“Do any of the people who make up your company, agencies, partners and so on actually live social?” That’s the question David Armano asks in his opinion piece in the Harvard Business Review.

His point is that a company (a winery, for example) shouldn’t just go out and hire somebody to manage their social media campaign if the actual people who run the company aren’t “living” it. That is treating social media “like a temporary advertising campaign,” an adjunct to traditional business practices rather than a revolutionization of them. If a winery tries “to control [the message] rather than participate in the discussion…then you’re not living social.”

I take Armano’s point. If a winery thinks it can just hire an “ad agency, PR firm or business consultancy to go out and ‘be social’ for them,” this will indeed “limit potential success.” But I’m not sure I agree that all management, everywhere, has to be SMATT [social media all the time]. It’s more complicated than that.

It’s too early in the evolution of social media to predict what will work and what won’t. I think, for example, of those wineries (Murphy-Goode, Jackson Family Farms and St. Supery come to mind) that already have hired social media directors.  In a sense they’ve done exactly what Armano says not to: Farmed out the social media sphere to hired experts, while the senior partners and owners who pay them do not necessarily “live social.” They (in Armano’s words) “assume that they themselves don’t have to be social (open and collaborative) to reap the rewards (cost savings, marketing ROI, effective reputation management, and search engine juice) they think they might get from social media.”

Well, this is only proper business practice. You identify a need and then hire someone to fill it because you don’t have the time to do it yourself. It’s in the job description. It’s all well and good to say that a winery that wants to use social media has to “live social” from top to bottom, but that’s a little like saying that a general heading up a war has to peel potatoes and scrub latrines in order to be “honestly engaged” with the troops or that Steve Jobs has to twitter and Facebook all day for ROI. (Does he?)

And yet Armano is spot-on when he suggests that the crass, reflexive use of social media by wineries will be instantly and harmfully recognized by other users who “look askance at posers.” “If you’re not genuinely, honestly engaged in the social network,” he warns, “you’re not going to get far with those who are.” This is true, as I learned when I started blogging. Some saw me as a poser. The idea that I wasn’t “honestly engaged,” that I was merely crashing a party others had started, was false, but it took me a while to get that message across. Wineries are going to have to put bets on social media before the wheel stops turning.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, which I think is endemic to the social media world, it’s that you can’t please everybody all the time, as tempting as that may be. Individual bloggers soon discover this; so do wine companies. There will be carping and criticism of everything, and if you’re a highly-structured company, this may be a problem. Armano deals with this in an indirect way when he asks “Where does social media live?” by which he means, Where inside the company? “Is it marketing? Is it public relations? Is it IT or corporate? Is it a combination of multiple business units…”? These are questions every company asks itself — so far, without answers. My own feeling is that it doesn’t matter where you house social media. That’s an old-style tactic that doesn’t fit in with the new paradigm, which is non-hierarchical. It doesn’t matter who represents the winery’s face or what her title is. If it’s done passionately and with talent — and let’s not pretend this is some junior position because it’s not — it will help the winery’s bottom line.

New paradigms are hard to recognize. Even if you’re lucky enough to recognize you’re in one, it’s hard to know exactly how to adapt, and impossible to see clearly where it’s going. Nobody who hopes to use social media should get too locked-in, or addicted, to anything. That means not believing the hype. Twitter could turn out to be this generation’s Nehru jacket. Even Pluto was downgraded from a planet to an asteroid. Nothing’s safe.

Whenever I hear about “living the social media life” it makes me worry. People already spend too much time on it, at the risk of being disengaged from the real world. Yes, the digital world is not the real world, in case that fact has escaped anyone’s attention. Remember that “social” had a profound meaning for humans before “social media” existed. Does any Twitterer believe he’s created anything new, beyond the medium, which is Faster! Stronger! New and Improved from anything we’ve known before? Can any social media relationship be as good as an old-fashioned relationship in which the participants actually meet in the real world, hang out together, eat and drink and laugh and talk with and see each other?

HAPPY NEW YEAR! See you in 2010.

Of my 32 highest-scoring wines of 2009, all but one were red (the sole exception was Iron Horse’s appropriately named Joy! brut) and of those, 18 were Cabernet Sauvignon or a Bordeaux blend. Except for two of those (Rodney Strong’s 2006 Rockaway, from Alexander Valley, and Kendall-Jackson’s ‘06 Trace Ridge, from Knights Valley), all the Cabs were from Napa Valley — from Oak Knoll in the south through Stags Leap and Oakville on up to St. Helena.

However, of the top 16 wines fully 12 were Pinot Noir. They were concentrated in the Sonoma Coast, Green Valley and Russian River Valley, but Santa Rita Hills were well-represented, with ambassadors here and there from Santa Maria Valley, Anderson Valley and Sonoma Mountain. Somewhat surprising was the relative absence of Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noirs. Is it just me or are these wines a little top-heavy? (You can see all my published reviews at Wine Enthusiast’s Buying Guide.)

