WineDiverGirl is a California blogger who specializes in (as her blog says) “Wine Life and Social Media Coverage.” As such, she’s passionate about the convergence of the wine industry and social media, and writes provocative posts on how wineries and bloggers might work in tandem to help the industry move forward.

I’m all in favor of that, but the question is what, precisely, ought to be the relationship between bloggers and wineries. Last summer, in the Rockaway-gate dustup, I called for bloggers to keep their distance from wineries. When a reporter/critic gets too close to her subject, there’s too great a chance for a conflict of interest or, at least, the appearance of one. I recognized, at the height of the tempest, that it’s flattering for a blogger to be given special treatment by a winery, but it’s vital to resist the temptation to succumb to flattery. Wineries don’t love critics because we’re warm and fuzzy. They pretend to love us because we can help, or hurt, them economically.

Well, in her latest post, WineDiverGirl says she’s “looking for all the ways wineries and bloggers are currently connected (if at all) and new and improved ways for them to evangelize the beautiful power of wine.” She offers a number of ways for bloggers and wineries to work together, nearly all of which are wrong-headed and, in some instances, dangerous. Here are her suggestions:

1. “Host a guest blogger for a month: either pay them or the charity of their choice for them to write about your winery, winemaker, wine, vineyards, etc.” Can we agree that this is a terrible idea? If a winery pays a blogger, then that blogger can have no credibility whatsoever about anything he writes concerning the winery. Even if the winery donates money to the blogger’s favorite charity, it suggests a quid pro quo that makes the blogger suspect. If a winery wants to boast online about how great it is, it can start its own blog.

2. “[S]ponsor or offer scholarships to various wine tasting events to help bloggers get there.” Now, this isn’t as bad as #1. Wine writers are notoriously underpaid and sometimes it’s necessary to accept some help to cover travel expenses. I’ve done it. But as a rule, having your expenses paid by a winery is a bad idea. It’s better for a regional winery association to pick up the tab, so that you’re not perceived to be beholden to anyone in particular.

3. “Host a guest blogger to pour in your tasting room for a day.” This is bizarre. A tasting room staffer should know all about the winery, its wines and vineyards, its owners and winemaker, the area in question, wine in general, and so on. Why would a winery be interested in having a blogger be its public face in the tasting room, unless it expected to get some good publicity — which brings us back to the conflict of interest issue.

4. “Include bloggers in focused research or think-tank like conversations about planning your year, events, marketing.” Bloggers are now supposed to be marketing managers and event planners for wineries? I don’t think so. This crosses so many red lines, it’s hard to know where to begin.

WineDiverGirl concludes by reassuring wineries that bloggers “know consumers better than almost anyone…because they are the wine industry’s BEST consumers.” I would have thought the industry’s best consumers are ordinary working women and men looking to drink a nice glass of wine for dinner.

“What do you think?” WineDiverGirl asks. “How do you see wineries and bloggers working together for everyone’s benefit?” With all due respect to WineDiverGirl, who means well, I don’t see wineries and bloggers working together, if “together” means becoming strange bedfellows. Bloggers should be very careful about getting mixed up in the business of wineries, and wineries should be very careful about trying to influence the independent blogosphere.

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I’m taking a few days off for the holiday. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Hundred-point wines are the Cartier of the wine world, the Cullinan diamonds of wine. The idea implicit in awarding a wine a perfect score is that it’s just that: perfect.To quote from Wine Enthusiast’s ratings parameters, a wine that scores between 98 and 100 points is the “absolute best. Pinnacle of expression. Perfect grape, terroir, winemaking.”

The Cullinan Diamond, all 530.2 carats of it

So why is it that I’ve given only three wines 100 points over the years? For that matter, I’ve rated only one wine 99 points. There are some magazines that compete with Wine Enthusiast that have more perfect 100s in a single issue than I’ve given in my life!

I think it comes down to the way critics approach wine tasting. I’ve tasted wines I thought were magnificent on opening, and was tempted to give very high scores to. But, after a while in the glass, something happened to lower them in my esteem. Maybe, as they breathed and warmed up, they revealed a trace of bitterness. Maybe there was some green unripeness that jarred my palate, or maybe the oak was, on second thought, too clumsily applied. So down went the score by a couple points.

On the other hand, I’ve had wines that disappointed me right off the bat, to which I tentatively assigned only middling scores. But then the wine woke up and showed me something I hadn’t noticed before. It could have been that the rusticity I at first detected was in reality a youthful vigor that bode well for the cellar. So up goes the score — not to perfection, but higher than my previous rating.

