I have long complained about wineries touting their green, biodynamic, organic, natural, sustainable, recyclable, blah blah practices when it seems to be nothing more than a marketing device to make them look good. In hype-and-spin America, it’s impossible these days to tell the difference between a company that’s doing the right thing because it believes in it (even if it’s not good for the bottom line) and a company that says it’s doing the right thing because it wants to put a gloss on itself. (I mean, look at those Chevron ads saying how they protect the world’s forests and so on. This, from a company whose Richmond production facility, just up the I-80 Freeway from me, routinely has pollution alerts.)

So it came as something of a pleasant surprise today when I read this account, on GreenBiz.com, saying how California winery and vineyard executives “are very concerned that their firms authentically ‘walk-the-walk’ when it comes to environmental issues and that they not be accused of just ‘greenwashing’ their businesses.”

That finding was by Robert Smiley, who’s well-known to reporters like me as the Director of wine studies at the Graduate School of Management at U.C. Davis. Among the 73 executives he surveyed were management from Schramsberg, Duckhorn, Stag’s Leap, Bonny Doon, Kendall-Jackson, Hess, St. Supery, Joseph Phelps, Cakebread and Gallo.

Walk-the-walk instead of talk-the-talk. Imagine that! I’ll give them one place to start walkin’: Let’s get rid of styrofoam, guys! In the GreenBiz.com article, it said that “many [of the winery execs] plan to introduce new, lighter weight and recycled packaging.” I don’t know if they mean things like PET containers instead of bottles (which would be fine with me), but how about shipping packages? Last July, I blogged about the California wine industry’s dismal failure to get rid of this obnoxious, toxic pollutant. Well, I don’t keep track of who sends me tasting samples in what kinds of packaging (except that, if memory serves me, I think Gallo and K-J both have been pretty consistent about using cardboard, not styrofoam), but if the above-named wineries — or any others who talk green — are still using styrofoam in any way, shape or form, they’re not really walking the walk as much as they want us to think they are.

The issue of alcohol advertising is heating up worldwide, as problems of underage drinking, abuse, drunken driving, illness, injury and death are sparking debate over whether governments ought, or have the right, to set limits.

Yesterday, in Australia, the Health Minister of New South Wales, John Della Bosca, set off a firestorm when he called for no alcohol ads on television before 9 p.m. Going even further, he suggested a complete ban on all alcohol advertising if that didn’t work. He told a local newspaper: “The power of persuasion of alcohol advertising is the most sophisticated and seductive I have seen. As a student of the art of persuasion for electioneering, the alcohol industry is almost unbeatable.”

Della Bosca’s comment was immediately challenged by New South Wales’ opposition leader, Barry O’Farrell, who said that promoting personal responsibility, not government censorship, is a better way to encourage responsible alcohol use. It’s the old education vs. regulation debate.

The brouhaha brought to mind last week’s explosion in this country when MillerCoors’ plan to introduce a new, high-alcohol drink clearly aimed at youth, Sparks Red, was opposed by 25 state Attorneys General. Under intense fire, the company last Tuesday announced it was shelving the launch. If Sparks Red had ever made it to store shelves, you can just imagine the ads deep-pockets MillerCoors would have created to sell it.

The European Union, like the U.S., forbids targeting minors in alcohol advertising, but individual member states have imposed far more stringent restrictions. France, for example, completely bans alcohol ads on television, while Norway and Sweden allow no advertising of alcoholic beverages that exceed 2.5% (Norway) or 3.5% (Sweden). Numerous other countries allow alcohol advertising on T.V. only at night.

The arguments over whether advertising increases alcohol consumption, or if it encourages underage people to drink, are eternal and probably impossible to resolve. Obviously, if alcohol beverage manufacturers didn’t believe advertising worked, they wouldn’t invest hundreds of millions of dollars in it. But human beings have shown a penchant for alcohol (and mind-altering substances in general) throughout our history, and long before the concept of “advertising” existed, drunkenness was a problem, as the tale of Noah in his tent reminds us. (See Genesis 9:21-24.)

