California's Big Wine Problem Evan Powell, March 8, 2009 PointlessWines.com If there is anything distinctively American, it is the peculiar notion that “more is better.” We invented all-you-can-eat buffets, 500 channels of television, super-sized fast food, and absurdly massive SUV’s. We introduced the world to the skyscraper and the concept of mass production. We invented the concept of a corporation that holds as its prime directive the earning of more revenue and profit this year than last, always more, more, more. So it is perhaps not unusual that the California wine industry makes wines that reflect the national obsession with excess.   In California, many winemakers assume that if some oak on a wine is good, more oak must be better. If alcohol is good, more must be better. If fruit character is good, then richer, denser, stickier fruit is better.  Over the last twenty years, the industry has moved toward making bigger, richer, more ridiculously massive wines—liquid Hummers in a bottle. Somewhere along the line “jammy” became a featured attribute rather than a gross flaw. Highly-extracted and overripe wines that resemble fermented Smuckers struck a nerve with the novice American wine drinking public. Wines with 16% alcohol began to be touted as appropriate table wine, and the “more is better” consumer bought into it. Consumers got fascinated with the taste of oak in wine. Premium wineries gleefully responded by overburdening their wines with an abundant stench of oak, since it quite often masked over an assortment of underlying weaknesses.   However, the winemakers did not do this on their own. The wine media is a co-conspirator in this tasteless travesty. Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator routinely give high scores to over-oaked, overly-extracted, high alcohol wines. Meanwhile, wines that are made with more balance, harmony, and finesse suffer the insult of low scores. Accordingly, unsuspecting consumers who blindly follows the scores of the 100-point rating gurus are misled into believing that the most outrageously overdone wines are what good wine should taste like.   As an example, Robert Parker gave the 2004 Martinelli “Martinelli Road” Chardonnay a whopping 94 points. The Wine Spectator gave it a 93. The typical consumer would reasonably assume from these scores that the Martinelli must be a great Chardonnay. It is not. It is an imbalanced monster that sports a hot 15.5% alcohol and a suffocating blanket of dense oak. In our recent tasting of a flight of five California Chardonnays, the 04 Martinelli ranked dead last—unanimously declared to be undrinkable by our tasting panel.	We do not fault the winemaker or the folks at Martinelli for making and marketing this wine. Clearly, big oaky monster wines appeal to a certain segment of the wine-drinking public. Robert Parker and James Laube of Wine Spectator are two critics who promote the notion that bigger is better, and the Martinelli Chardonnay is engineered to elicit high scores from them. However, consumers err when they interpret high point scores as objective indicators of the wine’s quality.   The result is that much of the so-called “premium” wine produced in California is horrifically imbalanced, lacking finesse, harmony, elegance, and structure. And it is imbalanced by design. Winemakers who cater to the pedestrian palates of Robert Parker and the crew at Wine Spectator create wines in the overblown styles in order to win high scores. The high scores in turn make the wine more marketable to the uneducated public. And though this insidious game started in California, it has compromised winemaking practices in all major wine-producing regions of the world.   Thankfully, not all winemakers are willing to play by the critics' rules. Some march to the beat of their own drums, making wines of character and balance that they know will never appeal to the critics. But the wines they produce are fascinating, sensually engaging works of art. Some of them are amazingly inexpensive—which in itself is a guarantee that they will never get high scores. These independent winemakers follow their own instincts and passions. They cater to the subculture of avid wine lovers who ignore the critics' scores, and choose instead to seek out the more sophisticated and distinctive accomplishments of the craft.   PointlessWines.com is dedicated to finding and spotlighting the true gems being made today, not only in California, but in Oregon, Washington, and around the world. We look for wineries that are not following the manipulative winemaking formulas for media success. We search out wines that reflect the creative talents of inspired winemakers, and avoid corporate designer wines that are built by marketing departments. We seek out that elusive quality in wine that evokes a sense of harmony, as well as intellectual and spiritual balance. When we find a wine that has these attributes, we feature it on this Web site.   We do not list hundreds of wines here, but rather a handful of each varietal and style. They represent sublime achievements in winemaking, and/or extraordinary values. As wines such as these are brought to light and consumers begin to appreciate them, perhaps the pendulum will swing. Perhaps the powerful 100-point critics will begin to lose their dominance. And if that happens, we may hope for a day that all winemakers are once again free to pursue their craft as a genuine art form rather than the cynical marketing game that it has become.