ruined it so carelessly.

There’s an argument against blind tasting in there somewhere. Though blind tasting isn’t about pleasure, blind tasting is about a false sense of objectivity. I would not want to taste Spottswoode blind, though I have. Once, many years ago, at a blind tasting of California Cabernets sponsored by Far Niente (I could be wrong about Far Niente), I managed to identify three of the twelve wines rather precisely. The other nine I was trying to identify simply by region. I struggled with one, couldn’t quite pin it down, and finally decided it was from Alexander Valley. It was Spottswoode. Spottswoode! I was personally humiliated. I love Alexander Valley Cabernet, but that was like taking a bite of sirloin and declaring, “Wow, great halibut!” Tasting it blind robbed me of the pure joy I feel when I drink Spottswoode. It’s like being blindfolded for a first date, then finding out the next day you had clumsily groped Charlize Theron. Yeah, like that would happen. But you get the idea.

Mary Novak made an appearance at the blind tasting. It was great to see her, and she looked fantastic. She is one of the grand and great ladies of Napa Valley. It’s almost impossible not to smile when Mary is around. I had been carrying around all that guilt from stealing two bottles of ’82 Spottswoode thirty years ago, so I finally confessed to Mary that I had done so. I offered to pay for them. I asked Beth what the release price was for the 1982 Spottswoode. It was eighteen bucks. Eighteen bucks! Hell, I wouldn’t have stolen them if I’d known they were only eighteen bucks! I told Mary I owed her thirty-six dollars. She laughed and told me, “It’s OK, Ron, I think we can afford that.” That Friday night—the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in thirty years.

Beth, Mary, and Lindy

Lindy Novak was also there. Lindy just makes me laugh. I’d be presumptous to declare us friends, but we share a mutual fondness. Did growing up at Spottswoode contribute to Lindy’s loveliness, warmth, wit and beauty? Or is Spottswoode such a beautiful place because the Novaks tend to it? From my perspective, people who tend to a place for a long period of time, and the Novaks bought Spottswoode in 1972, influence the attributes of the land at least as much as the land influences the people. Let’s say my family bought the place in 1972. The land would be a trailer park by now, and I’d be serving samples at Napa Valley Premier Crack Week. Luckily for all of us, the lovely Novak family has been the steward of Spottswoode. It’s equally lucky for Spottswoode.

Beth Novak stayed for the tasting. I adore Beth, too. Aside from our annual allocation fight, I always look forward to seeing her. She has her mother’s sweet energy and determination and smarts, and all of them have that lovely quality of being humbled by the estate they so gracefully manage. There is so little arrogance in the room you can’t believe you’re in Napa Valley. Maybe Alexander Valley…see, I was partially correct. I shudder to think of Spottswoode ever being sold. Spottswoode is the Novaks, and the Novaks are Spottswoode. The wines of Spottswoode are so often described with adjectives like graceful, elegant, beautiful, powerful, and restrained. Sounds a lot like the Novaks themselves. OK, maybe not restrained.

The vintages we tasted were ’85, ’87, ’91, ’95, ’01, ’05, ’10, ’11, ’12, and ’13. Spottswoode’s current winemaker Aron Weinkauf was there to answer questions and pretend he thought we knew what we were talking about. Those ten vintages represent the efforts of four other winemakers besides Aron—Tony Soter, Mia Klein, Pam Starr and Rosemary Cakebread. Usually, one would be worried about following an Aron; but, in this case, Aron had to follow a lot of home run hitters. It’s nice to report he’s doing just fine.

Tasting the ten vintages side by side spoke to, I felt, the slow discovery of what the Spottswoode estate vineyard had to say. I won’t bore you with my descriptions of the ten wines individually. There really wasn’t a dud in the bunch. My least favorite wine was the 2005, which seemed like an anomaly in the lineup, though I’d gladly gulp that wine with a grilled lamb chop. The ’05 struck me as very brooding and unevolved, not descriptors I usually associate with Spottswoode. Actually, I’m often called brooding and unevolved, but that’s a different story.

The first couple of wines from the ’80’s were lovely, but stylistically have very different taste profiles. You sense a winemaker feeling his way with a vineyard, trying to see what works. But then the 1991 starts to say Spottswoode to me. It had great persistence, and enormous presence, two attributes that are hallmarks of a great wine. 1995 Spottswoode dials that up a notch, and at 21 is, you guessed it, at drinking age. And just gorgeous. 1999 was the year I was married, and though it wasn’t in this lineup, I have had it many times and I can tell you it smells exactly like bliss. All through the ‘90s, a lot of Spottswoode’s vineyards had to be replanted, and I’m certain a great deal of thought went into clonal selection and rootstock and all the other stuff that makes a vineyard (how authoritative is that?!). The property was evolving.

And you can taste the Cabernets starting to progress, to hone in on what the vineyard has to say. Some vineyards won’t shut the hell up. Colgin won’t shut the hell up. Spottswoode whispers. The 2001 is very seductive, and focused on the dark black and borderline blue fruit that I associate with Spottswoode in a classic vintage. The 2005 just seemed in a time warp to me, but it will be just fine.

The final four wines are yet another step forward in the evolution of a great wine estate. The vineyards all reaching maturity, and the wines singing. I don’t have the talent to describe a wine like Spottswoode, not adequately. But so often greatness in wine is about great power matched with great delicacy. I think of Baryshnikov or Venus Williams. I think of their focus and balance, of their imagination, of their confident swagger. The 2013 has that swagger. If you can afford the $185 price tag, I’d get some. It’s a lot harder to steal now. Even in a terrible vintage, weatherwise, like 2011, the vineyard manages to show its greatness. Even on a bad night, I imagine Barysnikov was still better than most.

And the 2012 Spottswoode? It’s going to be legendary wine. Bank on it. I tasted it and I was transported--both into the past, when I first had the sense to keep an eye, and my sticky fingers, on Tony Soter’s new project, and into the future, hoping that I’ll be able to taste this masterpiece as I check out from a lifetime of wine. As a reminder of what a beautiful time and what a beautiful place I lived in.

The HoseMaster of Wine™ at the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium: Part Two

Badgering Hugh Johnson Photo by John Lenart, Thanks Again, John!