Total bans on things rarely work the way they’re intended. Prohibition was a joke and a disaster. The “war on drugs” has failed. Some people who call for a ban on alcohol advertising undoubtedly do so because of their own ideological or religious beliefs, and it’s not unlikely that some of them would prohibit the sale of alcohol in America, if they could. It’s reasonable to restrict alcohol advertising, but we have to be vigilent not to let the camel’s nose of neoprohibitionism get into the tent of our right to drink. There’s also obviously a huge difference in the way that alcohol is portrayed in advertising. Wine ads tend to be aimed at smart adults and emphasize issues of greenness, respect for the land, pairing with food, family, and a balanced life. Beer ads target juveniles of all age whose hormones are out of control. We shouldn’t lump them all together.

Technorati, an online search engine for searching blogs, is issuing its second annual State of the Blogosphere report in 5 parts, running all this week. It’s extremely worth keeping up with, as it’s become the go-to overview on the developing world of all blogs, not just wine.

Day 1’s analysis was on Who Are the Bloggers? Technorati reports we’re mostly college graduates, and nearly half of us attended grad school. (I did.) We skew male, and have a household income above $75,000. (Ditto here.) Half of bloggers are on their second blog (I now have 2) and 59% have been blogging for more than 2 years. (I started just last May.)

Day 2, The What and Why of Blogging, asked why blogs have become so big, so fast. Technorati couldn’t really answer this question, but in interviewing bloggers they found most “consider their style to be sincere, conversational, humorous and expert.” Most bloggers do not engage in tell-all gossip, and don’t want to. I’ll offer this thought on blogging’s explosive popularity: It’s the Internet, which is the biggest thing in the world! People were addicted to the Internet before blogging got big; blogs just give them one more reason to go to their computers.

Day 3’s topic was The How of Blogging. This was of particular interest to me. I was not surprised to find that one in four bloggers spends at least ten hours a week at blogging. Nor was I surprised by this finding: “The most influential bloggers are even more prolific.” I probably spend 12-15 hours a week blogging, if you count the research that goes into the back end of a proper post. Technorati also said that bloggers are “tremendously sophisticated in leveraging the available tools to make their blogs more robust,” such as video and photos. I posted a You Tube video here a while back, and I plan to do so again, because people seemed to like it.

Day 4′s topic (today) is Blogging for Profit. Technorati addressed only one revenue stream: advertising, although surely there are other potential sources. Slightly less than half of all bloggers surveyed have no advertising, with the majority explaining they’re not interested in making money. But I know for certain that a lot of wine bloggers would like to make as much money as they can through their blogs. And I wouldn’t bet against them. They’re smart cookies. As for this blog, I don’t make a dime off it. I do not accept advertising, yet. I may look into it someday, but right now, it’s too much of a hassle.

Tomorrow’s topic is called Brands Enter the Blogosphere. I guess Technorati is referring to big companies. That’s already happening, bigtime. Here is Fortune Magazine’s list of 500 corporate blogs, defined as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.” (I have to assume the employer companies are aware of them and approve.) They include Boeing, Google, General Motors, Xerox and Wells Fargo. And many wineries have started blogs. A blog is good public relations, and a cheap investment that could have big payoffs. The business world obviously believes there’s money to be made in blogs.

Do you remember last month’s news that 130 college presidents, under an umbrella organization called The Amethyst Initiative, suggested that the drinking age be lowered to 18? The headlines all but disappeared the next day, but the fallout has been heavy and controversial, just as you’d expect.

I put out a Google alert for “drinking age” and my inbox has been stuffed ever since. (I highly recommend Google alerts as a research tool.) The college presidents’ argument, if I understood it correctly, was that the “sin temptation” of illegal alcohol makes binge drinking all the more likely, especially on college campuses where a culture of drunkenness can exist. (It certainly did when I was an undergraduate.) That brought the anti-alcohol lobby out of the woodwork, and they must really be racking up their frequent flier miles for all the testifying they’ve been doing around the country. Here, for example, is an expert from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation telling the Maryland House of Delegates not to lower the drinking age.

On the other side of the argument are people like Chris Thomas, a Florida high school senior, who wrote an Op-Ed piece in which he cut through to the heart of the matter. First, he noted that, at 18, he must pay taxes, fight in America’s wars, vote, and serve on a jury. Yet he can’t drink. “Here’s the message I’m receiving,” Chris said, speaking probably for millions. “We’re trusting young adults to decide who’s going to run the country, yet we still don’t trust them enough to sip a glass of wine.”

