I’m always fascinated by the tension that so often arises in wine country between those who promote tourism and locals who don’t want a bunch of strangers traipsing all over their neighborhoods — even if they come armed with credit cards to spend in the stores and restaurants.

A couple years ago, I recall, there was a big brouhaha up in Knights Valley, that tranquil stretch of the Mayacamas Mountains that separates Alexander Valley from Napa Valley. Kendall-Jackson had wanted to build some kind of visitor’s center. Local residents opposed it. They called me up to see if I’d write about it. I decided not to, but in essence, their complaint was “Look, we have a nice, quiet little piece of God’s country up here, and we don’t want tour buses and traffic jams screwing it up.” I never did find out what happened.

There’ve been similar eruptions of passion in wine country. Another longstanding complaint is that when a region decides to glamorize itself as wine country, the price of real estate soars (well, it used to, anyway, before the housing bubble burst), forcing locals to pull up stakes and move. That happened in the Santa Ynez Valley, where lots of winery employees, who can no longer afford to live there, have to reside in faraway places like Lompoc or Santa Maria. And I remember when Wente wanted to develop the Ruby Hills area of Livermore Valley. Some bad feelings about that one.

Back in the ‘90s, when the owners of the Napa Valley Wine Train wanted to activate it as a tourist draw, the citizens of Napa Valley reacted with fury. It was a real pitched battle. Eventually, of course, the Wine Train was allowed to run along a stretch of Highway 29, but not as far as St. Helena, which surely is the leading tourist destination in the central-north part of the valley. Some of the local shops in St. Helena wouldn’t have minded the train coming into town and discharging tourists eager to spend money in the fancy chochky shops, clothing stores and art galleries. But St. Helena’s general citizenry said, Hell, no.

That was before the Great Recession. Now, the St. Helena Star is reporting that “[T]here’s been a thaw in the cold war between the Napa Valley Wine Train and the city of St. Helena.” Seems the city council has agreed to a trial period in which the train would bring passengers into town at 11 a.m. and let them wander around and spend money for two hours.

The issue of “sustainable tourism” is of worldwide concern, from scuba diving in endangered barrier reefs to eco-tourists plundering through the ancient preserves of indigenous people. In the case of wine, or what has come to be called vino-tourism, the downside was aptly described in this essay about wine tourism in Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Rising real estate prices are bringing about “land wars with aggressive buyers trying to corrupt land transactions,” and hotel and resort owners and wealthy Americans looking for second homes “roaming the valley…bused in from Ensenada to ride ATVs and ORVs, drinking wine and roaming the formerly quiet and peaceful neighborhoods.” Nor is there enough water for all the newcomers.

I imagine this is the very sort of thing the people of St. Helena wish to avoid.

I wouldn’t want to have a restaurant these days. Times are tough for them. Everywhere, I hear anecdotes about the hoops they’re jumping through to try to stay open — if they do stay open.

The other day I got approached by the P.R. people for The Fifth Floor, the ultra-chic San Francisco restaurant you used to have to wait forever to get reservations for. They’re now selling something called “Sommelier for a Day.” For $250 per, you get to “shadow” their Master Sommelier, Emily Wines, learning the ropes alongside her, working the dining room floor, and then, afterward, have dinner with Emily, with wines she herself chooses. (I’m not putting this down at all, and may even do it myself. It’s a great idea and sounds like a lot of fun.) I’m pointing it out to show the lengths to which restaurants are going, in order to increase revenues, get publicity, or otherwise keep things going until this economy turns around.

Then, right after I got off the phone with The Fifth Floor’s P.R. person, I came across this article from the Associated Press about a Washington State restaurant, in the heart of Walla Walla’s wine country, whose owner decided to close its doors the very same day that Gourmet Magazine gave him a glowing review. “The recession just squeezed us so much we couldn’t do it, and we had a huge space for that type of restaurant,” the owner said, in words being echoed everywhere. He added, “It’s probably going to take us two years to recover. Financially and emotionally, it devastated us.”

