It's that time of year when I use a thousand or so words to praise wine industry favorites, or chastise those that I feel need to make a change of some sort. I use the device of passing out wine competition type awards, the traditional gold, silver and bronze on the positive side, the Dregs award (bottom of the barrel stuff) on the negative side and the dreaded Phylloxera award, named for that rotten little root louse that destroys entire vineyards, as the very lowest of the low awards.

Let's go right to the biggies:

GOLD for "Wine of the Year" goes to one of the few 100 point wines of 1999, Quintessa 1995 "Rutherford, Napa Valley." This elegant Bordeaux/Meritage style red wine comes from Agustin Huneeus, the man who turned Franciscan Oakville Estates around, and it is one of the California wines commanding $100 price tags that is actually worth the money.

GOLD for "Winemaker of the Year" to Ed Moody of Forest Glen Winery. This is a man who went from making large volume jug wines to barrel-fermenting more Chardonnay than just about anyone and producing red wines like Merlot, Syrah and Sangiovese that win awards against all contenders no matter the price. Did I mention that none of Ed's wines ever cost over $10?

GOLD to "Winery of the Year" Louis M. Martini Winery of Napa Valley for making consistently fine wine (especially red wine) since shortly after Repeal, and especially for making the 100 point Gnarly Vines Zinfandel from dry-farmed, 115 year old Sonoma County vineyards. Good work, Mike.

GOLD also to the three comeback wineries of the year. All three have new or relatively new winemakers who seem to have unlocked new potentials at all three facilities. We're talking about Sterling, St. Supery and Buena Vista.

DREGS to all the California wineries which are failing to make delicious dry Roses from top varieties like Sangiovese, Syrah/Shiraz and the like. If you need a model to follow, check out Joseph Phelps Grenache Rose.

PHYLLOXERA to all the legislators, state and federal, who sell out consumer's rights and interests to the wholesale monopoly seeking to make interstate shipping of wine illegal.

PLATINUM (that's even better than gold, folks) to the federal court judge who threw out Indiana's law making interstate wine shipping a felony. The judge did so on grounds that the law violated the Constitutional rights of consumers under the Commerce Clause.

GOLD to FedEx for publicly announcing that they would begin accepting wine shipments to several more states.

DREGS to UPS for refusing to ship even to all the states where it is legal, and for a policy that seems to be arbitrary with local offices accepting wine shipments to certain destinations, while a neighboring office in the same county will refuse a shipment to the same address.

DREGS to wineshopper.com for sending out more press releases than anyone about everything they were going to do, and delivering nothing. Their plans called for being up and running for holiday season 1999. Now they're talking early 2000. If I were a stockholder I think I'd be nervous.

GOLD to "Muckraking Wine Book of the Year" to "The Wrath of Grapes" ($13.50) by Lew Perdue. Perdue pulls no punches and talks about the dangers of investing in wine stocks, the potential for the bottom to fall out of premium wine prices due to overplanting, and lots of other scandalous stuff.

GOLD to "Best New Pocket Guide to Wine" to "Millennium Champagne & Sparkling Wine Guide" ($14.95) by Tom Stevenson. It's chock full of information about your favorite sparkling wine and there are hundreds and hundreds of tasting notes, complete with 100 point scale scores.

GOLD to "Best Overall Wine Book," that one title you must have in your library even if it consists of just one book. It's the "Oxford Companion To Wine" ($65) edited by Jancis Robinson and the latest revised edition is just out.

DREGS to all those wineries using the word "Coastal" in their brand names, knowing that it has no legal definition, and then voting against ATF giving the term meaning. It's as shabby a practice as when wineries named their jug wines "Mountain" Chablis and "Mountain" Burgundy 25 years ago, when all the grapes came from flatland vineyards south of Fresno.

PHYLLOXERA to those vintners selling wine products under varietal names that aren't really wine, because they have water, sugar and flavorings added. How do they get around the federal regulation that requires varietal wines to made from a minimum 75 percent of the grape named on the label? They add so much water and other ingredients that the alcohol goes below 6 percent, at which point it is no longer legally wine and therefore is not regulated by ATF. It's a food product regulated by FDA and they have no regulations as to the use of varietal grape names on such beverages. Be especially careful of those wines in a box that are so cheap. If the alcohol is very low and the label says flavorings added...well, now you know why they're cheap. Water doesn't cost nearly as much as grapes.

BRONZE to me for rightly predicting a couple of years back that we were destined to see White Merlot appear on the market. This was the year it actually began to happen, and there will be more in 2000. White Zin now has a new competitor.

SILVER to America's many wine competitions for giving hundreds of small vintners a chance to show their stuff and for introducing new wines to consumers. If only you could find a better way to publicize the results, you'd get the Gold.

GOLD to California's Central Coast for producing grapes so good that the big guys are now investing in vineyards and wineries in your back yard. We're talking Monterey, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, and vintners like Gallo, Robert Mondavi, Fetzer and Kendall-Jackson.

The Wine of the Week will be back next time.