No dry white table wine enters the list until #32, Hartford Court’s Stone Côte Chardonnay, from the Sonoma Coast. After that three Chards in a row pop up: Boekenoogen  2007 from Santa Lucia Highlands, Gary Farrell 2007 from Rochioli Vineyard and Au Bon Climat’s apocalyptically-named Santa Barbara Historic Vineyards Collection Bien Nacido Vineyard, from the 2006 vintage. As many of you know, I do like and admire a rich, ripe, oaky Chardonnay.

What all this says is no surprise. California’s three greatest dry wines are Cabernet Sauvignon (or blends), Pinot Noir (never, one hopes, blended) and Chardonnay (ditto). The reds get the nod because they’re more interesting. The same also is true in France, where these three varieties (with the addition, some would say, of Syrah in the Northern Rhône) constitute the nation’s patrimony. (Would anyone add the Sauvignon Blanc or Chenin Blanc? Speak now or hold your peace.) Why Cabernet, Pinot and Chardonnay are “noble” will be argued in different ways by different people. From an esthetic point of view, I suggest that when properly sourced and produced these three types of wine are the most complete and complex. (I’m speaking of California.) They drink the deepest and last the longest, and are best adapted to take on new oak. They show the greatest balance and longevity. After Cabernet, Pinot and Chardonnay there simply are “all the rest.” But they include some very good wines.

I wrote two days ago about the problem with Syrah in California and that generated lots of comment from readers, most of whom tended to agree with me that the variety lacks identity here. But I did have some very high-scoring Syrahs. Qupe’s ‘05 Bien Nacido X Block was way up there and so was Failla’s ‘07 Estate. Stolpman’s 2007 La Croce also did well, and I was surprised to learn it’s a blend of Sangiovese and Syrah. Perhaps there is something to be said for co-fermenting these varieties, provided that the grapes are superior. The Sangiovese seemed to add structure and acidity while the Syrah brought richness.

Not too many Sauvignon Blancs or Bordeaux-style white wines on my upper tier. Illumination’s 2008, which is 92% Sauvignon Blanc and 8% Semillon and was partially barrel-fermented and then aged on the lees, clocked in at #25. I did not know, when I gave it 95 points, that it was made by Charles Thomas, whom I remember from his days at Robert Mondavi, where he presided over the Tokalon Fume Blancs that are consistently among California’s best of the genre. (I liked the actual Mondavi 2007 Tokalon Reserve Sauvignon Blanc well enough, and gave it 92 points.) There were quite a number of dessert wines I scored highly in 2009, but I’ll save that discussion for another time.

It’s not likely that Cabernet, Pinot and Chardonnay will be dislodged anytime soon from their commanding heights. What is there to threaten them? I speak not of the cascades of indifferent, wannabe examples but of the very best. You can be an A.B.C. person but really, a great Caifornia Cabernet or Chardonnay is a world-class event. As for Pinot Noir, I am reminded of the tale that Napoleon (? can’t remember which one) had his troops bow down on bended knee as they marched past the Clos de Vougeot. There is something about that wine that approaches, well, worship, then as now.

P.S. I said yesterday I would blog today on “ten things we need more of in 2010.” It was a good idea but when I tried to write it, nada. Maybe another time.

It’s been an awful ten years of tumult and disappointment, a decadus horribilis. Time to get rid of what doesn’t work and concentrate on what does. Here is a list of things we don’t need during this second decade of the 21st century. (Except for rosé, I’m not including general varietal criticisms. There is always room for improvement across the board.)

10. Hard, faux-wax plastic seals you need a chisel to chop off. I’m tired of them. One of these days I’ll cut my hand and sue the submitting winery, or else stop reviewing them entirely. The wines are usually plonk; after all that effort, you find an indifferent wine not worth the price, much less the work involved.

9. Imitation plastic corks that are hard to extract and then swell up so they’re impossible to cram back into the bottle. They are abominations. I give credit to them for trying to avoid TCA, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. A decent fake cork that pulls out with roughly the same effort as a real cork and then re-enters is okay, but those cheap rubbery ones are a mess, especially when they’re purple. Even a screwtop is better.

8. Styrofoam packaging. Environmentally unclean, huge carbon footprint, and messy. So many hypocrites out there who talk green and then play with this fossil fuel-derived stuff. Get rid of it. I’ve been on this crusade for years and one of these days I’ll win.

7. Ugly labels. Rule #1: the human face should never, ever appear on a label. Rule #2: Repeat Rule #1. Also [personal point of privilege], if the grapes are from a single vineyard then don’t put “vineyards” [i.e. plural] on the label.

