Fruit of the vindication

Forget politics. Forget child tax credits or the lunatic photo-op of pushing 11 million across the border. Enough but-but-Benghazi! and titanic comb-overs. No more grain-fed Egyptian pyramids. No more about the plain red cups.

Let's focus on what really matters:

I'm right about the folly of wine.

Overwhelming evidence has just come to light — well, this is from May, but I was distracted by all the war and pestilence and refugee crises and other trivia.

Not Vox, the news site where I learned this six months after the fact. Vox had its priorities straight.

Vox has blown the lid off this scandal: People wrongly buy more expensive wine because they think it's better. And it isn't.

I have been trying to warn the world about wine time and again, and I've been marginalized and ignored — mostly ignored — for it.

Maybe nobody took me seriously when I said all wine comes from one municipal tank somewhere near Modesto, and that the flavor and nuance of wine comes from the power of wine servers to suggest this wine tastes different or better than that wine.

But the world is going to listen to me now!

In something called Vox Observatory, Vox reported "Expensive Wine is for Suckers," and had its staff members taste three Cabernet Sauvignon wines, one $8, one $14 and one $43.

The most expensive is a 2011 Honig Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley," explained the video voiceover. "Wine Spectator Magazine rated it "Outstanding." And it costs five times more than the ($8) one on the right."

(The video shows Wine Spectator Magazine's 93 out of 100 score for the wine, and its opinion, "Extremely well done for the vintage, with style and panache."

"So," says the narrator, "does it taste five times better?"

Vox staffers gave the same average rating for the cheapest and most expensive wines in this taste test. This is consistent with a 2008 study that compiled more than 6000 blind tastings from 17 events across the United States.

"It found that unless they had undergone wine training, people didn't actually enjoy the taste of expensive wines," said the narrator. "In fact, they enjoyed them slightly less."

See?! Education, man, it's only gonna get you in trouble.

Vox implicates the power of suggestion, specifically the 2004 movie Sideways (great movie, even if you don't like wine; plus, you get to see the places where I grew up, in the proper light), which skyrocketed sales of Pinot Noir over other red wines, based on Paul Giamatti's character's fussy adoration of the variety ("That's 100 percent Pinot Noir. Single vineyard; they don't even make it anymore.").

Conversely, his character's infamous trashing of Merlot damaged sales of that variety.

Who judges what's good in wine? Why, wine judges! But Vox pointed to a study that showed not only are professional judges so inconsistent they cancel out each other, but their awarding of gold medals to wines are statistically no different than the awarding of gold medals by random chance.

Judges aren't even good judges of their own tastes. When some judges were secretly given the same wine to taste three times, only one in 10 gave it the same medal each time, Vox reported.

Not all professional critics from wine publications taste the products blindly, and are privy to the wines' prices. An Australian study Vox cited showed wine tasters consistently preferring the most expensive of wines selected, even though though the creators of the study had been adding acid to the most expensive wine to make it taste worse.

Another study even strapped wine tasters to brain wave machines, and gave them the same wine to drink. When told one of the wine was nine times more expensive than the other, brain wave activity increased in pleasure centers for taste and smell.

"So, expensive wines may taste better after all," said the narrator, "as long as you know they're expensive."

That's not quite the conclusion I draw. I say winemakers use the most cynical selling point — unmitigated profit from arbitrary pricing — to bamboozle wine drinkers, who must. have. their. wine!

I'm not against wine. I don't like it, but I don't care if others do. What I can't stand is the pretense and flim-flam and mind-meld that goes into the selling of wine.

Even wine expert and former Sacramento Bee TV critic Rick Kushman says the fuss over wine is ridiculous.

"There's two things you need to know with wine," Kushman told local public radio yesterday. "How to get the cork out, and which end of the bottle to drink from. After that, it's all minor."

Here's what I want wineries and restaurants to do: Simply give someone a glass of wine. Let the patron drink and enjoy, or not; if the patron wants to know things about the wine — what grape, where grown, how long in the barrel — despite the overwhelming evidence that it's been sitting in a giant tank with all the other wine — then the patron can ask. Otherwise, live and let freaking live.

But enough with the sell job. And enough with the arbitrary prices.

Never work a day in your life

Whatever you do, get into it …

a … HA!!!

That noise you hear, America, is the thunder of people running to support my as-yet unchallenged  theory on California wine.

The big guns have joined ranks behind me, so who knows how big this Rally for Reason will grow?

