New video series: Intoxicating Conversation With W. Blake Gray

Conversation brings us together. The further we feel apart, the more we need a connection.

Today I launch a new video series: Intoxicating Conversation With W. Blake Gray

People need entertainment. Many crave information about wine, or whisky, or cannabis, and of course not just those. But you can get information in print. For conversation, just two people talking, wherever it goes, you need video.

And I believe that now more than ever, we need conversation. We need connection.

I'm speaking pretty ambitiously for a novice video journalist. I've been a print and online journalist since university, specializing in wine, spirits and cannabis for the last 16 years. I might have a face for radio and a voice for newspaper. Plus, I realized recently I probably won't be able to get a haircut for months.

Whatever. It's time for this.

Wine draws interesting people. Winemakers, the good ones, are a cross of scientist and artist. Farming wine grapes isn't like producing any other fruit. I've had so many intoxicating conversations regarding it, many with the guests you'll see in this series.

I was sheepish about asking my inaugural guest, Laura Catena, to do this. She's busy running harvest at her family's winery in Argentina, Catena Zapata, from her home in San Francisco, where she is stuck for the time being because Argentina has closed its borders.

But Laura was my dream first guest, so I asked anyway. And my dream came true: she agreed right away.

Laura is very impressive. For 30 years, she was an emergency room physician in San Francisco, specializing in emergency care for children. At the same time, she was helping her father run the family winery. Catena Zapata makes a lot of excellent wines. But I think its strength in the US was having Laura living here. Amazingly, she sometimes found free time from her medical duties AND raising children to jet off and do tastings for sommeliers, journalists and wine lovers. She's scientifically minded, and she's also a positive person who enjoys life.

At the end of last year she quit her ER job to focus on the winery; she talks about it in the video. You or I might think, wow, great timing. I'll let her tell you what she thinks.

As for the rest of the series, I'll do my best. 頑張ります. (To see more, subscribe to my Youtube channel.)

Here goes: Intoxicating Conversation With W. Blake Gray: Laura Catena, ER doctor and winery managing director

Follow me on Twitter: @wblakegray and Instagram @wblakegray and like The Gray Report on Facebook.
And subscribe to my Youtube channel!

Wine, the corona virus, and the wisdom of George W. Bush

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, President George W. Bush encouraged Americans not to be afraid to go on with their lives, including going shopping. He was immediately mocked for it, and still was years later. Here's a ridiculous piece from Time magazine in 2009, on the last day of his presidency, that says he should instead have called for sacrifice.

But he wasn't wrong.

There are now adult Americans who don't remember the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The destruction of the World Trade Center wasn't the only terrorist attack that autumn. Just a week later letters filled with weaponized anthrax spores were mailed to lawmakers and journalists. CNN and Fox News were competing to see which could be more hysterical. People were convinced that every shopping mall was a target. Bush wanted Americans to keep living life and not bring down the economy, which was the terrorists' objective.

He was mocked because our politics were the same as now. Half the country (including me) hated Bush, and that half, as now, included all the smartest and most interesting writers and commentators. "Going shopping" wasn't a serious enough response for a serious crisis and proved Bush was in over his head, was the argument. Then as now, it was nearly impossible to acknowledge when somebody on the other side of the political divide actually got something right.

Bush was right. We needed to spend money so that our consumer-based economy wouldn't collapse, so that people wouldn't lose their jobs and bring about an economic depression. We also needed a military response, and unfortunately he didn't get that right. But he was right about the shopping: It was one small thing that every American could to support our way of life.

I'm among the half of Americans who cheered out loud when Bush's helicopter carried him away from the White House in 2009. If you had told me that a scant 10 years later I would miss him I would have laughed in your face. But here we are.

The wine industry is going to be hurt very badly by the corona virus pandemic. It's not alone: almost every industry other than the hand sanitizer business is going to be hurt.

People are already staying home, which is sensible. But many restaurants will fail because of this. Ordering food delivered won't help them as much because they don't make as much money on it. Many restaurants survive on the margins they make by overcharging us for wine. And ordering food delivered won't help restaurant servers who are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Restaurants failing is bad for wine.

Wine tourism is plummeting along with every other kind of tourism. Many wineries are dependent on sales from their tasting room. Some won't survive without it. Wine-country businesses like hotels and local transportation will suffer.

But, you say, people will drink wine at home.

Exactly!

Here is what you can do to help the wine industry fight through the looming recession: Keep buying wine.