Inviting the HoseMaster of Wine™ to speak at the opening night’s gathering was intended, I was informed, to send the message that wine writers shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. This is a little like telling the Miss America contestants not to worry about their hair. They just can’t help it. I spoke for my twenty minutes, and for the rest of the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium at Meadowood (just the damned title smells of taking yourself too seriously) I was free to attend any or all of the seminars and speeches. I went to almost all of them. It was a very interesting couple of days, but not at all what I expected.

I didn’t take any notes. I’m not a journalist, I’m a self-styled satirist with a wine blog. Many of the symposium fellows were wildly taking notes on their laptops, while I just tried to pay attention to what was being said, and the manner in which it was being said. In truth, I was the proverbial fish out of water, the black sheep of the wine writing family, the pubic hair on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ can of Coke. No one knows what I was doing there, but most felt a certain level of disgust.

I didn’t take any notes, but neither, apparently, did Guy Woodward, former editor of Decanter magazine. In a column for Harper’s UK found here, Woodward writes, “By contrast, Johnson’s fellow keynote speaker at the symposium was American novelist Jay McInerney, who observed there at two types of wine writers: writers who had decided to write about wine and wine buffs who had decided they could write.”

That McInerney is pretty smart. Unfortunately, that was my observation at my fireside chat, not McInerney’s in his keynote address. Lovely to see one of the faculty observing only the highest standards of wine journalism. I believe Woodward also attributed the aphorism, “Wine is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” to Henny Youngman. But, I guess, I make shit up all the time, so I have it coming.

For some strange reason, I thought that the symposium would be more about the craft of writing. In hindsight, I can see how that was silly on my part. What the symposium was about was networking, and pitching. As they say in baseball, you can never have enough pitching. There was some talk about the actual craft of writing, but not much. The advice I heard over and over and over again was for wine writers to “find the story.” Once you “find the story” it’s easy from there. Now this might be sage advice to someone in the sixth grade, but it’s hardly insightful to a working wine journalist. It’s the oldest advice in writing. “Find the story.”

“Hey, Shakespeare, find the damned story. You know, pick up some history books or something, then just tell the story.” Yup, all there is to it.

I was lucky enough to have a couple of brief conversations with Neil Beckett. What a charming and eloquent man. Neil is the editor of World of Fine Wine magazine, and, as such, edits the likes of Terry Theise, David Schildknecht, and Neal Martin. How in the world do you cure that amount of logorrhea? Neil radiates kindness and brains, and we spoke a bit about wine writing, and satire in particular. He told me that the one thing World of Fine Wine hasn’t done well at all is wine humor. Well, I told him, that makes two of us.

Indeed, when Neil sat next to me on the shuttle back to Meadowood from the C.I.A. I remarked to him that not once in the two days that I attended wine writing seminars and speeches did any of the speakers mention humor as a tool for making wine writing more interesting, even more marketable. It never once came up. I found this discouraging, especially considering I’m in a room filled with some of the most powerful editors in the wine writing business, but completely unsurprising.

However, when writing about a subject so fundamentally trivial, and essentially about joy, it would seem to me that humor is appropriate, if not necessary. I don’t mean the brand of raunchy and tasteless humor I employ here, obviously. I mean humor, lightheartedness, a voice that understands that what we’re talking about is wine, not the reason for living. I see occasional doses of wit in wine writing, but, in general, much of it takes itself far too seriously for my taste. Too much wine writing seems aimed at elevating the self-esteem of the person writing it. A tribute to their own insight and wine knowledge. Or it reads like marketing material. When you find the story, when you profile yet another of the 50,000 winemakers walking the planet, do you then have to make it read like you work for the guy? Everything someone like R.H. Drexel writes reads like this to me. (What’s annoying is that she’s such a good writer, but wastes her gifts  with such a transparent marketing style. That’s not being a wine critic, or a wine writer, that’s shilling.) Am I the only one who thinks this? Wine writing is getting to be like watching the Academy Awards. Yes, we are important! Just look at how important we are. We make movies! Do not laugh at us. Which is why they need a Chris Rock. Wine writing needs more Rocks, fewer papers, and a lot of scissors. 

In truth, the symposium covers a lot of ground in a short period of time, and it’s a great event. There are wine tastings that feature many of Napa’s best wines. There were seminars not just on wine writing, but also on self-publishing, on photography, on creating wine lists, on aspects of winemaking and, of course, on selling your work to publishers. That’s a lot of ground to cover in just two days, and it’s gracefully and tirelessly done. I met an amazing array of people, and left on the final day extremely grateful to have been invited. My complaints and peccadilloes are my own, and undoubtedly based almost entirely on my own shortcomings. I’ve been looking around at the websites of others who attended but, aside from what amount to summations of speeches and seminars, I have yet to find anyone else writing about their personal experiences at the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium, about what they learned. I’d be interested to see how much their story would vary from mine.

Of course, one of the rules of attending the symposium is to not talk about what happens outside of the seminars and lectures, not write about any extracurricular foolishness you might witness. I intend to honor that. “Off the record” is a useful status to observe in a situation like the Wine Writers Symposium. It encourages candor and liveliness. It’s enough that people worry they’re talking to the damned HoseMaster, not also have to worry that I’ll write about their moral trespasses. Though why they worry about me, I cannot understand. I’m just so damned convivial.

It has been a very long time since I spent so much time in the company of a large group of writers. We are an odd family. That we have chosen wine as our primary subject (with the exceptions of Jay McInerney, who is foremost a novelist, and Hugh Johnson, who is as famous among gardeners as he is among wine lovers) makes us even odder. Writing is a solitary task. Sequestered in front of a keyboard, we search for just the right words, for something interesting to say, and for a way to say it so that it doesn’t appear to be as much of an almighty struggle as it is. I think, deep down, all of us hate the struggle. Most of us read our own words and only see fault, wonder why anyone is the least bit interested in what we have to say. Which is, of course, why we need a story. I have always found that writers are very often profoundly insecure. And they either wear that insecurity on their face and in their conversation, or they try to hide it behind bravado, or machismo, or truly impressive drinking. I learned early in life to develop a very thick skin and wield humor as a weapon, making my insecurity and fear impenetrable to any outsider. I like to think it works for me, but the older I get the more I see that as a mask for insecurity and low self-esteem, it’s pathetically transparent. Like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the symposium was filled with odders. It felt like a place filled with people who felt out of place.

