In the early 2000s, Jon Bonné, former wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, described California's (and by extension the rest of America's) wine culture as being "self-satisfied and underwhelming." Many of the biggest names in American wine—the Beaulieu, Beringer, and Mondavis—had grown and been bought out by big corporate entities, and were no longer the family-owed, renegade companies they had once been. Also, it seemed as if everyone, big or small, was locked in an arms race to produce the biggest, ripest most outrageous wines they possible could. But all was not lost, a new generation of passionate wildcats (and a few older keepers-of-the-flame) have emerged to redefine what 'American wine' means, and they are not just rising out of Napa and Sonoma, but the California Central Coast, Walla Walla in Washington, the Finger Lakes in New York, the Willamette of Oregon, and the rolling hills of Texas.