You may remember a few weeks back when Jancis Robinson set the blogosphere agog with her remark, made at a conference in Spain, that wine critics are “parasitical.”

But overlooked was another remark made at that conference, by the editor of Decanter, Guy Woodward, to the effect that some winemakers make wines to suit the palates of certain critics. (I couldn’t find the exact quote, but the paraphrase is from an article on the conference published in last April’s Decanter.)

I wouldn’t think there’d be any debate about the truth of Mr. Woodward’s statement, but there was a flurry of incredulity that winemakers would even be conscious of critics. The article quoted one Spanish winemaker as saying, “I don’t even think it is possible to do this.”

Well, it is.

The first time I learned that winemakers craft wines to suit the palates of certain critics was years ago, when a California winemaker told me so. He wanted to make a Pinot Noir that would get at least 90 points from a certain well-known wine magazine (no, not the one I work at). So he studied every Pinot review that got 90 points, carefully analyzing the adjectives and the flavor descriptors, and Bingo! He eventually got his 90 point Pinot Noir (which he humorously admitted to me he didn’t much care for!)

Actually, that winemaker could have asked Enologix to do the analysis in a more scientific way. Enologix is a firm that describes itself as “the quality metric for the California wine industry.” Basically, you hire Enologix to tell you exactly what to do to get a high score on your wine. It’s paint-by-the-numbers winemaking (this is all from their website) to get “100-point scores.”

Now, lest you think I’m beating up on Enologix, or on the wineries that hire them, I swear I’m not. Heck, I’m sure I’ve given high scores to wines that were made using their “metric.” All I mean to say is that it’s obvious that winemakers aim to please certain critics.

Put yourself in the winemaker’s head. “Gee, I have to pay the bank. I have my mortgage, my kids’ college tuitions. Salaries, overhead, depreciation, rising fuel costs, new equipment and barrels. And we may have to replant that virused old section of the vineyard.” This is the hidden side of the “glamorous” wine industry. The winemaker can’t just make something he likes, he’s got to produce something that sells. And what better way to sell wine than to get a great score from a famous critic? (You think Spielberg wasn’t anxious about the reviews for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?)

So, really, if some winemakers are pandering to certain critics, I can’t be too hard on them. It’s easy to throw brickbats from the outside. On the other hand (being a Gemini, I always see the other hand), the best winemakers strive to obey the dictates of what Richard Olney, in his little book Romanée-Conti, calls le génie du terroir: “whatever it is lying hidden there that makes a wine from a given climat different from its neighbors.”

It’s a tremendous balancing act, this need to respect both nature and the market, and I get impatient with purists who insist that any nod to the market is somehow disrespectful of terroir. In addition to le génie du terroir, le génie du marché is to have your wine respected among connoisseurs and bring a high price. (One of the best examples of accomplishing both is Harlan.) We need a new word, neither terroir nor market-driven, that describes the true genius of making it all work.

After a long, cool Spring marked by record frosts, Summer has arrived in California with a vengeance. Now they’re saying there’s more than 1,000 fires raging across the state. A few days ago, it was “only” 800. The weather has cooled off, but it’s supposed to heat up again, and the weatherman said there’s a strong possibility of more lightning this weekend. Lightning is what caused most of the existing fires.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the heat’s on and it’s T-shirt time: backyard barbecues, picnics and the beach. Which means white wines. I find it harder to appreciate a red wine, even a very good one, when it’s hot. The body craves wines that are lighter, crisper and cleaner — and colder.

Fortunately California abounds with great whites (sharks as well as wines), and many are usually cheaper than reds (not always). Here are some of the best summer sippers I’ve tasted recently.

Ehren Jordan made a fantastic 2006 Chardonnay ($42) from his Failla estate vineyard. It’s way up and way out in the wild, remote Sonoma Coast mountains, and you can taste a tang of the sea in it.

An equally stunning, but different, 2006 Chardonnay was crafted by John Falcone at Rusack ($32). It’s from the Santa Maria Valley in Santa Barbara County, a sometimes overlooked source of great Chard and Pinot Noir. (Santa Maria is where the Bien Nacido Vineyard is.)

Up in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino, Ted Bennett made the best Muscat Blanc I’ve ever had, the 2006 Navarro ($19). It performs the magical act of tasting honey-sweet but finishing bone dry. Too bad more white wines aren’t this good, and this affordable.

Signorello’s 2006 Seta ($25) is a blend of Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc. It has the weight and density of a fine Chardonnay, but the flavor profile is rich in citrus fruits and melons. I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more of these white Bordeaux- or Graves-style blends made in California.

For pure Sauvignon Blanc, you can’t beat Matanzas Creek’s 2006 ($24). It was partially barrel-fermented, which adds some creamy, yeasty notes, but it’s the acidity and grassy, lemony taste that really stars. The addition of a little of the Musqué clone adds complexity.