The last evening of the symposium there’s a farewell dinner. It’s quite the feast, and Meadowood more than lived up to its Three Michelin Star reputation. The seating is assigned, and I was a bit nervous about who might be sitting next to me. For once in my life, I was hoping for a seat at the kids’ table. There were plenty of people there I would have been nervous to be seated next to, people I have lampooned over the years who made it a point over the three days of the symposium to avoid speaking to me. Though I always think of my work as “all in good fun,” there are a lot of Georg Riedels in the world. It comes with the territory.

It turns out I could not have been luckier in my seating assignment. I sat between Virginie Boone and Lana Bortolot, and across from Eric Asimov. When I finally found my seat (the dinner guests numbered around 80, I’d guess), my place card had writing all over it. The scribbling, which looked rather foreboding from a distance, turned out to be the signatures of all the Master Sommeliers in attendance, who had been invited to choose wines for each course. From Geoff Kruth MS, Sur Lucero MS, Gillian Balance MS, all the way up to Doug Frost MW MS, nearly all of them at the dinner signed my place card. I don’t know whose idea it was, but thank you. I saved it. It was a lovely gesture, a comic sign of respect for the HoseMaster, and an unexpected honor. It was the most welcome I felt the entire week.

Virginie and Lana made the evening even more memorable. Virginie and I have met on occasion at wine competitions, but never really spoken much. She has a winning sense of humor, a refreshing outlook on her wine scoring occupation, and I felt drawn to her warmth and intelligence immediately. Lana Bortolot snuck up on me. I had seen her at the symposium, but knew nothing about her, aside from having read her work in many wine publications and in Wall Street Journal. I don’t believe we had even said as much as hello to one another for the entire three days. I was initially scared that she was someone who didn’t like my work. But after a few minutes of chatting with her, I felt in the company of a loved one. By the end of the dinner, I was downright angry I hadn’t made her acquaintance the first day. Lana is one of those people whose smarts and easy wit register immediately. She has a rare human warmth, great beauty and strength of character. We seemed to share a lot of the same impressions of the people and events at the symposium. It ended up being a difficult night because I wanted to spend the entire evening talking to both of them individually. Thank you, Virginie and Lana. What a lovely evening.

Each of the Master Sommeliers spoke briefly about his/her choice of wine to go with a course. Fred Dame MS was the final speaker. Fred was kind enough to single me out. “I’m glad to be here with all of you talented wine writers. Except for Ron.” He said it jokingly, and added that his wife had been upset that I had once compared Fred to a serial killer. She’s upset, Fred? You should have seen the letter I got from the Hillside Strangler! Fred went on to talk about how once a year he goes hunting and shoots a deer. I leaned across the table and asked Eric Asimov, “So how is that not being a serial killer?”

I left the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium with a lot of stories, most of which I can’t tell here. More than that, I left having made many new relationships that I hope will continue to grow. I was lucky to meet a few HoseMaster fans, and there are only a few, like John Lenart and Thomas Riley. I was able to visit with old friends like Alfonso Cevola , Deborah Parker Wong and Bill Ward. I met wine luminaries like Hugh Johnson, Karen MacNeil, Andrea Robinson MS, Ray Isle, Jamie Goode, Doug Frost MW MS, Neil Beckett, Elin McCoy and Eric Asimov. And, finally, and unexpectedly, I made the acquaintance of people I hope will become friends—Esther Mobley, Jane Anson, Virginie Boone, Lisa Perrotti Brown and Lana Bortolot. Doesn’t mean I won’t lampoon them, but they were the folks who made the symposium a wonderful experience for me. Not something I expected at all.

I also must thank the people in charge of the symposium: Jim Gordon, Linda Rieff, Julia Allenby, Patsy McGaughy, Ann Marie Conover and Traci Dutton. You all made me feel welcome. I always say that there needs to be a place for the satirist, the Fool, at the table. You allowed me that place, which took some courage. It was an experience I will never forget. Thank you.

My final words at my Fireside Chat were a quote that I love from Steve Martin. When asked by young comedians for advice, Steve would often say, “Just be so good, they can’t ignore you.”

To those who ignored me, Gosh, I hope one day I'm good enough.

The HoseMaster of Wine™ at the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium

When I told friends that I had been asked to deliver a “fireside chat” for the Napa Valley Professional Wine Writers Symposium, and that I was extremely nervous about it, many of them remarked that it was good that I was doing something “outside my comfort zone.” I’m not sure what that means. It sounds like the sort of persuasion child pornographers dispense to their victims. Despite that, I agreed to speak. As the HoseMaster of Wine™. Well, I spoke, and I sucked.

After dinner on the first night of the Symposium, everyone gathered in the Vintners Room and I was introduced. Here are my opening remarks:

“This is quite a distinguished group. Though I’m starting to get why Spike Lee isn’t here.

“I’m extremely nervous. To give you an idea how nervous I am, and this is the truth, I have a colonoscopy scheduled in a couple of weeks, and I’m more nervous about THIS. You know, boys and girls, they put a camera up your lower intestine and look around…I’m calling it SOMM 3: Into the Wine Cave.

“I’m pretty sure Fred Dame is in it.”

I have no idea what I was doing up there, really. First of all, I am terrible at standup comedy. I used to write standup, but I never had the talent, or the courage, to perform it. But I knew that I would never be invited to the Wine Writers Symposium again, and that if I wanted to attend, and meet Hugh Johnson, then I had to suck it up and step outside my comfort zone. My audience that night contained a lot of wine writing luminaries, most of whom I had insulted on one occasion or another. A partial list would include Eric Asimov, Virginie Boone, Guy Woodward, Ray Isle, Lisa Perrotti Brown MW, Doug Frost MW, MS, Neil Beckett, Jamie Goode, Jeannie Cho Lee MW, Esther Mobley and Elin McCoy. (Many other bigshots were part of the Symposium, including Hugh Johnson, Karen MacNeil, Jay McInerney, and Andrea Robinson MS, but they weren’t at my speech.) If a bomb had gone off in that room…well, it did, in the form of my monologue. There were no survivors.