6. Bad rosé. Sorry, Rosé Avengers and Producers, but Provence and the Loire don’t have to be afraid. Almost nobody here is making rosés that are dry, crisp and complex, which three attributes surely are essential for world-class rosé. We have the terroir and the right varieties for rosé, but varietal wines get far more money than a blush ever could. This financial imbalance prohibits California from being a great rosé wine producer. Tant pis.

5. Excessive by-the-glass fees in restaurants. If a bottle of wine retails for $30 then I shouldn’t have to pay $12 for a little glass of it. Not even close. Some of these restaurants are gouging their customers, and 2010 would be a good year to bring sanity to restaurant wine practices.

4. Snarkiness in wine blogs. Can we agree that snarkiness is sooo 2008?

3. An end to the hemorrhaging of wine writing in newspapers. Now the Wall Street Journal has lost Dorothy and John. This is a great loss and I hope it’s the last one of its kind we’ll see in any American newspaper, anywhere. The media needs wine (and food) coverage at least as much as it needs sports or comics (and much more than it needs astrology or bridge columns).

2. The idea that anybody can be an instant wine critic just by deciding they  are.

And finally, the Number One thing to get rid of in 2010:

1. Stupid, pretentious French names. “Rhapsodie de la Lune a Nuit” and that kind of phony stuff, especially when the wine sucks but even when it doesn’t. We have got to get over this worship of the French language when it comes to wine, and the funny thing is that the best producers almost never fall prey to this nonsense. It’s usually arrivistes who think they can charge extra bucks. Can you imagine any reputable French producer naming a wine after anything in America? Sacre bleu.

Tomorrow: The top 10 things California wine needs more of in 2010.

We had a lot of wine at the old groaning board on Christmas Day: Zinfandel, Gewurztraminer, sparkling, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc. But no Syrah. I know, because I brought all the wine, and there was no Syrah.

Of all the major varieties grown in California, Syrah’s the poor cousin. Nobody wants it. Winemakers tell me what a problem sell it is. Distributors grimace when they have to peddle it. It’s a fairly easy grape to grow, not fussy like Pinot Noir. Syrah throws a good crop, although it responds well to limiting yields, and it doesn’t seem to mind being grown in both cooler and warmer climates.

It should sell well because it’s got a pretty, easy-to-pronounce, French-sounding name, which Americans love. Merlot’s pretty, too, but Syrah is even sexier. It sounds like somebody whispering something in your ear. Ssssyyyrr-rarrrhhh. So what’s the problem?

For one, Americans have a fairly limited imagination when it comes to wine. Everybody’s heard of Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s the go-to red wine if you want something dry and fancy. Merlot’s probably #2. With Pinot Noir, of course, we in the industry have clubbed the consumer over the head like baby seals so many times since “Sideways” that there’s probably no one conscious who hasn’t heard favorable things about it. Zinfandel? Everybody knows something about it, too. But that’s when the brain starts getting pretty crowded with grape names. It’s about as easy trying to wedge Syrah in there as it is stuffing an overcoat into your already-full suitcase.

I looked up my highest scoring Syrahs in Wine Enthusiast over the last two years. Highest is a Qupe 2005 Bien Nacido, followed by a clutch of Faillas, a Chateau Potelle (are they still in business?), then a Rubicon, an Ojai (also from Bien Nacido), a pair of Zaca Mesas (gosh, their Black Bear Block is good) and a Heintz, which I believe (correct me if I’m wrong) comes from not too far from Ehren Jordan’s Failla. So these are all from relatively cool places.

They’re all rich, elaborate wines that deserve their high scores, and one of these days, you never know, a 100-point Syrah might come along (and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was from one of the wineries mentioned above). At its best, Syrah is slightly soft, with velvety, ultra-refined tannins and a chocolate-biscuit taste to the berry fruit flavors, which can range from red cherries and currants through blueberries and blackberries, all the way into cassis. There is also often that savory hint of black pepper that only a cool climate can coax out.

I like a good California Syrah but when it comes to pitting it against its nearest neighbor in the noble, full-bodied red wine sweepstakes, I’ll take a great Cabernet Sauvignon every time. As lush as Syrah can be it never seems to have the structural depth of Cabernet. It’s like (pardon the analogy) the Anna Nicole Smith of red wine (may she rest in peace), beautiful, fascinating, exotic, opulent, curvaceous, eye candy (or in Syrah’s case, mouth candy), but somehow missing something essential. The greatest Cabernets are not missing anything, which is why they are so great.