What I’m trying to say here is that the critical judgment of wine is a moving target. Wine changes in the glass, sometimes within seconds after being poured, and most certainly after minutes. As the oxygen in the air invades wine’s being, subtle chemical changes occur, changes that can be even more profound in a white wine, since it’s also warming up to room temperature. This is why, when I taste my daily average of 12 wines, it takes me a minimum of 90 minutes. That’s about 7-1/2 minutes per wine, which in my opinion is barely enough time for a diligent reviewer to consider the wine from multiple perspectives, and with a depth of understanding that can’t be achieved with the kind wham, bam, thank you ma’am approach that some critics take. I mean, I know of critics who taste 100 wines in the same 90 minutes I take to do a dozen. That’s less than one minute per wine.

One minute per wine! Including writing! Under those circumstances, I can see how somebody would think, “Perfect!” and give the wine 100 points — especially if they know in advance they’re tasting potential 100-point wines, like Burgundy Grand Crus, Bordeaux First Growths, vintage Ports and the like. That’s one approach, but it’s not mine. I think of perfection the way William Faulkner described it: “All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”

First I picked The Matriarch, the least expensive ($90) of Harlan’s 2005 lineup of 7 wines, as my top wine in a tasting at the winery. Then, a few weeks later, I chose a Paso Robles Pinot Noir (Adelaida 2006 HMR Estate, $30) over 11 others from the North Coast, including some famous, pricey bottlings. A couple days after that, my top Cabernet, in a tasting that included Staglin, Beringer Private Reserve, Flora Springs Trilogy, Rubicon Cask and Whitehall Lane Reserve, was Justin 2006 Reserve, also from Paso Robles.

What’s going on? Each of these three tastings was conducted blind. That eliminated the element of bias based on knowing what you’re drinking. Blind tasting is enlightening, but it also exposes the critic to the possibility of embarrassment. Reputations can be shattered. But truth is a higher value than a reputation, and if a Paso Robles Pinot bests several from the Russian River Valley, then so be it.

One thing my friends, my fellow bloggers, have taught me is the importance of truth and its handmaiden, transparency. Winston Churchill once remarked, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” But wine tasting is not war, and deception has no part in the critical process.

The reason why tasting wines blind is so important can best be illustrated by what may happen when you don’t.

When I did my annual tasting at Harlan in October, I was startled when Bill Harlan told me he had never tasted his own wines blind. Nor had he ever tasted all seven in a lineup. Nor had at least one of the world’s most famous über-critics who had just been there. In fact, Bill said, he was amazed that I had the cojones to taste his wines blind, and then inform him and his winemaker, Bob Levy, of my conclusions before the wines were unbagged. Wouldn’t I be embarrassed if I got them “wrong”?

Well, no. There’s never any reason for embarrassment if you’re truthful. You can’t be wrong if you tell it like you see it. The worst that can happen is someone will disagree with you. On the other hand, I think there would be room for embarrassment if you’re looking at the labels as you taste, and then conveniently rate Harlan Estate ($450) at the top, and score everything else down from there, based on descending price. That’s why The Matriarch got the highest score in my tasting. Since I didn’t know what it was, I had to go by one parameter only: How good it tasted. And let me assure you, that Matriarch was one gorgeous wine.

Ditto for the Adelaida Pinot Noir, which comes from one of the highest and coolest parts of the Paso Robles appellation, and whose vines are among the oldest Pinot plantings south of the Santa Cruz Mountains. A 1975 Pinot from the vineyard, crafted by André Tchelistcheff for the previous owner, Hoffman Mountain Ranch, may even have taken first place in a famous 1979 GaultMillau tasting in Paris that included Romanée-Conti (for a fascinating exercise in investigative journalism, check out this 2005 article on the tasting by my late friend, David Shaw). But the point is that far western Paso Robles is capable of producing excellent Pinot Noir, and the only reason a critic wouldn’t understand that is if he was so mesmerized by the words “Paso Robles” on the label that his brain was deceived into not appreciating what’s in the glass.

Today’s young bloggers talk about bringing revolutionary change to the entire field of wine writing and criticism. Imagine if everybody tasted completely blind, all the time, in such a way as to level the playing field utterly. How soon would it be before the great and famous wines of the world were losing out to less expensive, upstart rivals? That would be truly revolutionary. I urge young bloggers, as you increasingly get the chance to taste really famous wines — and some of you will — do so in lineups that include “lesser” wines, and do so blind. Many of America’s top critics — the ones you hope to, and maybe someday will, replace — don’t taste blind, even if they say they do. But you should.