Made along similar lines is Chateau St. Jean’s rich, savory 2006 La Petite Etoile Fumé Blanc. This variety is the same as Sauvignon Blanc; the late, great Robert Mondavi dubbed it Fumé Blanc back in the Sixties. When people call a Sauvignon Blanc Fumé Blanc, it usually means the wine was barrel fermented.

Then there’s Handley’s 2006 Gewurztraminer ($18). Anderson Valley is making a name for itself with Alsatian varieties, and Milla Handley shows a deft touch with this spicy, just off-dry wine. Perfect with veggies with guacamole or cold cuts, especially ham.

Twisted Oak is a bunch of guys up in the rugged Sierra Foothills of Calaveras County. They made a wine whose name is unpronounceable and I won’t even try. It’s their 2006 %@#$! ($24) and it’s a Rhône blend of Marsanne, Roussanne, Rolle and Viognier. A truly interesting and different kind of white wine.

Finally, there’s Casa Nuestra’s 2007 Home Vineyard Old Vines Dry Chenin Blanc ($24). I am decidedly not a Chenin Blanc fan, but Casa Nuestra makes a dependably dry, appley one from their vineyard in St. Helena. There’s no legal definition of “old vines” although there should be (but who wants more government intervention in the wine biz?). In this case, the vineyard dates to the 1960s.

Enjoy your weekend, and if you’re in a fire zone, be safe.

I did a book signing and talk last night at the Napa Library in St. Helena for my last book, New Classic Winemakers of California: Conversations with Steve Heimoff. The people who turn out for these kinds of things are book lovers, supporters of libraries (which need all the help they can get) and wine lovers. In a day and age when people are reading less and sitting at their computers more, it’s nice to see there’s still an audience who likes the old-fashioned pleasures of reading a book.

We didn’t get home until close to 11, but of course the first thing I had to do was check my messages. And I found an email, from someone commenting on my recent post Making wine blogging credible, who chose to privately email me instead of posting publically. (For that reason, I won’t identify the person.) The email said, in part, “It’s clear that bloggers think print is dead and that they’re the wave of the wine-writing future. But I’ll bet a bottle of Champagne that any one of them, if offered the chance to write a column for a mainstream print pub, would jump at it.”

Well!

Segue: About 10 years ago I moderated a debate between the owner of the famous Berkeley bookstore, Cody’s (which just announced it’s shutting down after 52 years) and the head of the new media center at the University of California, Berkeley. The topic: Is the paper-bound book dead? The media center guy alleged it was: too many dead trees, too much waste. He predicted we would someday read everything on high-tech portable devices that could download anything, anywhere, quickly. The bookstore owner begged to differ. No technology, he said, could ever replace the feeling of browsing in a bookstore, fondling books, flipping through their pages, curling up in an armchair with one.

Come we now to the age of the Internet, wine blogs and that email that was waiting in my computer last night. Let me make a few observations. Yes, I do think many bloggers — maybe most — think that print is dead. Maybe many of them want print to be dead. Maybe print is moribund, dying, on its way out. Maybe someday there will be no books or magazines or newspapers. But print is hardly dead now and it’s not likely to be buried anytime soon. Print still dwarfs digital. I would argue print remains more influential in wine than anything online. There’s probably no way to prove this, but I think this way: Take the world’s top ten wine publications (it’s not necessary to define what they are). How many people read them? How many other publications quote them? How many wineries use their reviews in their marketing and advertising? Then take every wine blog on Earth. How many people collectively read them? How often are they quoted?

End of debate.

Whether or not my correspondant is right about any wine blogger jumping at the chance to write a column for a mainstream print pub, I’ll leave to others to decide. That’s a third rail I don’t want to touch. But I will say this. At the book signing last night I met a 29-year old MBA, Courtney Cochran, an entrepreneur who runs two San Francisco-based wine companies, Your Personal Sommelier and Hip Tastes. Her entire mission is to make wine accessible to members of her age group who want to enjoy the lifestyle but are intimidated and put off by what they see as the snobbery and elitism. I’m guessing that a lot of people her age have never read a wine magazine and wouldn’t know Robert Parker if he walked up to them with a bottle of Petrus. What I’m getting at here is that I know things are changing and everybody’s moving online and Courtney Cochran represents that trend with eloquence and intelligence and I’m sure she’ll be hugely successful. But you know what? Courtney was at the Napa library to promote her own book. It’s paper-based, not digital, and I’m betting she’s hoping that all those 20-somethings will buy it, cuddle up in an armchair and read it. Too bad they won’t be able to get it at Cody’s. But I’m sure it’s available at amazon.com.

It’s been smoky here in Oakland the last few days. Smoke from the big wildfire in Napa has been riding the breezes right down here into the Bay Area, giving a sooty, gray pall to the sky and causing eyes to tear. The fire started last Saturday in the Vaca hills east of Napa city and quickly grew to 1,000 acres. It headed east, toward Solano County, and threatened the city of Fairfield (pop. 105,000). By Sunday night you could see flames all along the ridgeline. On Monday, the fire had grown to 3,500 acres, then 4,000 acres this morning. But firefighters now say they have it under control, and the thousands that were forced to evacuate their homes can return. Damage was light, this time: only 1 house and a barn.