This is true for most industries. But wine is more vulnerable than most. Vineyards take four years to develop and land prices are high. Distribution is complicated -- in parts of the country you still can't buy wine online -- and is skewed against small wineries, who large distributors would rather not carry. US wine importers are hurting because of the tariffs imposed from our trade war with the EU.

In 2008, after the last major recession (Bush was right about a few things but not about the costly Iraq war or about leaving the mortgage crisis untouched and festering), Americans kept drinking wine, but they spent a lot less on it. People started looking for good $10 wines again, which tends to help only the largest companies.

This will probably happen again as the pandemic leads to an economic slowdown. I'm not going to tell you to keep buying $300 Cabernets; you really can find wine just as good for $35 (but not for $10).

What I urge you to do is to buy wine mindfully. In hard times, each bottle you buy will support someone, whether it's publicly-traded Constellation Brands or that small winery you visited on vacation years ago where the staff was really nice to you. You can support a grocery store chain, or you can support your local wine shop, which is seeing fewer customers. You can support LVMH or the economy of a vulnerable country like Greece or South Africa.

This is the best thing you can do for the wine industry. Keep shopping, and shop with a purpose.

There's an expression I like to use: "Life is too short to drink bad wine." It's more true now than ever.

Follow me on Twitter: @wblakegray and Instagram @wblakegray and like The Gray Report on Facebook.

Endorsements for the March 2020 San Francisco election

This may be Nancy Pelosi's last primary

Welcome to Super Tuesday! For the first time in my lifetime California is going to play a major role in choosing a Presidential candidate. This is great because the diverse Golden State grapples with large issues better than most of the country. The Presidential primary alone makes this ballot an exciting one.

But there are other people and issues on the ballot, and I'm going to write about those, because you simply won't get much advice elsewhere.

For some reason the San Francisco Chronicle, after running its best endorsement page ever just a few months ago, has decided to put its endorsements behind a paywall. Why? I am very sympathetic to the need of newspapers to increase revenue, but I doubt that the Chronicle will gain 5 new subscribers with this strategy, and even 5 new subscribers wouldn't be worth it. Why limit the reach of your endorsements? Don't you want to share your knowledge and help elect the candidates you prefer?

Fortunately the very liberal San Francisco Bay Guardian is still doing online endorsements years after the print publication ceased. Thank you, Tim Redmond. I also drew on candidates' statements at votersedge.org, and stories from the Mercury News, 48 Hills, Mission Local and The Bay Area Reporter.

To the ballot!

President: I'll get back to this.

District 12, US House of Representatives: Nancy Pelosi

Pelosi has been a national, not local, figure for much of her time in the House and it will be nice to get a representative to pay attention to local issues again. She has had very limited success in opposing Trump despite the House Democratic majority. We love her dismissive gestures, but the decision not to impeach after the Mueller Report -- which was far more damning than the Ukraine fiasco -- hasn't been criticized enough. It might be time for new leadership in the House. But she doesn't have impressive opposition this time. If she retires as expected before 2022, this seat will be a free-for-all.

Intimidation and shame are holding wine back

Helen Rosner, food correspondent for the New Yorker, stirred up the wine Twitterverse last week by complaining about a page on a wine list.

Her actual complaint, which wasn't clear from her first tweet, wasn't that she couldn't understand the list. Instead, she is irritated when she calls a wine something (i.e., "the Benoît Ente") and the server responds by calling it something else ("Oh, you mean the Aligoté.")

I am an actual professional restaurant eater and I still have no ducking clue which of the many many words on a wine list is the one word I’m supposed to say to indicate that this is the wine I want a glass of pic.twitter.com/NyINumC6Fz

— Helen Rosner (@hels) January 16, 2020

Let's put the reach of this tweet, and all wine Twitter, in perspective. This was, for wine Twitter, an enormous tweet. She got 2900 likes (as of Saturday). Also in my Twitter feed as I write this, Congressman Ted Lieu got 191,000 likes for telling Devin Nunes to shove it. (Not enough likes.) The Hill got 7,100 likes for announcing that Donald Trump was repealing Michelle Obama's school lunch rules on her birthday. (People like that?) And Professor Snape (@_Snape_) got 2600 likes for posting, "Recent studies show I hate everything." Wine Twitter is still a fishbowl.

That said, Rosner took a blender to the fishbowl with her tweet, and her subsequent aggressive stance in arguing about it. It is the latter that strikes me.

Rosner is no shrinking violet. She's fully capable of having a conversation with a sommelier, obviously, because she's willing to argue with dozens of people simultaneously. What bothers her is that she doesn't want to experience in person, however briefly, the feeling of a server correcting her.

Result of a 10-year experiment: does filtering out brett work?

This blog post has been 10 years in the making.

