David W Graves, Saintsbury, Carneros:
While Dan Berger makes some excellent points in How California wines have changed, he needs to consider a few cultural factors in his argument.
One may rightly ask about the pH levels of classic wines (great topic), but his sample from the 1980s is from a time when the pendulum was fully the other way, more biased in favour of lower pH, rather than at some "classic" neutral point of an imagined golden mean. However, the general point is very interesting: has the human construct of "great wine" undergone a permanent stylistic shift, with consequences...