Half an hour before I was to speak I was so nervous I thought I was going to throw up. One of the toughest things about comedy is that when you rehearse it over and over, the jokes all start to sound stupid and unfunny. You lose perspective, and then it becomes harder and harder to convince yourself that you shouldn’t just start over. Fifteen minutes before you speak, you hate every joke. Add to that that some of the butts of the jokes are sitting right in front of you and may not take kindly to your witticisms. For example, I had this joke about one of the featured speakers:

“2015 also saw the publication of a lot of wine books, many of the retreads. Karen MacNeil published the second edition of the 'Wine Bible.' The New Testament. Now that’s a title! Wine Bible! I know she considered The Wine Book of Mormon, but Mormons don’t have a lot in common with wine people. You know, closet drinking and lots of wives… Oh, well, I guess there’s Jay McInerney…”

I took a little walk before my speech, my stomach in knots, and called my gorgeous wife. Kathleen is the only person who knows what it’s like to be the HoseMaster (perhaps the only one who cares), knows my insecurities and fears, and she talked me down. Her wisdom and love and patience are beacons in an otherwise dark universe, and when we disconnected, I said a silent thank you to the world for having blessed me with such a remarkable spouse. Then I threw up.

I would print a copy of my speech here, but, after speaking to Kathleen and absorbing her wise words of advice, I changed a lot of it. Apart from that, a transcription of a comedy monologue isn’t always that funny to read. Written humor, like the crap I write here, is much different than standup. Different to write, and much different to read. It’s a bit like poetry in that much of it doesn’t make any sense at all unless you read it out loud. And, as I said, I sucked anyway.

I spoke for about twenty minutes. It was the longest twenty minutes of my life other than my first marriage. When I was done, though, I had no other responsibilities the rest of the Symposium. With that behind me, I could finally relax, meet the famous people who shared the marquee with me (I was definitely the low man on that credits roll; in Hollywood, my part would be described as, “Drunk #2”) and maybe learn a thing or two. It turned out to be a very interesting and rewarding couple of days.

After my Fireside Chat, there was a reception with some older Napa Valley wines being served. I have no idea what I tasted. I was suffering from PTSD from having an IED in the form of my monologue go off in my face. Many of the attendees, both faculty and fellows, said nice things to me about my speech. For example, “It was like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey.’ It felt really good when it was over.” And, “Don’t quit your day job, unless it’s doing standup.” And, “What’s that wet spot?” So I felt loved and supported.

One of the nicest moments of my entire week occurred at the tasting after my speech. I met Esther Mobley, the new wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle (hard to say she has some big shoes to fill, but you get what I mean) at the bar, and Esther, whom I had never met, was extraordinarily kind to me. In a nutshell, she told me that at least I was telling the truth when I spoke, and on my blog, and that telling the truth is what journalism is supposed to do. It was unexpected and welcome sentiment from a wine writer who has a great future ahead of her. Esther struck me as a very talented, very smart and capable young woman, which will not keep me from mocking her, of course, and I’m sure she wouldn’t have it any other way.

The portion of my speech that generated the most response was my mention of “Wine Folly.”

“The best selling wine book on Amazon in 2015 was ‘Wine Folly’ by Madeline Puckette. It’s filled with wine information, information uncovered in what must have been exhaustive Google searches, displayed in countless graphs and pie charts. In its own way, it’s revolutionary. Turns out many pictures are actually worth only seven or eight words. That it outsold the likes of Karen MacNeil and Jancis Robinson says that those ‘Wine for Idiots’ people were on to something. ‘Wine Folly’ has more wine mistakes than BevMo.”

About half a dozen Symposium attendees went out of their way to thank me for my “Wine Folly” rant. The notion that a wine book written for beginning wine lovers is essentially allowed to contain countless mistakes because it isn’t written for professionals is simply ignorant. And an embarrassment to everyone who has recommended the book. I did ask the folks who patted me on the back for making fun of “Wine Folly” why they hadn’t. I never got any sort of an answer.

No one, however, was at the Wine Writers Symposium to see the HoseMaster. I was the tired opening lounge act for the headliners, a Tom Dreesen or a Charlie Callas. Most would say I was more Callas. Though, really, what the Symposium is about is networking, meeting successful and influential wine writers and editors hoping that somehow they’ll boost your career.

“We’re lucky enough to be in the company of a group of great wine writers this week. If becoming a great wine writer were as simple as just hanging around with great wine writers, I’d be one helluva hooker.”

I had decided before attending Meadowood that the only person I was going to introduce myself to was Hugh Johnson. I had previously met many of the faculty and fellows, and many of those I hadn’t met had every reason to dislike what I’d written about them, and I didn’t want to walk into an uncomfortable situation. And I’m shy. In truth, I’m a disappointment in person if the only way you know me is through HoseMaster of Wine™. I had considered backing out of speaking after I had agreed to--until Hugh Johnson was announced as keynote speaker. I very much wanted to meet him because I admire his body of work. His PBS series, “The Story of Wine,” is easily the best wine documentary every produced; which is faint praise given the category, but true nevertheless.

There are two kinds of wine writers these days. There are talented writers, in the mold of Mr. Johnson, who choose wine as their subject. And then there are the thousands of people who love wine and decide they can write. The online world is overpopulated with the latter—all passion and no talent, like having sex with a narcissist. Hugh Johnson is a graceful and erudite writer, not just on wine, but also on gardening. I suspect he could make even make Grüner Veltliner interesting if he wrote about it. Not delicious, but interesting.

Hugh Johnson spoke the morning of the third day of the Symposium, held at the C.I.A. It was touching to see how emotional Andrea Robinson MS, the day’s moderator, was introducing Mr. Johnson, one of her heroes as well. I don’t know Andrea, but her introduction was lovely and moving, and you cannot do better than that. Hugh spoke for about an hour, and I think everyone there would have gladly listened for another hour. He spoke eloquently about the history of wine writing, some of his favorite wine writers (I wasn’t mentioned—I’m the Abe Vigoda of wine writers, apparently. I really should show up in the Death Reel), and wine in general. He graciously answered some questions from the audience as well.