THIS JUST IN

Rep. Mike Thompson, the Democrat from Napa, Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties, is said to be Barack Obama’s pick for Commerce Secretary. This is fantastic news for the wine industry. Mike is a solid friend to wineries, and he even owns vineyards in Lake County. Good pick on President-elect Obama’s part.

The Rochester, Minn. Post-Bulletin is reporting here and here that the Saudi royal family dropped a bundle in Rochester the past few days. Seems King Abdullah was getting a checkup at the Mayo Clinic, and, in true royal fashion, he was accompanied by a large retinue that included many of his female relatives. And, women being women (am I going to get in trouble here?), there was plenty of shopping to be done.

According to the reports, the King’s sisters hit up Macy’s “three or four times.” Meanwhile, “a group of five Saudi women, including a woman who appeared to have high standing in the royal family,” spent 45 minutes shopping at New York & Company, whose website says the store sells “trendy, sexy, comfortable, affordable clothing.”  No word on what the Saudis purchased, but a store employee said, “They cleaned us out.”  I’m betting they didn’t buy burkahs. Maybe some of these shapely little leotards:

wide strap contour rib fit bodyshaper

Seems the ladies also hit up The Nordic Shop, whose owner told the Post-Bulletin the Saudis “have been pretty much everywhere downtown.” Again, no word on what they bought, but could it have been Orrefors crystal wine glasses? Royal Copenhagen mugs? Boxes of Norwegian fruksuppe mix? Brooches from Mikkelborg Solje? Whatever their purchases were, there were a lot of them; the Post-Bulletin reports it took “trucks, buses and vans” to carry everything back.

Oh, and the Royals ate dinner out, too. They went to Chardonnay restaurant, but not before checking out the silverware “to see if it was good enough,” reported restaurant owner Mark Weimer. The restaurant has no website, but it’s described as French cuisine with an extensive wine list. A local review praised its “elegantly appointed tables” and “roast duck, foie gras, and rack of lamb,” not to mention a wine list with “an impressive array of vintages from California, France, and Italy.”

(There’s a McDonald’s in Rochester, at 1937 Highway 52 North, but we’re not being told if the Royals dined there, too.)

Hey, like Mel Brooks said, it’s good to be king. Or related to the king.

Back in September I blogged that Gallo was asking the Feds to approve a 14,044-acre expansion of the Russian River Valley AVA. I noted also that local opposition to the proposal was vehement. The Tax & Trade Bureau (TTB) has extended the public comment period until Dec. 20, but the idea continues to draw widespread criticism. I recently spoke with Jim Collins, Gallo’s director of coastal winegrowing.

WE: Where is the area you want expanded?

JC: South of the Russian River Valley. It would include Cotati and part of the Petaluma Gap, depending on how it’s defined.

image courtesy of Appellation America

WE: What does Gallo have planted there?

JC: Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and some Pinot Gris.

WE: To what appellation is the area now entitled?

JC: Sonoma County and Sonoma Coast.

WE: Why not just call it Sonoma Coast?

JC: Well, it’s part of the Russian River Valley. The soils are the same as over by our Laguna Vineyard, near Graton, and the climate is the same.

WE: Rod Berglund, from Joseph Swan, told the TTB, “The area that they wish to have included is, in no way, part of what has been defined as The Russian River Valley.”

JC: I think Rod’s a great guy, but if you look at the facts, it is. The climate data, the soil, it’s all the same as Russian River Valley.

WE: Berglund also says an expansion will create consumer confusion.

JC: I don’t agree.

WE: And Merry Edwards says this is a slippery slope that will lead to further expansions that eventually “will destroy the integrity of the Russian River Valley brand.”

JC: Again, I go back to the facts of soil and climate, especially in the context of the last expansion [of Russian River Valley], in 2005. This area was left out and it needs to be put in.

WE: Is it conceivable that the Russian River Valley AVA is too big? That instead of expanding it, it should be broken into smaller sub-appellations?

JC: That’s a good question that we could take up at another time.

WE: Are there any other areas that are not included in Russian River Valley which you think should be?

JC: I can’t think of any.

WE: So is this the last time Gallo will ask for an expansion of the valley?

JC: Well, I couldn’t answer that with 100 percent clarity.

WE: What happens when the public comment period is over?

JC: TTB takes it back internally, mulls it over, and makes their decision.

WE: If they reject the expansion, can you appeal?

JC: I’m not an expert on that. I imagine there is. But it’s hard to argue against the facts. And there are quite a few people who agree with us. You can be confident there will be letters [of support] coming in to TTB.