In Spain’s La Mancha winegrowing region, there is a saying (and no, it’s not “Don Quixote slept here,” though that’s a reasonable guess):

“Nueve meses de invierno y tres meses de infierno.”

Which means, “nine months of Winter, and three months of hell.”

This is how the locals describe the climate of La Mancha, where it can go as low as 10F in the coldest months, and in the low 100sF in the hottest. Rainfall is ridiculously scant in the region (about 14 inches per year), and so vines are planted on average about eight feet from one another in order to maximize the amount of that scarce resource that does manage to hit the ground.

The result of such low planting density is that La Mancha has nearly half a million hectares under vine, making it not just the largest winegrowing area in Spain, but the largest winegrowing area worldwide.

And the grape that lays claim to the majority of that space?

Meet the lowly Airén – a white wine grape that most folks know nothing about, but which, by far, dominates the statistic (trivia alert!) of most-planted grape (in terms of  area under vine) in the world…

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Well, you may actually know about it, but that would certainly put you in better shape than I was when my friend and sommelier legend Randy Caparoso kidnapped me from Premiere Napa Valley in February, insisting that I spend some time in Lodi to see some down-home, old school wine farming.

What I wasn’t entirely prepared for was just how old that old school was going to be.

As in, going on 126 years old, old. Think about that the next time you read the words “old vines” printed on a wine label; you know, right before you think “well, hell, I know some really old vines, suckah!.

What Randy insisted on showing me first was Lodi’s Bechthold Vineyard, nestled in the Mokelumne River area and home of Cinsault vines planted in 1886 on their own roots (on which they remain, thanks to sandy soils and a deep root system preventing the vine-killer phylloxera from picking them off) by German immigrant Joseph Spenker; the place has been continuously dry-farmed – and family-owned – ever since.

And the place is nothing short of magical, if you’re a real wine geek. Because older souls you are not likely to encounter in California, unless your house is haunted or you live among the redwoods. And when you’re done reading this, you hopefully won’t wonder why I went ga-ga over the Single Vineyard concept for WBW75 (and be thirsting for some Cinsault, or Lodi wine, at least)…

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Readers here could be forgiven – what with all of the French wine mini-review action, and the Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Loire features running here lately – for thinking that 1WineDude.com has gone totally Francophile. But then, after I start pumping out the coverage from my recent Napa jaunt, you’ll probably start calling me a CA-o-phile… whatever…

I like to think in more Zen terms, in that swinging the pendulum one way, followed by a full-on go-for-broke swing in the other direction, maintains (ironically) a sense of centeredness to our vinous proceedings here.

And so it’s in that Zen vein (Zein?) that I top off the Salon des Vins de Loire feature-style coverage by going back to where my Loire wine journey started in the first place, many moons before I’d ever dreamed of actually going there.  After tasting a enough Loire valley wines (most of them new to me) to probably fill the region’s river, I’m coming full circle. I’m going to delve into what have long been my two favorite regions in all of its river’s serpentine 600+ mile length: Sancerre and  Pouilly-Fumé. Sooooo predictable…

Prior to my press trip to a very chilly and snowy Angers, I was a sucker for the almost-hypnotic flinty, lilting qualities of what might be the world’s best Sauvignon Blanc from those areas on the far eastern side of the Loire. And hundreds of Loire wines later, I’m still a sucker for the almost-hypnotically flinty, lilting qualities of what might just be the world’s best Sauvignon Blanc.

So it’s with a warm spot in my ticker and notes of papaya and grapefruit on my tongue that I give you my thoughts on two family-run outfits that are making near-heart-stoppingly good Loire Sauvignon Blanc, but the whole thing is even more Zen precisely because they aren’t at all in-your-face about it: Domaine Vacheron and Chateau de Tracy…

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IntoWine.com recently (at least I think it was recently, as their posts for reasons unknown to me aren’t dated) ran an interview with SF Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonné (long-time readers will recall that roughly a year ago I was on a panel about writing better opinion pieces with Jon and the Wall Street Journal’s Lettie Teague, both of whom probably still in therapy trying to get over my inclusion; I’m kidding… I think…).

I’m not here today to dissect Jon’s responses (many of which ring true for me, and are worth a read because he’s a very, very intelligent guy), but one answer he gave to the IntoWine folks struck me as a bit odd. To the tape (emphasis is mine):

“The average consumer still feels intimidated by wine and wine-speak. Are publications like the Chronicle partly responsible for the prevalent feeling among consumers that wine is somehow beyond their comprehension?

If we’re going point fingers at the idea that wine is pretentious, let’s start with the spread of overpriced, mass-produced wine sold as an aspirational luxury. I’ll borrow a phrase from a conversation with a fellow writer a few days ago: You write up to your audience, not down. If sportswriters had to explain a two-point conversion every time they mentioned it, we’d all die of boredom. That’s not an excuse to fall into jargon. But there is no shortage of amateur wine criticism out there that doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

The trouble for me is that I’ve got no idea what conversation Jon is talking about in that response.

It might be that there is a hidden wine conversation, one available only to a Romanée-Conti-sipping secret society of critics with wine review superpowers like UV vision that can detect the exact number of Brett, fruit, and mushroom particles floating around in a glass of Burgundy and determine at a glance if they are at an appropriate level. A secret society that meets in an underground lair at an undisclosed location (guarded by pools of sharks with lazer beams attached to their heads) and through joint nefarious consensus determines what wines will get the really high scores this year.

The bottom line is that this secret society might as well also be made up of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, because the real wine conversation is actually the one that the amateur critics are having. Or, I should say, it’s the thousands of real and virtual “water-cooler” conversations that the amateurs are having every day, all over the world…

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