After his speech, Mr. Johnson stayed for the subsequent tasting and panel discussion of “Minerality,” led by Doug Frost MW MS, Jeannie Cho Lee MW and Lisa Perrotti Brown MW. They were for minerality, I’m agin it. Minerality is one of those wine descriptors I consider lazy. From my own experience, I know when I use it I’m being lazy, using it in order to avoid actually having to pin down what it is I’m tasting. What we now commonly refer to as “minerality” certainly exists as a component of some wines, I simply think that’s a lousy choice of words for it, a sloppy choice of words. There are trace amounts of minerals in wine, but at levels too low for a human to detect, even a Master of Wine. From a scientific point of view, it makes no sense to use the word “minerality” when describing wine. What does minerality taste like? How many minerals are there? (Anyone have a vague idea how many?) It’s like someone asking you to describe a rainbow and you say it looked like “colors.” Wine descriptions are intellectually sloppy enough without “minerality.” Do we all have to sink to “Wine Folly” levels?

It was after the minerality seminar that I approached Hugh Johnson to introduce myself. I had two of his books I was hoping he would inscribe. One was for my beautiful wife, a horticulturist by training, the other for me. Hers was “Principles of Gardening,” while I brought Mr. Johnson’s autobiography, “A Life Uncorked.” I felt awkward introducing myself. But the final question asked of Hugh by an audience member was, “What would you like to be remembered for?” He answered that, aside from wine writing, he’d also like to be remembered as a garden writer. That seemed like a message to me from the universe as I sat there clutching his “Principles of Gardening.”

Photo by John Lenart Thank you, John!

I walked up to him, thrust out my hand and said, “Mr. Johnson, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Ron Washam.”

“Ah,” he said, “you’re the HoseMahster.”

In a long career in wine, I cannot remember being more thrilled. Hugh Johnson had heard of the HoseMaster. I won’t pretend he’s read a single word I’ve written, but he knew who I was. I cannot say he likes my work, but he knew who I was. I’ll take it. Imagine you write a blog that showcases your cat poems, you meet Billy Collins, and he says, “Oh, you’re the Lord of the Pussies.” Yeah, like that.

Hugh seemed genuinely happy to see “Principles of Gardening” at a wine event. “Shall I sign it to ‘HoseMistress?’” Not a good idea. He signed both books for me, and I walked away feeling honored to have spent a few minutes with him. I was so excited that he knew my nom de plume, I nearly wet my disposable Comfort Zone.

TO BE CONTINUED

A Strange Experience

I had a strange experience, an experience that moved me in a way I’m still trying to digest.

My wife and I ordered a Marzemino at our favorite local Italian restaurant. It was lovely, in that captivating way the red wines of Trentino have, so delicate and yet so powerful. My wife was unfamiliar with the variety, but it’s one I’ve long adored when I’ve encountered it. When we arrived home after lunch, I searched Marzemino to get a little more information about it. After all these years, I still love to immerse myself in wine’s almost incomprehensible variety.

One of the first listings in my Google search was for a post about Marzemino on a wine blog I’d encountered before, but not in a very long time—Fringe Wine. I clicked on the link, and read the brief article about Marzemino (a grape that always makes me think of a prize fighter—Rocky Marzemino—but that’s a different story). I noticed that the author of the blog, a Rob Tebeau, hadn’t published since 2014, and that was a single post. Prior to that, he’d written in July of 2013. Now, it’s certainly not odd to find abandoned wine blogs. The Internet is littered with them, like cigarette butts on the information highway. But, bored and rather sleepy from my long Marzemino-fueled lunch, I clicked on Mr. Tebeau’s last post. It’s here, if you want to read it: Fringe Wine.

That last post is about Mr. Tebeau’s struggles with depression. It completely disarmed me. It speaks of his experiences with ECT, electro convulsive therapy. It’s candid, and it is filled with a desperation in its voice that is distilled down to something powerful and pure, Depression Grappa. I swear I felt my heart pounding.

So I read the “last” post from a year earlier, July 2013. In that post, Mr. Tibeau writes hauntingly of his struggle with depression. I’ve never read anything like it on a wine blog. Of his depression he writes:

“It takes away the things you love and your drive by removing your capacity to love and your capacity for action.  It's a grief with no cause and a pain with no source or location.  Nothing makes it better.  Nothing makes it go away.  You wake up in the morning and it's waiting for you at the foot of your bed.  And somehow it's gotten bigger in the night, and it grabs you a little harder every day.”

It’s painful to read that. But it’s also beautifully expressed.

I only read those three posts, the one on Marzemino, and the two final posts, written a year apart. The very last post, about ECT, had zero comments.

Something about this ate at me. I decided to search for Mr. Tebeau to see what had become of him. I quickly learned that he had died, quite suddenly (the obits read) only a few weeks after that last post. He was 33. The last word he wrote on that final post of Fringe Wine was, “Goodbye.”

I don’t need to know any more of Mr. Tibeau’s struggles, or about how he died. That’s a kind of voyeurism I’m not comfortable around. I didn’t know him, I didn’t regularly read his wine blog, and I never mentioned it, or insulted him, on HoseMaster of Wine™. I’m grateful for that. And, honestly, I nosed around in his life more than I probably should have, driven by something that I can’t quite put my finger on—it was more than idle curiosity. When I discovered he had died shortly after that last piece, I was dumbstruck. And I didn’t even know him. Yet I felt a profound sadness having learned of his death, having read his last words.

And then there is the eternal life that is the Internet. We think of the Internet as a place of immediacy, where we go for instant gratification and connection. But reading Mr. Tebeau’s last posts was like reading his diary—not a violation of his privacy, of course, but intimate and terrible. I don’t think I’ve ever realized the sort of immortality publishing on the web brings to all of us here, I didn't really comprehend its implications, how our deaths will change the way our words are read and perceived. It makes me want to delete HoseMaster of Wine™ the minute I retire. Problem is, I retire so often, even I don’t know when it’s for real.

As much variety as there is to wine, there is an equal variety to the reasons people are drawn into it. For some it’s about insobriety, for some it’s about wine’s inexplicable prestige, for some it’s simply a path they stumbled across and thought they’d be good at. Reading Mr. Tebeau’s words, “I started this project a few years ago in an attempt to occupy myself during another particularly nasty time in my life.  It was interesting and it engaged me and I learned a lot of really cool things in the process.  Those wines and this site helped me get back on balance at a time when I was in danger of losing control.  Wine has helped stabilize me at several different times in my life.” made me wonder about my own motivations, my own desires and needs, that fueled me to make wine my life’s work, as trivial as that has been.