Wildfires are a fact of life here in California. My cousin in the Malibu hills has had to run for her life at least twice over the years. I was all packed up and ready to evacuate my own home during the big Oakland Hills Firestorm, in 1991. At the time, it was the worst urban-wildland fire in American history. (If I recall correctly, the Southern California fires of a few years ago eclipsed it.) About 4,000 homes were burnt to their foundations. For a while, Berkeley was in the fire’s path, while on another flank the inferno was headed straight toward downtown Oakland. I wrote a newspaper story on the fire back then and a batallion chief for Oakland Fire Dept. told me if the wind hadn’t changed direction Oakland and Berkeley both would have been gone. As it was, about 27 people died, including a cop and a fire department batallion chief. I had several relatives who lost their homes, including a cousin’s wife who had to escape in her bare feet down the mountain that was choked with poison oak and thorny blackberry bushes.

Yesterday, by coincidence, I was in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, where the 1991 Firestorm Memorial wall is located under a freeway overpass. It consists of thousands of handmade glazed tiles. Each was designed by whoever wanted to make one, and then the tiles were crafted by local volunteer artisans. There’s a tile from Bill Clinton expressing his grief. There are many devoted to lost pets; they say things like “Misty, RIP, 2 years old” with a child’s drawing of a kitty cat. Chokes me up every time.

All this has nothing to do with wine, or does it? Everything has something to do with everything else. Today there are still about 800 wildfires burning in California, most of them ignited over the weekend when we had some really weird weather: very hot, but with lightning storms and even some local downpours. It had people talking about global warming and climate change. If California is heating up, there will be more fires, and most of the better grapegrowing areas just happen to be in the most dangerous fire zones: hilly rural areas where wildfires raged long before grapes were planted, and will again when they’re gone.

In an upcoming column on blogging I wrote for Wine Enthusiast, I said that the “tendency [among bloggers] to cite each other can result in a self-referential gossipy-ness that’s almost incestuous.” Now, the lead-in for print publication being what it is, I wrote those words nearly 2 months ago, while the column itself won’t appear until the July issue. Which is to say, I wrote them before I started this blog (and well before my new Unreserved blog at Wine Enthusiast launches, which is supposed to be any day now, but that’s not something I have control over, like I do here).

Well, maybe I was a little hasty when I wrote the incestuous thing, because I am finding that other peoples’ blog postings (and the comments they generate) can give me useful things to think and write about. Yesterday and today the wine blogosphere — parts of it, anyhow — was vibrating with the topic of “credibility.” Can wine blogs become credible sources of news and opinion among the vast wine-loving public, not just in the U.S. but abroad, the way print wine publications traditionally have been?

It’s a complicated topic, made all the murkier by the inevitable spectre of filthy lucre. Yes, money. Because a credible wine blog would be one which attracts a lot of eyeballs — and a website that has lots of readers on a consistent basis is an advertising magnet; that’s the way the Internet’s revenue stream works. So, you see, the issue of credibility is directly tied to the issue of revenue.

Which brings us to the Wine Bloggers Conference, a first of its kind set to be held in Sonoma County next October. You can bet that the question of revenue will loom large. As one blogger, at Good Grape, put it succinctly, “Simply, most people that engage in wine blogging want more credibility and they would not mind making a little money from the time spent blogging.”

The Good Grape blogger had a suggestion to make to boost credibility: Have wine bloggers complete some form of wine education, in order to become certified. (There are several different organizations in the world that offer such certification; some are more prestigious than others.) In Good Grape’s view, this would increase the public’s belief in the competence of wine bloggers’s reviews.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to have bloggers pass some form of rigorous training in order to educate their palates. After all, since anyone can blog, the standards as they are now are low to non-existent. I’ve seen umpteen wine blogs that purport to review wine, and while I can sympathize with these bloggers wanting to be taken seriously, the question invariably is, Why should we take anyone seriously just because they have a blog and put up some wine reviews? I don’t mean to sound snarky, but that’s the bottom line. So, yes, it’s a good start to have wine reviewing bloggers get all the professional education they can.

But to me the best blogs, the most interesting ones to read, don’t do wine reviewing. They’re blogs like Tom Wark’s Fermentation, where you never know what rant Tom’s going off on. If I’m taking the time to check out blogs every day, I want a sense of being surprised and delighted by what I find — and reading about so-and-so’s Chenin Blanc experience of the prior evening doesn’t cut it.

In the end, the most credible blogs will be the ones that do good reporting, offer lively and cogent analysis and opinion, and entertain (and occasionally outrage) you, the reader. I do not think that the most credible blogs will be ones that review, at least, not anytime soon. I think print publications will continue to dominate, not just magazines but private newsletters. Credibility doesn’t spring up instantly, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead. It takes years and years to build. The best advice I can give to wine bloggers is to stay at it, work hard, be patient, and do good writing. I intend to follow my own advice.