One of my favorite punching bags in the world is the sorry state of California rosé. For some reason, winemakers just don’t seem to be able to produce the beautifully dry, crisp, tart rosés that I have come to expect from southern France, southern Italy, and northern Spain. These mediterranean wines are the benchmark for rosé, and most American wines fall quite short.

Which is why I’m so enthusiastic when I discover pink wines that are made well in this country. And when they’re made of exotic grape varieties, so much the better!

If you gave me three guesses as to which winery in northern California would be most likely to grow Touriga Nacional, I’d probably have ended up with York Creek Vineyards before I ran out of guesses.

The York Creek property is one of the largest and most beautiful parcels of land on the crest of Napa’s Spring Mountain. One hundred twenty-five acres of vineyards are surrounded by another 575 acres of woods and orchards, hosting 24 varieties of native trees whose silhouettes make an appearance on the York Creek wine label. The property mirrors the variety of trees in its vineyard plantings of over 14 different varietals including Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Blanc, Carignane, Alicante Bouschet, and Touriga Nacional.

York Creek has been owned since 1968 by Fritz Maytag who purchased the property around the same time he purchased the Anchor Steam Brewing Company here in San Francisco. He always meant to make his own wine there, it just took him a while to get around to it — about 32 years, to be exact.

Maytag is the prodigal son of the Maytag family who decided that he needed to do something instead of appliances or blue cheese with his life. Not that his family ever had any intention of just letting him run the family business. Maytag was encouraged to find his own way in the world without a sense of entitlement. That way included a stint at Stanford as well as a lot of hanging around in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, until the day in 1965 when he fell in love with the Anchor Brewing Company, and decided to save it from going out of business by buying a controlling interest “for the price of a used car.”

Maytag took to brewing like a fish to water, and in the subsequent decades, he has become the Midas of the beverage world. His beer is world-renown and best-selling; his experiments in whiskey and gin have become quick successes. Maytag is a dabbler, a beverage renaissance man if you like, that seems to get it right. From home grown olive oil, to home grown apple brandy, to grappa and port, and now his own wine, Maytag wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the turn of the century village market where farmers eked out an existence from every asset the land provided.

Maytag initially started his winemaking operations in the early Nineties for fun and with the encouragement of his neighbor and friend Cathy Corison, owner and proprietress of Corison Vineyards. In 2000 he moved his operations to a specially designed (by him, of course) winery building across the street from his brewery and made his first commercial vintages. There he continues to serve as winemaker, though now with some help from Tom Holmes, formerly one of the brewers at Anchor Steam who trained as an enologist.

York Creek Vineyards makes a number of excellent wines that I have tasted repeatedly over the years. They are distinctive, well made, unpretentious and often good values. Some of the wines also express what I take to be Maytag’s adventurous spirit for experimentation. I’m quite certain this pretty rosé falls into that camp. Who on earth would have thought of making a rosé in California out of Touriga Nacional, one of the primary red grape varieties that goes into Port and the dry red wines of Portugal?

I don’t know much about the winemaking for this wine, other than what I can guess from what is in the bottle. The grapes were probably harvested ripe-but-not-too-ripe on a cool morning, destemmed, crushed, and then a portion of the fermenting juice was probably bled off from the tank and put into a separate steel tank to finish fermentation on its own.

One of the first wines I fell in love with as a young wine lover was Mateus, a rosé from Portugal that had two important characteristics: it came in a cool shaped bottle, and it was just slightly sweet, not unlike contemporary White Zinfandels — perfect for a beginning wine lover. This wine is quite superior in quality and flavor, but it reminds me fondly of the beginnings of my wine adventures.

Tasting Notes:
Brilliant rose pink in the glass, this wine has a nose of crushed stones, hibiscus, and candied orange peel. In the mouth it is light and smooth with flavors of hibiscus, raspberry, watermelon, and a light bitter earthiness that emerges on the finish. Dry, but not tart, the wine has enough acidity to make it refreshing. A unique and pleasurable rose.

Food Pairing:
I had this wine with cornmeal crust goat cheese pizza with tomatoes and basil, as well as a salad of mixed greens with scallions. It was a particularly nice counterpoint to the scallions, which made the wine more floral in character.