By big guns, I mean the folks behind Freakonomics: Writer Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Levitt, who through two books, a documentary film, and now a radio show, have challenged long-held assumptions about the way we think about money and the economy.

I love it when really smart people reexamine what we firmly believe or stubbornly assume and, with calm scrutiny of facts, show us we're dead wrong.

Stephen and Steven have agreed not to go near my firm beliefs and stubborn assumptions, so I firmly believe and assume my campaign for Wine Truth will advance undeterred.

Of course, Stephen and Steven don't know who the hell I am, but I sure know them, because last week my neighborhood National Public Radio station (shout out to KXJZ, Sacramento!) ran old episodes of Freakonomics Radio in place of an hour-long local issues talk show.

And what to my wondering ears should appear but a story challenging our ideas about the economics of wine. To wit: Wine is a con.

Dubner didn't say it quite so boldly or succinctly, but the episode featured other economists using calm factual scrutiny — and some funny subterfuge — to demonstrate that drinkers can't really tell an expensive wine from swill. OK, less expensive but nicely labeled wine like you can find in any supermarket.

One economist hosted a wine tasting for learned Ivy League oenophiles (wine snobs) by putting a variety of wines in separate unlabeled decanters. Not only could the learned drinkers NOT tell which was expensive and which cheap, but claimed to note a difference in two wines in particular — even though it was the same wine poured from two different decanters.

Another economist created a fake restaurant, complete with fake menu and wine list, carefully constructed to include extremely expensive wines that The Wine Spectator — the beacon and trend maker of wine journalism — had condemned in reviews. The economist submitted his "restaurant's" wine list for The Wine Spectator's annual awards recognition for such folderol. The economist's hypothesis: The awards were an excuse to sell advertising.

The economist's fake restaurant did indeed receive one of the awards. A representative from The Wine Spectator asked if he'd like to advertise the news in the magazine. The economist attended the awards ceremony and explained his fraud.

The same economist conducted a more thorough, scientifically controlled study of many, many wine tastings held at vaunted wine festivals and celebrations, and came up with a similar conclusion to the economist with the intimate gathering of tasters: Wine drinkers can't tell the difference between expensive wines and the more economical ones (which the industry calls by a funny name: fighting varietals).

Carve out an hour of time and listen to the episode. At the very least, it's entertaining.

So, why is expensive wine so darned expensive? It's a meta-marketing tool: It not only makes people think the wines are better for their expense, but they pay the big bucks for the false privilege. Genius! I shall charge in the five- or six-figure range for my illustrations from now on.

The expensive wine probably doesn't cost more to produce than the others, but maybe the prices should reflect the actual costs, huh? Beers are mostly the same price. The smaller so-called craft brewers charge more for their six-packs than the Coors and Anheuser-Busch products (simple input-costs per unit of product stuff), but not anywhere near the five to 10 times what some wineries charge over others for their product. Maybe wine drinkers should vote their wallets.

Look, people are going to enjoy their wines — I recognize there's no stopping that. I can't taste the difference in wines, and when my wife and family and friends go wine tasting, I'm the designated driver for that reason. I have to go stand among the grape cluster-shaped trivets and $50 sweatshirts and chocolate-covered elderberries so the winery staffers can't hear my eyes roll when they talk about how this wine has notes of cherries and noses of vanilla and a finish evocative of sandalwood, or whatever. It's all just countertop psychology: I tell you this wine tastes like fish, and you'll certainly detect a nuanced blend of rock cod and sturgeon, maybe a jouncy afterthought of halibut.

The Freakonomics guys didn't exactly say that all of California's wine comes from one big municipal tank hidden somewhere near Modesto (and that it's all white wine and the red wine is simply dyed); they didn't say all the wineries in the state drive up to little spigots on the tank late at night and get their boutique's allotment.

But that's the conclusion I'm jumping to.

Rally for reason, America, and speak truth to the wine power!

My long awaited theory on wine. You're welcome!

Artist's rendering of California's secret wine supply …

The bane of my extended family, I don't play cards, hang tough during small talk, or drink wine. You can imagine the joy I bring to family gatherings.

Of the last, I have heightened my unpopularity (or lowered my popularity further?) with a despised theory on wine, which is: It all comes from one massive tank, like the largest municipal water supply tank you can imagine, somewhere near Modesto, exact coordinates known to only to the wine industry. All of it, every drop of California wine, comes from that tank. Maybe Gallo controls it, maybe not.

(This theory as yet has gone unchallenged. I know what you're thinking: You can't prove a negative. Well, prove it!)