I’ve written previously about how I stumbled into my sommelier career, and about how this stupid blog came to be. I won’t bore you with rehashing all of that. I loved wine from the very first. It wasn’t my first career, but it was my life. I have no regrets about that, but, now, I wonder about that choice.

The role of wine that we rarely discuss is how it makes us feel better about ourselves. It begins with the alcohol, of course. I’ve been an angry person my entire life, impatient and short-tempered, intolerant and unkind. Wine, somehow, takes me to a better person in myself. Not when I’m alone. If I’m alone and angry, wine makes it that much worse. But among others, wine seems to make me more collegial, less angry. When I discovered that, as I did in my 20’s, I began to need wine. Not in an addictive way, I’m far from an alcoholic. I swear. Really. Ask any bartender in town. No, I think I needed wine to find that better person in myself. Anger drives my sense of humor, as it drives most senses of humor, but wine made me enjoy the company of other human beings, and even like the man I was. I’d never believed that possible.

But the other way wine makes us feel better about ourselves is the way it allows us to claim some sort of superiority, some measure of status and class. I was proud to be a sommelier, not because I was good at it, or because one should be proud of knowing a lot about wine, in the big picture wine is laughably unimportant, but I was proud because most other people in our Western culture assign admiration to folks who are very wine knowledgeable. It’s prestigious to know a lot about wine. It may be fun to know endless baseball trivia, it may be interesting to collect stamps, but one is almost ashamed to admit those hobbies knowing the vacant stares the admission will earn. Being employed as a sommelier made me somebody. Not in my own eyes, but in the eyes of others. And that’s what I needed, that’s what kept me in wine, the admiration, the being somebody. I managed to hide from my own self-loathing for those hours I was in the wine business. I wonder how many of my peers feel the same way. I'm certain it's many.

There’s something tragic about all this. Or comic. I sense it every time I watch a show like “Uncorked,” or sense the desperation of a wine blogger yearning for more and more attention, or read about a wealthy individual ardently filling a wine cellar with hundreds of cases of prestigious wines. It’s only wine. That’s what I always think. It’s only wine. Pursue it, write about it, collect it, make it, sell it, above all drink it, but always remember, it’s only wine. I’ve felt the anger of others who've forgotten it’s only wine—from Georg Riedel to The Hair. There is anger everywhere in the wine business, an almost territorial sort of aggression. And I often forget myself that it's only wine, and then my anger goes flying around the Internet. But, I comfort myself, at least my anger is funny.

On the Internet, we create new selves. On FaceBook, on Twitter, on Snapchat, on every dating site, people spend hours and hours creating a new, better, smarter, prettier face to present to the world. For his last two posts, Rob Tebeau didn’t. I won’t be able to meet another person seriously involved in wine without thinking about him. Maybe I am him. Maybe it’s death that’s sitting at the foot of my bed every morning when I wake up. And maybe it’s wine that keeps thoughts of my own death, my own shortcomings, my own fears and sadness, at bay. Maybe it’s wine that allows me to continue to live with the illusion that my life is important. And maybe that’s why I love wine.

I’m haunted by that last piece of Mr. Tebeau. The fear that pervades it. The honesty. The No Comments. The Goodbye.

Wine, Memory and Massacres

Around noon today, Wednesday, a coworker told me that there was another mass shooting unfolding at that moment in San Bernadino, CA. It just barely registered. Your first response is to wonder how many people were murdered—it’s almost like you want to know the gunman’s score. He received a 20 from Twitter, a 14 from NPR, and all scores were done blind. Not bad, but not in the Exceptional range. Maybe in the Shooting range.

Aside from disgust and anger, I felt a little hopeless at the news. These sorts of massacres are not going to stop any time soon, any more than climate change is going to suddenly reverse. But I’m not here to discuss politics (who am I? STEVE!?), I’m here to write about wine. Trivial, ordinary, meaningless wine. It’s what we do on wine blogs.

Thinking about ordinary folks whose lives are suddenly destroyed by angry human garbage with a gun, I took comfort in wine, that I work, and have always worked, in the wine business. And I realized that all of my life I have turned to wine for comfort, reassurance, and solace. Solace not in the alcohol in wine, though that obviously matters, but in wine itself, and what wine represents. Maybe it’s that I see wine as being one of the things that is best about our Western culture. Literature, art, baseball, wine, jazz, those beautiful creations. Can they compensate for random death (that is, if all death isn’t random to those who haven’t died), or for all the evil that’s in our world? No, perhaps not. But it’s what I have.

Many years ago, I think I was 27 at the time, my girlfriend Josie and I arrived home after working  our shifts in the restaurant where we met to find my cockatiel Buster flying crazily around the living room. Buster was often out of his cage, but not after I had left for work. I was confused. I knew he couldn’t get out of his cage. None of us can. My confusion abruptly ended when I realized my television was gone. And my stereo, and my camera, and a lot of other valuable stuff. Our apartment had been burglarized. We called the police, and they dutifully came and filled out a report. I asked the cop why burglars would take my sleeping bag. “Oh, they use it to lug the heavy stuff out. They probably rifled through your panty drawer, too.” A little too quickly, I said, “Yeah.” But that’s another story.

After the police left, Josie and I were not the least bit sleepy. After a burglary, your apartment feels creepy, and your bedroom feels dirty, and sleep is not an option. So I went to the wine rack and opened a bottle of wine. I’ll never forget that wine. I’ve never consumed another bottle of that wine, I refused to buy it for my wine list when I was later a sommelier, and I wouldn’t carry it in my wine shop. It was a Grgich Hills Zinfandel. I cannot even see a bottle of Grgich Zin without recalling the feeling of fear and disgust and anger and violation that I felt when I realized our apartment had been burgled. I thought drinking a nice bottle of wine would help, and it did, it helped, but I wish I had been wise enough to choose a wine that was cheap, or lousy, or Pinot Grigio. The lesson, friends, is that when something miserable happens to you, drink something shitty, not something you like. Maybe keep a bottle of Pinot Grigio in your fridge, just in case.