A decade ago, I interviewed Cameron Hughes. He's a San Francisco-based wine negociant and I've interviewed him a bunch of times, but on that occasion, he said something -- and gave me a bottle -- that I wanted to test.

Hughes had bought a batch of 2008 Napa Cabernet that he said was full of brett, so much that the producer couldn't risk releasing it under its own name. He boasted that he sterile-filtered out all the brett and now he had a prestigious wine to sell.

What if you didn't get it all, I asked. Even a little brett in the bottle could increase over time.

Hughes told me if I checked the bottle in 10 years, I would find no brett. And he gave me a bottle.

Which I put away for a decade.

Last week I got it out of my cellar. And on Saturday night I opened it. What would I find?

***************

This is the part where I talk about how the world was different in 2010, when I put this bottle away.

The first iPad was sold in 2010. A DVD-by-mail company named Netflix introduced streaming video.

Healthier, lab-tested, lower in alcohol: the appeal of Dry Farm Wines

You will know immediately if you are the kind of person who would like Dry Farm Wines.

The wine club, founded by a real estate investor who lives in the heart of Napa Valley, is the largest buyer of natural wines in the world. It's ironic because these wines are the antithesis of everything Napa Valley stands for. They're recommended on the website by a who's-who list of biohackers and people who espouse keto and paleo type diets, because they're healthier than most commercial wine. It hasn't made Dry Farm Wines founder Todd White popular with his neighbors in Yountville.

"In 2009 I founded a street festival in St. Helena that became the largest gathering in Napa Valley," Todd White told me. "In 2009 I was named citizen of the year in St. Helena. Today I barely get my calls returned by anybody. My social calendar in the Napa Valley has run dry. It's OK, it's a price I'm willing to pay for helping people live a healthier life."

These are not just natural wines. The company has a very specific aesthetic: low alcohol (12.5% or less), clean wines (despite minimal sulfur) and no residual sugar.

The special feature is that it lab tests all of its wines, so they are what they claim to be. I'm a rather well-known skeptic, but I believe in Dry Farm Wines.

I have no desire to argue about this story with people who like high-alcohol wines. These wines are not for you; you don't have to drink them. I also know the term "natural wine" puts some people into a frenzy. But I tasted nine of these wines and all were fine: the lab-testing program seems to assure it. They are similar to each other, especially the reds: they are lean, fresh and juicy, without oak flavors. I enjoyed all of them.

"These wines aren't for everybody," White says. "They're not big enough, they're not bold enough. They're for people like me."

As for them being healthier than most (not all) commercial wines, I think that's a fair statement. I'll let White elaborate.

Todd White

"I have a tenuous relationship with alcohol," White told me. "I spent most of my adult life drinking too much. I think most regular wine drinkers think they drink too much. Most of them believe they should drink less. But they don't want to. That's my customer. My customers are people who want to drink healthier. This is really about brain health."

White said he discovered the kind of wines he now sells completely by accident, and not before tasting a bunch of truly terrible natural wines.

"I was drinking 15% alcohol wines in Napa," White says. "I don't want to poopoo on Napa. The same thing is happening in Bordeaux. I quit drinking for a while, in 2014, in a period I recall as suffering through sobriety. Didn't enjoy that. I thought it was just the alcohol. I didn't know about the additives or anything like this. I started mixing tea and wine, in the winter. I'd put an ounce or so of wine in the teacup, and have a cup of tea with it. You know what? I felt a lot better. I'm not drinking as much alcohol, and I feel a lot better."

A friend recommended that he try some low-alcohol wines produced in Europe, so he went to a wine shop and bought a case.

"Most of them were undrinkable and I poured them down the sink," White said.

Endorsements for the Nov. 2019 San Francisco election

One of the panels from the mural that has shaken up the school board election.

I hate this election.

I wish there was a ballot measure to end San Francisco's practice of scheduling mayoral elections during odd years. We're spending a lot of money on an election when most city officials are running unopposed. Because there's nothing exciting on the ballot, zealots and professional advocates can have an outsize influence, which is why Juul got its scam proposition on this year's ballot instead of 2020.

Philosophically, it's most important to give endorsements in elections like these. You already know who you're going to vote for in next year's U.S. Presidential race and you don't need my advice. But that school board race is a different story.

I want to praise the San Francisco Chronicle for its best-ever endorsements page. If the Chronicle wasn't consistently in bed with developers, I wouldn't need to do these anymore. I also want to praise Tim Redmond for keeping the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Clean Slate endorsements alive even after the print publication disappeared. Redmond is a little far left for my taste, but he does the most work of any journalist in the city in interviewing the candidates and analyzing the issues, and his endorsements are always a must-read.