I doubt if this “missing” quality, however, is why more Americans don’t buy Syrah. The masses wouldn’t know that, nor would they know that very few critics ever give perfect scores to Syrah, as opposed to Cabernet and Pinot Noir. So it remains a mystery why Syrah isn’t more popular. Someone once suggested to me that Syrah has been hurt by Aussie Shiraz’s cheap image, which may be partly true, but that assumes people know that Shiraz is Syrah. There was an article last summer, in winebusiness.com, which implied a certain indecisiveness on the part of American consumers, who seem not to know exactly what Syrah is, or what it ought to taste like, or how much a good bottle should cost, or why precisely they ought to buy it when they’re not quite sure they should (which is a violation of the First Law of Marketing: Convince the consumer he must buy the product, or suffer irreparable loss). There also is the implication that selling Syrah is a bit like trench warfare: each sommelier or merchant has got to hand-sell it to each customer, in a never-ending scrim that occurs on the one-yard line where getting past the cash register, not the goal post, is the goal.

Then there are Syrah’s weaknesses, which are greater than Cabernet’s. The worst you can say about a minor Cabernet is that it’s overcropped. That leaves plenty of room for them to score in the 83-85 point range, which isn’t bad. There are millions of glasses of such Cabernet Sauvignon sold every day at the nation’s Denny’s, Popeye’s, Red Lobsters, Longhorn Steakhouses and Tony Roma’s. A poor Syrah on the other hand is a truly dreadful wine. High alcohol can burn the finish, excessive sweetness make it insipid, and if you include green flavors with high alcohol and residual sugar you have something not even fit for vinegar. There are many such Syrahs and they come, surprisingly enough, not just from hot climates (Paso Robles, Livermore, Lodi) but cool ones (Edna Valley), although the truth is you’re more likely to get a bad Syrah from a hot climate than a cool one.

I don’t know what the answer is for selling more Syrah. Maybe that orphan variety needs a trade and promotion event, like ZAP or the Rhône Rangers or the World of Pinot Noir. Something that would raise Syrah’s profile in the consumer’s mind would be a good thing.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And in times like this, when consumers are loathe to spend money, it becomes more necessary than ever for wineries to figure out ways to encourage them to do so.

As a critic I’ve seen almost every way there is for wineries to attract attention to themselves. They’ll resort to oversized bottles so heavy you have to use two hands to pour from them. They’ll put more and more outrageous things on the label. Critters and various colorful modes of transit (trucks, wagons, bicycles) seem mercifully to be on the way out, but on the way in are larger point size for type, greater contrast of colors on the label, and more psychedelic use of gold. It’s the label as roadside billboard. Of course, bottles wrapped in tissue paper suggest that the wine inside must be very special indeed, as is the case with bottles that come in wooden boxes.

There is a cottage industry of packaging redesigners, to whom despairing marketing and sales people turn in roughly the same way a worried man might go to a psychic for consultation following a broken love affair or economic crisis. “[T]hey are hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money” is how the New York Times yesterday described how restaurateurs are trying to lure in cautious diners. The same can be said of wineries. Production people come up with their own “magic combinations.” If you can’t sell your Cabernet Sauvignon, what about a Malbec instead (grabbing onto Argentina’s coattails)? How about a cleverly-named proprietary bottling incorporating the owner’s children’s names, or something French-sounding?. There’s as much psychology involved in buying decisions as anything else. One restaurant cited in the Times article “not only excites the taste buds but goes to work on the mind.” This is crucial because flavor occurs, not in the taste buds, but in the brain, which is the seat of our sexual fantasies.

We humans, it turns out, are as irrational as invertebrates when it comes to choosing our delicacies. “[T]he psychology of the menu”, a complex interplay of graphic design, word and image association and subtle tricks played on the mind (e.g. cost sans dollar sign is said to be less threatening, so that 9 is friendlier than $9) represents the summitry of the restaurateur’s — and the P.R. agent’s — art. “The hidden persuaders,” in Vance Packard’s term (the title of his 1957 book), provided pre-”Mad Men” evidence of hidden tactics advertisers used to sell products. The ultimate in subliminal was said to be barely perceptible (to the naked eye) images of writhing nude human torsos in airbrushed ice cubes floating in cold, refreshing glasses of cognac and other spirits — images that the eye missed but that the reptilian id did not. There are wineries right here in Northern California that are not above mixing eye candy in with their message. The handsome young man from Livermore and the hot young woman from Napa Valley, both of whom are used in their company’s pictorial ads (and you know who they are), come to mind. What’s surprising is that the wine industry does not use sex appeal more than it does. Perhaps it’s a form of prudishness, or maybe the industry just feels it’s “above” pandering to that denominator. But if the suggestion of salaciousness can sell everything from Volvos

to coffee

to clothes

to iPods

it can certainly sell wine. I’m not suggesting that we start having young winemakers in bikini briefs and thongs appear in wine advertisements (although that could be pretty cool) and I certainly wouldn’t want to see old winemakers scantily clad. But the wine industry is stuffy and tight-cheeked when it comes to portraying its own image and it could have more fun and try new things. And by the way, a sincerely meant message from this blog: