Could you tell a Merlot from a Cabernet from a Syrah in a blind tasting? Faced with three unmarked glasses from three brown-bagged bottles with no clues other than a Napa Valley origin, I couldn’t. Neither could food and wine authority David Rosengarten, Chicago Tribune wine writer Bill Daley and editorial director of Curtco Media, Brett Anderson.

These three experienced wine writers were leading a seminar during last week’s Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, based at Meadowood Resort in St. Helena, California. While the rainstorms came and went, and the flowering mustard waved in the wind between the rows of dormant grapevines, 60 wine writers and editors from around the country studied how to improve their craft.

The blind-tasting exercise was supposed to help wine reviewers compose better tasting notes, but to me it made one or both of the following two points:

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This happens every day in group wine tastings or competitions: one group of tasters loves a wine that the other group really hates. These are experienced tasters who love wine. So how can they be so far apart?

I’ve often thought that the reason people can’t agree over which wines are best or worst is simply because they have different likes and dislikes. It must be comparable to people who love classical music vs. those who love hip hop. They’ve been enculturated to like one, and may extremely dislike the other because it’s not their’s.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that something else is happening in wine tastings.

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Today is a great day to pop open a bottle of Schramsberg in memory of the co-founder of the pioneering sparkling wine cellar in Napa Valley, Jamie Davies, who died Tuesday at the age of 73 after living with Parkinson’s disease for many years.

I had known her and her husband Jack Davies (who died in 1998), since the early 1980s when I was the cub reporter- photographer- editor at the St. Helena Star newspaper. I counted her as an especially friendly face in the crowd at wine events in Napa, San Francisco and New York over the years. As did many other journalists, restaurateurs, chefs and wine sales people.

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It’s wise for a guy to have a good plan in advance of Valentine’s Day. I’ve learned this after too many Valentine’s Days when I tried to rush around San Francisco or New York at the last minute to find a gift of jewelry, chocolate or flowers. This year my gift is going to be a quiet, romantic dinner, where I spend a lot of time gazing into her hazel eyes, and not at the wine list.

Here’s what I’m thinking our evening will involve, at the table, that is. I just have to decide whether I’m buying the sushi and dessert as takeout and then cooking the quail, or if we’re dining out. What’s more romantic, anyway, cooking for your partner or dining out in style?

Sushi with Bubbly
Quail with Pinot Noir
Chocolate with Port

Ah, but why and what?

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My post defending California Pinot Noir on Monday stirred up quite a bit of discussion. Good comments about Burgundy vs. US wines got me thinking about aging. It’s accepted that well-balanced wines, not blockbusters, are the wines that are supposed to age well.

So how does this apply to Pinot Noir?

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It bugs me sometimes when I hear other wine writers and critics dissing California wine for being too big, too flavorful, too much. Disclosure: I live in Napa Valley, and I’ve lived about 40 percent of my life in California, so I do have an urge to support the home team.

The dissing sometimes strikes of condescension from people who learned about wine from a Eurocentric perspective and will never be able to acknowledge that a style different from the generally lean and underripe European profile could be desirable. So I defend the generally bigger style of West Coast wines, but I also like to point out that they make smaller wines here, too.

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Italian-Americans seemed to dominate the program Monday night in New York City when Wine Enthusiast honored its 2007 Wine Star Award winners at a well-orchestrated reception and dinner for more than 300. Ray Chadwick, the CEO of multinational wine company Diageo Chateau & Estate was Man of the Year, and I doubt if he’s Italian, but many of the other award winners were.

It got me thinking about the powerful influence Italians have exerted on the world of wine, and especially in the US.

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Led Zeppelin, like a Ravenswood Zinfandel?

We all know the arguments against the 100-point scale, but the question is, what’s better? Some years ago, Kermit Lynch, the Berkeley wine merchant and importer, who was definitely not a fan of the points system, suggested in a seminar that people get creative with how they convey the style and quality of wine.

He recommended that people compare wines to art, to architecture and other forms of creativity instead of reducing them to digits. It was a fun idea, and I spent the rest of the day rating wines by architectural styles. Something like a 1961 Haut Brion would have been the wine equivalent of a Georgian townhouse in D.C. A Hanzell Chardonnay 1990 conjured a Bel Air contemporary mansion, and so on.

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You may remember my post about the book, The Red Wine Diet, back in November. Author and cardiologist Dr. Roger Corder clarifies the relation between red wine, what you eat and heart health in a revealing and memorable way.

He debunks a number of accepted platitudes on these subjects, and makes a bold argument that a previously little known group of compounds, procyanidins, is the key found in certain foods and in certain types of red wine that can open the lock to better cardio health and potentially longer life. But are these healthy wines good for your palate, too?

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A study at the California Institute of Technology came up with scientific backing for the widely observed phenomenon that people tend to like expensive wines more than less expensive wines.

The interesting part, to me, is not just that knowing you are drinking a high-priced wine makes you say that you like it better, but that something happens in the brain so that you really believe it’s better. You’re not simply being consciously snobbish.

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