I don't know that my endorsements are a must-read, but I am going to vote. Here's who and what I'll be voting for.

San Francisco Mayor: London Breed

Breed was the third best of three good candidates for mayor last year to fill the term of Ed Lee after he died in office. Unfortunately Mark Leno and Jane Kim did not run against her this time and she's going to coast to a full four-year term.
Breed has proven to be very good at one aspect of the job: communicating. She has charisma and is a good spokesperson for the city. As one of our previous mayors is now the state's governor, it's worth keeping an eye on her future politically. She's a Democratic machine candidate and the left doesn't like her; that was also true of Governor Gavin Newsom, but Newsom took more initiatives than he got credit for on homeless issues and gay marriage. Breed hasn't done a whole lot, but she also hasn't mucked up the office, and she has no serious opposition.

City Attorney, Public Defender, Sheriff, Treasurer, Community College Board Member: Whatever

It sucks that five of the seven city jobs on this ballot are going to go to unopposed candidates. This is the main reason I hate this election. Couldn't somebody have challenged Paul Miyamoto for the sheriff's job, or Manohar Raju for public defender? This is what happens when one party machine has too much sway. You can check their names or not: they're going to win anyway.

Photo courtesy Lola M. Chavez/Mission Local

District Attorney: Suzy Loftus

The most interesting and important choice on the ballot. It's the only race with several good candidates and your decision will depend on your politics. Chesa Boudin, who currently works in the public defender's office, is the left-wing candidate: he seems more interested in investigating cops than crimes. Nancy Tung is the right-wing candidate: she wants more drug sweeps in the Tenderloin.
Loftus, currently legal counsel to the sheriff, has previously been a prosecutor and president of the Police Commission, which has oversight over police procedures. She strikes a good balance between supporting criminal justice reform and actually doing the job of prosecutor.

Member, Board of Education: Kirsten Strobel

Earlier this year, the school board voted unanimously to spend $600,000 to paint over a mural at Washington High School that accurately depicted George Washington's life, including portraying slaves and a dead Native American. The mural was painted in the 1930s by a radical artist who wanted to show what American history really looked like. But the school board didn't think students should see history while being educated.
Jenny Lam, a school board member, first voted to destroy the mural. To her credit, after public outcry she shifted her vote to ... covering it up, so that students shouldn't see it. Sheesh. This reminds me of the white people who complain that Whitney Plantation and Monticello now give too many details about slavery. Sometimes the far left and the far right aren't so far apart after all.
Strobel, an administrator at the SF Film Society, and Robert Coleman, an artist, jumped into the race to oppose Lam because of the mural issue. The Chronicle is correct that the mural isn't the only issue facing the school board. But if Lam's judgment is so poor on the one issue we know about, what else is she preventing students from learning?
The Guardian prefers Coleman, a longtime housing activist. I'm going with Strobel because of her nonprofit administrative experience.


Ballot Propositions

Prop A: No

This proposal to issue $600 million in bonds to finance affordable housing will almost certainly pass, so I'm wasting my time here. My objection is that landlords are allowed to pass along the cost to tenants, so people already struggling to make ends meet will have to pay for it.

Prop B: No

The city would change the name of the Department of Aging and Adult Services, which is fine, but would also impose a quota for board members, requiring the commission to include a person with a disability, a veteran and a senior. While I agree with the goal in general, I'm against quotas.

Prop C: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

San Francisco's board of supervisors sensibly voted to ban sales of tobacco vaping products in the city. Tobacco vaping is a crisis for high-school kids. This proposition is funded by Juul, the evil bastards who are putting mango-flavored high-nicotine tobacco in the pockets of teenagers, dooming them to a lifetime of addiction. Do NOT let Juul and its nicotine-fueled cash machine overturn San Francisco's ban.

Prop D: Yes

This would tax rides on Uber and Lyft and give half the money to Muni, and the other half to the County Transportation Agency. Uber and Lyft are the main reasons for a shortfall in mass transit funding, so it's an elegant solution.

Prop E: Yes

Affordable and educator housing could be built on public land. As long as they're not going to build it on Golden Gate Park, I see no reason not to vote for this.

Prop F: Yes

Major political campaigns like Prop C would be required to divulge the source of their funding. There's also a provision that would prevent people who would profit from a land-use decision from contributing to political campaigns for a year beforehand. It's a small hedge against corruption.

Follow me on Twitter: @wblakegray and Instagram @wblakegray and like The Gray Report on Facebook.
Vote.