It's all white wine, by the way. The red wine results from dye, conveniently provided in color-matched packets.

One "vintage" of white wine
(or red, whatever), coming up …

During the night, all the wineries — big and small, with names like Leaping Lizard or Fauntleroy or Burnt Bramble or some such; all the wineries with histories written in warm tones about how the sweat and love and blessing of a certain microclimate and generational vision (leaving out the part about the hefty inheritance or absconded-with treasuries) of this or that family delivered this fine wine to your worthy table — back their boutique vans up to a hose bibb sticking out around the base of the tank.

Each winery has a hose bibb. I imagine a plaque — probably gold-plated — is affixed above each, engraved with the winery's name. Each winery pays according to its needed volume in wine product, and drives it back to its home place, and dumps the wine into its casks for distribution.

Back at the wineries, wine lovers cluster in for the distribution, bellied up to polished countertops, sampling each winery's "specialty." Through the power of suggestion (hypnosis, perhaps?), well-trained winery staff use buzzwords to impart the effect that each wine has a different flavor, is brim-full of nuance and pleasure.

Maybe this is all in my mind, a convoluted rationalization for explaining that all wine tastes the same. To me, anyway. Probably to everyone else too, but everyone else denies it. Instead, under the wine stewards' spell, they say they taste "notes" of currant and chocolate and blackberries and dirt and coffee and redemption and longing and success and who knows what else. Sometimes maybe wine grapes.

I don't get much kick from wine (or champagne). Mere alcohol, as is said, doesn't thrill me at all. But most around me indulge in its thrall.

Our son celebrated his 21st birthday belatedly last weekend with friends and family on a winetasting tour of the Amador region, in the Sierra foothills along Highway 49. They stood at those counters and pretended with the proprietors that this wine tastes different from that because this was bottled under a quarter moon and global pressures and regret, or lack thereof.

But the proprietor will know where the wine really came from, and now so will you.

I wandered around the wine tanks, where it's cool and smells sweetly of wine. I like the fragrance of  a cool cellar on a summer day; I enjoy the subterfuge on which each winery has splurged in order to make people believe they actually make their own wine. I like the token vineyards around the winery, the usually unbelievable, money-laden architecture of the wine tasting room, the unmatched views. Always the view; makes me wonder if winemaking isn't really all about prime real estate.

One winery encouraged our entourage outdoors, where a staff member brought out its "pourings." He described one wine as "smoky" and "jammy." Wineries are where real adjectives not only go to get stretched to the breaking point, but where some get born that never make it off the property. Jammy!

My wife held out her glass to me. "This guy said it tastes like blackberries, and I have to say, it really does!" I sipped.

"Tastes like every other wine to me." The party proceeded to ignore me again, clouded in their bliss.

I don't feel the same about beer. Beer certainly tastes different from brand to brand, and it all tastes … well, not awful exactly, but not something I look forward to drinking. The only time beer tastes good to me is right after mowing the lawn, and then it's a cheap beer, and then only a swig or two of it and after that finishing the beer feels like work. I feel like I'm chewing most other beers.

Plus, certain beers, like certain wines, "must" be drunk out of certain glasses that foment foaming or  oxygenate or imbue nobility. Or the glass must be held just so. Hm. Life's too short.

I tasted straight tequila last month for the first time, and actually laughed. "This tastes exactly like whisky," I said. As with whisky, I don't feel I'm drinking tequila so much as it feels like my body is quickly bypassing normal processes in order to ingest the alcohol.

Alcohol should taste like it does when I read about it. Doc in Cannery Row exclaimed, "Hah! There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer!" I want beer to taste like whatever he's talking about. John Steinbeck even made a beer milkshake sound good, even though Doc finally struck up the nerve to order one in a diner (in Santa Maria, 30 miles from my hometown!) and decided it was terrible.

But alcohol never takes like I imagine. Maybe if it did I'd be in trouble.

The truth: Alcohol scares me a bit. I'm afraid of its effects on me. Yeah, goody two-shoes, born and raised, which even my mom regretted.

I don't think I'd be a mean drunk; my maternal grandfather, from the stories I was told, became mean and violent. The closest I've come is being a sarcastic drunk, which is unpleasant enough.

On the few occasions I saw my dad drunk (he was mourning with his best friend the cancer that had shaken and would soon kill his friend), he was sweet and cloying and smothering, weeping and waking me up early in the morning to tell me important things a nine-year-old is never going to understand.

I've never wanted to be that way, and I think maybe the germ of my wine theory is born in that.