That burglary was my first lesson in wine’s power over memory. And, therefore, us. For what are we but memories? And bodily fluids. And a side of meat. The Grgich Hills brought me some solace in that moment; it was something civilized to counteract something sad about the human race. But that’s not the kind of example I’m trying to get to. It was my first lesson about wine, and its hold over me, about its connection to memory. More lessons, many more, were to come.

Nine years later, Josie died. Just typing that was hard. I was working as a sommelier, and, eventually, after some weeks away from the job trying to find a way back to my life, back to any sort of goddam life, I returned to the restaurant. I had stopped drinking. Hell, I’d stopped eating and sleeping, what did I need wine for? I discovered death is a great weight loss plan. But I had to continue to buy wine for the restaurant, to do my job. Several nights a week, I would sit with salespeople and have to smell and taste wines, as I always had. And those were the only moments in my miserable life when I was OK. Putting a wine up to my nose and sensing its energy, thinking about its components, about where it was from, just making sense of it, brought me comfort and security. But it was much more than that. Wine smells of the earth, smells of human endeavor, smells of community. Great wine awakens in us a powerful gladness to be alive. Even during the darkest hours of my life, the aroma of a first-rate Châteauneuf-du-Pape made me happy when nothing, and I mean nothing, else could.

The wines I smelled and tasted during my grief reminded me that I had once known how to be happy. I didn’t think I’d ever be happy again, but at least I knew happiness lived in me. The wines triggered memories of happier times, of all the joy my love of wine had brought me, of the people I loved with whom I’d shared great wine. And, as all great wines do, the wines I tasted promised a future. Earth, love, memory, community…wine began to heal my broken life by forcing me to remember them. I was slowly, and this may sound melodramatic and maudlin, but it’s also true, healed by wine, and by its connection to memory, which brought me back into the world, into the possibility of love, into the community of, first, wine, and then the living. Wine’s pull was, for me, irresistible.

The older I get, the more I notice that when I taste wine, I think more about my feelings about wine, my accumulated memories, than I think about aromatics and alcohol level and descriptors. I smell a California Cabernet, and I’m home. I put a glass of Hermitage to my nose and I’m that kid who “discovered” Hermitage 35 years ago and was astonished that anything could be that wonderful. I open a Chablis and I remember all the Raveneau I used to drink and how now I can’t fucking afford it. Wine is memory. And maybe memory is wine. Put the most dramatic ones away for a couple of decades, and when you finally examine them again they’ve transformed into something completely different. Something that makes you deeply grateful, as I am grateful for Josie; or something that makes you buy an automatic weapon and kill people. Like wine, how you store memory is what matters in the long run.

When terrible things happen, from the mundane to the horrifying, from burglaries to death, from 9/11 to civilians killed by drones, from domestic massacres to suicide bombers, there isn’t any real solace, no “closure.” But life beckons us, in all its Sisyphean glory. We open a bottle after a miserable experience, perhaps catastrophic experience, and we begin, again, to try and make sense of it all.

Tonight, I’ll open a bottle of something interesting, not a fucking Grgich Hills Zin, and it won’t take long before the wine will stir memories, will fill my head with all sorts of unpredictable and unforeseeable thoughts. I’ll be struggling with the memories of what it’s like to lose a loved one in the blink of an eye, as many people in San Bernadino are doing today. One day they’re here, next day they’re gone. And I’ll remember Josie, and so many others I’ve lost. And, after that, as the wine embraces and commandeers my memories, I’ll remember this great community I’m a part of, and I’ll remember all that I’ve been given, all the people who have touched me, and loved me and helped me. I’ll remember that it’s the simplest things in life that can bring the most joy. Rather than surrender to anger and grief, I'll try to make some sense of it all.

I turn to wine in tough times to bring me solace, but it doesn’t. It brings me Grace.

A Tale of Two Wines

In the beginning, I always wondered when I would be able to drink wines that were ten years old with some regularity. This seemed an almost mythic and unattainable goal. Like most young wine lovers, I imagined that ten-year-old wines were far superior to wines that had just been released, that if only I could uncork older wines all the time I would finally understand the beauty and mystery of wine. I know now that this is foolish. In my experience, the vast majority of wines, and I’m speaking now of fine wines, not the oceans of plonk that make up most of the wine consumed in this country, do not get wildly better as they age. Even at twenty years old, most disappoint, or underwhelm. Wine is certainly different as it gets older, but better? This is a matter of taste. But I suspect most wine people would agree that wines that are brilliant after twenty years of age are relatively rare. But they’re what we live for.

When I open an older wine from my humble wine cellar, what makes it fun and rewarding is the trip the wine takes you on, the trip back in time and memory. What was my life like back in 1999? (Well, I got married to my beautiful wife Kathleen, most importantly.) It almost doesn’t matter if the wine is magnificent or memorable on its own. I’ve learned how to choose wines that will not fall apart over time, so the wines are rarely undrinkable. But the real pleasure is in the associations the wine brings to mind—that first year of marriage, the wonder of how grand and beautiful life can be. I hold the bottle in my hand, gaze at the vintage, and the producer, and I am overwhelmed with memories. Hell, I almost don’t even have to open the wine to enjoy it.

I always tell people starting out in wine to collect wines that have emotional meaning for you. You ordered it on your first date with your lover. You served it at your wedding. You visited the winery and fell in love with the place. The wine speaks to you, changes your feelings about wine. Those are wines that will reward cellaring, assuming they are wines structured to age. If you cellar wines because they received 100 points, you’ll find little meaning in them when you open them in twenty years. It was in the Wine Spectator Top Ten? Believe me, you won’t care. That’s a fool’s game. I know people with cellars filled with First Growths, 100 point wines, Top Ten wines, and cult wines. They brag about their collections, but that’s all they are. Collections. Meant to impress others. They’re soulless, and the enjoyment of wine is as much about feeding your soul as it is about drinking great vintages. I’ve tasted countless wines that were highly rated, and was grateful each time. But the wines I will always cherish are the wines that were not just magnificent, but nourished my soul, that triggered personal memories, which reminded me to be grateful for my life. It’s memories that make older wines complex as much as the tertiary aromas.