Caught in the middle are teens, parents, cops, courts, school administrators, healthcare providers and the rest of us who live in the real world, where pontificating experts and Op-Ed pieces have little bearing. It’s clear that binge drinking and drunk driving by idiotic teens are taking their toll. Here’s what I think. It’s probably too late to fix the current problems, but we can get through to our young children and inspire them by changing things now. Let’s raise kids to be comfortable around alcohol, not in awe or fear of it. European countries like Italy, Spain and France don’t seem to have these problems. Could it be because they’re wine-drinking countries, where children aren’t made to feel like wine is something illicit and evil, like heroin, but rather a natural part of life? That’s my problem with neoprohibitionists like Sarah Palin and, yes, the religious right in general, and AA types like George W. Bush, who think that their issue extends to everybody else. They treat alcohol like demon rum, not like the gift from God that the Bible recognizes it as.

My San Francisco tasting group met again on Monday. It was a warm day in the city, with blue skies and a temperate breeze from the north, and outside the window the Bay Bridge and the waters of the Bay sparkled under the sun.

All we knew of the wines was that they were Cabernet Sauvignon, or Bordeaux blends, from around the world, and from multiple vintages. Our host, Gary, had set up eight glasses, but one of the members, Chris, brought a ninth wine, so this was added at the last minute.

We always rank the wines in order of preference, then get a group ranking, but this time, we agreed beforehand that rank would be of lesser importance than the discussion of terroir that would follow. We were each asked to guess the country or region of origin of the wine as well as its approximate age. Of course, if anybody wanted to go out on a limb and guess the producer, that was okay, too.

In blind tasting, I proceed this way: Visual, aroma, taste. You start with broad-brush conclusions that are no more than guesses, really, but quite often that first impression can be your best guidance. Too much thought can be crippling. Right off the bat, I could see that the wine Chris brought was far and away the palest in color. It was orange at the rim, or meniscus, and I judged it was at least 15 years old on that basis alone.

It would take too much space to go through each of the wines, but here are some highlights. Chris’s old wine was in fact the 1990 Capezzana Ghiaie Della Furba, a Super-Tuscan blend of Cab, Merlot and Syrah. It was an instructive lesson in the appreciation of an older wine, starting out delicately perfumed and spicy, but after 30 minutes it began to dry out, and the alcohol showed through. My top wine of the flight — in fact, the group’s top wine by far — was another Italian: the 2001 Rampolla Vigna d’Alceo ($200), a Tuscan blend of Cabernet and Petit Verdot. It showed impeccable balance even in the company of the other wines: Penfolds 1994 Bin 707 ($110), 2002 Rudd, 2000 Lynch-Bages ($240), 1995 Montelena ($150), 1997 Togni ($225), 2001 Spottswoode ($150) and 2002 DuBrul “Cote Bonneville,” a Yakima Valley Bordeaux blend ($125). All the wines were quite good, although the Lynch-Bages was a little heavy and so was the Togni. But that Rampolla made me understand, or re-understand (for it’s a lesson you can never absorb enough), the importance of things like balance, harmony, elegance and class in the evaluation of wine.

There were 2 other take-home lessons from the tasting.

1. How much a complex wine can change in the glass. For example, the Montelena grew dramatically better after an hour of airing and warming up. This confirmed to me what a pity it is that I — and most other critics — can offer only a shapshot of a wine, an appraisal of how it is at a particular moment in time. Someday, I’d like to write about how a wine changes in the glass, which is really the way we drink our wines.

2. How terroir is harder to determine than it used to be. Once upon a time, there were huge differences between Tuscany, Pauillac, Napa Valley and Barossa Valley. That’s less so now, as the International Style (or Parkerization, or call it what you will) marches on. I thought the Rudd was a Left Bank Bordeaux, although I nailed Spottswoode and Togni as Napa Valley. And I was gratified when Chris explained that his Italian wine, which I identified as an old Classified Growth Bordeaux, had been planted by Lafite’s vineyard manager, from Lafite cuttings.