Overall Score: between 8.5 and 9

How Much?: $15

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

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A little less than five years ago when I started this blog, I naively thought that I might try to do something different from all those big wine critics. They were only telling part of the story, I said to myself, but I was going to tell the whole thing. I wasn’t going to pull the punches that I felt everyone else was avoiding. I decided I was going to write negative wine reviews — just what the world needed. Or so I thought.

I think my pioneering attitude lasted about six weeks, after which I was left with a (now) blindingly obvious set of revelations:

1. There was so much mediocre wine out there in the world that lukewarm or negative reviews could easily take up the majority of my writing time.

2. Writing negative reviews is about as fun as completing the writing comprehension section of the SAT.

3. People mostly want to know which wines are great much more than they want to know which wines to avoid.

Since those early days, I’ve developed a more nuanced point of view on the subject, but I hadn’t thought about it recently (nor had to defend that point of view) until I was politely “cornered” at the recent Wine Bloggers Conference and asked to publicly state, and defend, my position.

The question of whether negative wine reviews benefit anyone does not clearly resolve into black and white, which means it’s something that was certainly worth talking about, and on reflection, writing about.

As readers will probably recognize, I almost never write negative reviews here on Vinography. The few times I have were situations where I felt like there was an honestly useful, even more specifically educational, value in writing such a review. They are few and far between.

I don’t write negative reviews of wines because I don’t think that they are particularly meaningful or relevant for another set of reasons in addition to those listed above:

a. Many times, I don’t necessarily know that the bottle I happen to be reviewing isn’t simply just a bit off — whether from a fault that I am not detecting or identifying or simply due to bottle variation of some sort or another.

b. A bad review is quite damaging, because it is often read as a condemnation of the winery itself (despite any care or attention put to the contrary by the author) even though the particular wine in question could be part of a portfolio of truly stellar wines.

c. Likewise, bad reviews are often read (and written by irresponsible critics) as being absolute and categorical judgements about a winery, when in fact they are mere evaluations of a specific wine in a specific vintage. That particular wine could have been great the year before, or it could get great the next year. But bad reviews hang around in the minds of consumers like skeletons in the closet, much longer than they should.

d. Bad reviews also hang around in the minds of winemakers and winery owners a lot longer than they should. Like it or not, anyone who seriously attempts to write consistently about wine in a critical fashion has a symbiotic (or as Jancis Robinson would put it, a parasitic) relationship with the wine industry. Bad reviews burn bridges in ways that make it difficult for the writer to ply their craft.

As readers know, when I review an individual wine, I spend a lot of time (and words) in the process. To do so, only to pan a wine, would be a waste of my time and the readers for all the reasons stated above.

There are a couple of slight exceptions to this rule, however, when it comes to my coverage of large categories of wine at major public or trade tastings or my reviews of the entire portfolio of wines by a single producer. In those situations I often (but not always) include the scores of the wines that fall the lowest on my scale. In the case of large public tastings, I am not writing tasting notes or any other kinds of notes about the wines, only offering their scores relative to a much larger group of wines. In the case of a producer, I am including that wine in a group that includes wines I think are excellent as well (otherwise I wouldn’t write the review), so I believe there is enough context to mitigate my negative assessment of the wine.

These exceptions lead me to the conclusion, however, that if I was going to attempt in any way to offer a comprehensive set of criticisms about any particular category of wine, that I might indeed write negative reviews. For instance, if I ever happened to be able to attend the En Primeur tasting of top Bordeaux Chateaux in the Spring, my goal would be to provide readers with my reviews and scores for every single wine, and that comprehensive coverage would by necessity have to include those wines which I did not care for.

I rarely find myself in a position with the time or the opportunity to be so comprehensive in my coverage of any type or showing of wine, however.

Nonetheless, the fact that such a situation might exist, certainly forces me, in answering the question that titles this post, to not only concede that there certainly could be a point to negative wine reviews in certain situations, but also to admit that my position on the subject isn’t quite as strong as I might believe.

For instance, if I ever got into the habit of publishing every tasting note I ever made (hard to imagine given the effort of doing so at the moment) I might consider including the bad ones as well.

But I suppose I’m lucky that I don’t have to suffer through that at the moment. Instead, I choose to take the time that I do in order to write carefully and passionately about individual wines that I love. Life is too short to drink bad wine, and it’s also too short to write 500 words about a wine only to recommend that no one should buy it.

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Amid a maelstrom of international financial turmoil, the Euro is dropping rapidly against the dollar. But there’s nothing happy about this situation, and wines of good value remain a worthy target.

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