All of this has been said before. There’s almost nothing new to say about wine, though we spend countless hours saying it again and again. Wine is a vast subject, filled with infinite minutiae about infinite bottles, but, in its essence, it’s not hard to understand. Though it takes a while. Every beginning wine lover has to wade through the misinformation and folklore that surrounds wine. Spend a day in a tasting room with ordinary folks and you’ll hear an amazing amount of misinformation about wine that they’ve accumulated from various sources, primarily friends or relatives they see as wine experts, or misinformed tasting room employees or wine shop employees. It’s daunting how much bullshit wine generates. Wine blogs are filled with it. I attended TexSom and heard people with letters after their name say things I know are false, though often to promote themselves or an agenda. And, of course, the HoseMaster does his share.

My gorgeous wife and I were in Cambria for my birthday week in October. I brought along six or eight bottles of wine from our cellar for the occasion. One bottle in particular was reserved for our birthday meal at Bistro Laurent in Paso Robles. It’s that bottle, and another that I’ll get to, that sparked this little essay, that made me think more about aging wines and the rewards of doing so. Not while I was drinking the wine, not at all; while I was drinking it, I was speechless and utterly enthralled by how great the wine was. But later, in the passing weeks, as the experience stayed with me, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

 
The bottle was the 1990 Chave Hermitage. I don’t think I have the chops to adequately describe it. Anything I write would do a great disservice to a remarkable bottle of wine. I will say that at 25 years of age it was still young, vibrant and alive with energy. I’ve always loved Hermitage. For me, it’s the pinnacle of Syrah, though I also love Côte-Rôtie. The other legendary Hermitage from 1990 is the Jaboulet “La Chapelle.” I’m lucky enough to have consumed a few bottles of that great wine, also, and, make no mistake, it is a great wine. The Chave is better.

Where was I in 1990? I was in my third year working as a sommelier, and, truthfully, supremely ignorant about wine and the wine business. I was 38 years old, and finally surfacing from the grief of my fiancée’s death a year earlier. Near the end of 1990, I was dating the woman who would become my first wife--a remarkable woman who saved my life, and who awakened me to my own shortcomings and pain when she wisely divorced me. The Dow Jones hit a record at 2800. “The Simpsons” began. Barry Bonds was the National League MVP playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates while wearing a normal-sized hat. The Zodiac killer terrorized New York. And Chave produced yet another remarkable Syrah.

But it was the personal memories that the wine evoked as I consumed it with a fantastic meal at Bistro Laurent that really mattered. Sitting next to my beautiful wife, recalling the heartbreak that was part of my life in 1990, and thinking about my first gorgeous bride, and about all that had happened since, all the luck and all the heartbreak, the tiring and lonesome trail that miraculously led to my wife Kathleen, that was the gift of the ’90 Chave Hermitage. Its beauty and life reminded me of the beauty in my own life, the incredible luck and fortune that have been my constant companions. Nothing else, and not anybody else, could have given that to me. My favorite wine from my favorite Syrah appellation at twenty-five reminding me of how long twenty-five years is, and how lucky I am to have survived all those days. Only a great wine, a wine I’ve carried along with me all those years, imagining the day I’d finally get to drink it, could have done that. I have no idea what it scored, or if it was a Top Ten Wine that year. Only an idiot would care about that. It was a wine I shall never forget, joining a very, very short list of wines in that category.

In the midst of thinking about the Chave Hermitage, I happened to stop by Ridge Vineyards out in Dry Creek to pick up some wine and taste what they had to offer. Ridge doesn’t need my praise. They’re one of the greatest producers in California. And on this day, with that Chave still kicking around in the back of my head, I was greatly impressed by the Ridge 2012 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. In fact, after sniffing and tasting, my first thought was, “I’d love to drink this wine in twenty-five years.”

The Ridge is spectacularly good Cabernet Sauvignon that is sourced, I was told, from the younger
vines at Monte Bello Vineyard. Younger, in Monte Bello’s case, meaning twenty years old. If you’ve never had the pleasure of drinking Monte Bello Cabernet, especially one that is twenty years old or so, you should put that on your wine bucket list. Anyone asked which are the five greatest California Cabernets who doesn’t include Ridge Monte Bello simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This 2012 Estate is not the legendary Ridge Monte Bello, but, truly, it seemed as good as its older brother. I was astonished, and kept tasting it trying to pick it apart, see why it was so much cheaper. I’m no Paul Draper, but I would be surprised if, in 25 years, you could tell the Estate from the Monte Bello. No matter, both are great wines.

Let’s put it this way. There are a lot of Cabernets that aren’t half as good made from vines that aren’t half as old that sell for a lot more money to the folks who chase scores and “cult” wines. The Ridge 2012 Estate is fifty bucks. Twenty years from now, that will seem insanely cheap.

Somehow, my brain decided to link the Chave Hermitage with the Ridge Estate Cab. You stick around wine long enough, taste tens of thousands of wines, and your brain alters—and not just from the alcohol. It finds connections that might make little sense at first, but which you mustn’t ignore. You might be tempted to call it intuition, but it’s more certainly wisdom. I’ve learned to listen to that wine voice in my head. When it says, “I want to taste this wine in twenty-five years,” I pay attention. Will the Ridge be another Chave Hermitage? Most certainly not. Doesn’t matter. It will be great in its own way.

If I live another twenty-two years and open the 2012, I know it will be something special. How do I know? Beats me. But I trust my instincts. And when I do drink it, it will remind me of 2012. Of the days when I was the HoseMaster of Wine™. Of the people I met and loved because I write this crap regularly. Of the people who may have passed since then. Of my sweet and adorably dumb Norwich Terrier, Mickey, who was born in 2012, who we raised from birth. And, therefore, of his mother, Kate, a dog I feel is my canine soulmate on her second visit. Of my long and remarkable marriage to the kindest soul who exists in this time and this place. Of a time that will seem imaginary to my future self in 2037, slippery, hard to recall, but was my 60th year on this mysterious planet. Only a wine can do that.

Every old wine, but especially the ones that take your breath away, is a time capsule we open with a corkscrew and a full heart.  A living, breathing, energetic reminder of our past that will unearth memories that have long lain dormant. And when people ask me how a wine can be profound, there is the answer.