It’s not just here in the U.S. that upscale restaurants are closing. “Many of the best restaurants in France are being forced to tighten their belts and lower prices as recession eats into their profits,” the BBC reported yesterday.

One tactic more and more restaurants are turning to is to allow, or ease up on, their BYOB policies. A P.R. person (not the same one who called me about The Fifth Floor) recently pitched a story to me about how “more restaurants are allowing BYO. My understanding is that it’s…now becoming more welcome (to allow BYO wine).” [I’m quoting from her email to me.] A firm she told me about, goBYO.com, “surveyed more than 50,000 restaurants in the 10 major markets, and of those more than 15,000 allow BYO Wine.” She called this trend “another sales angle…for restaurants seeking methods to spark business during tough economic times.” (You might check out the goBYO website. It’s pretty cool.)

Here in Oakland, some longtime favorites, like JoJo’s, closed their doors, and in San Francisco, in March alone, “two neighborhood Thai spots, a vodka bar offering over a hundred different vodkas on Belden Place, a relatively short-lived Hawaiian place in a Japantown mall, and Bong Su, a glamorous upscale Vietnamese restaurant,” all closed, according to the SF Weekly.com. I went to Bong Su’s glamorous opening a few years ago, when times were flush, and it looked to be a keeper, in its fancy new South of Market digs. But it wasn’t…

In New York City, New York magazine recently ran an interview with a guy named Steve Kamali, a restaurant broker. The headline: “Why Three-Star Dining Is Dead.” The article said “Close to 100 substantial restaurants have already closed in 2009” in The Big Apple. Kamali said, “I do think that we’re going to continue to see closures all across the country, not just in New York.” One of the shuttered N.Y. eateries, Fleur de Sel, was Michelin-starred. It had a 55-page wine list and offered a three-course prix-fixe for $76. The online business management journal, bnet, wrote that, as bad as things are for U.S. restaurants, “it’s even worse in California and Florida,” and not just for fancy places. “The 707-unit smoothie chain Jamba Juice, based in Emeryville, Calif., recently outlined struggles in its core market of California,” bnet reported.

Bad news for foodies, but maybe the silver lining is that those places that do stay open will be more affordable and offer better deals.

Mea culpa: I have since found out that Fifth Floor has offered the Sommelier for a Day program since 2005.

In fact, they’re talking about “a new wine world order,” which should get the conspiratorialists roiling. This is the headline over at South African wine.co.az:

Industry leaders gather at LIWF to debate a new wine world order

It announces a gathering next month of “major figures of the global wine industry” in London to consider everything from emerging markets and obtaining credit to the future of corks. The conference is being sponsored by Wine Intelligence, a London-based market research company.

Some of the breakout sessions sound really cool. “What do consumers really think of wine producing regions” is based on the premise that “where a wine comes from heavily influences a consumers’ perception of that wine.” The session on Emerging Markets will look at the question of whether the paradigm that Russia, India, China and Brazil are the wine wave of the future is really true, given the worldwide economic meltdown. I’d like to be there for that one. A session on “Positive retail strategies for today’s economic climate” will examine “How and why do consumers behave as they do?” Do they act merely on price? On packaging? On other information? Market researchers have spent millions trying to figure that out. And then, of course, there’s the inevitable session on “New ways of engaging the next generation wine drinkers.” You can bet the following terms will be widely uttered: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube. I just hope they have someone under 20 as their expert.

Two of these issues — emerging markets and the next generation — were indirectly dealt with in this morning’s Times (New York, of course; there is no other) in a fascinating article headlined “In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit.” It seems that social media companies that were once so enamored of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe are losing interest. Why? “[T]hese people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.” That’s from Dmitry Shapiro, CEO of Veoh.

Oy vey. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Joost and Veoh all are running into the same problem our bloggers have confronted: Everybody wants to read and watch the Internet but nobody wants to pay for it! Thats what the Times’ headline meant: “Web Grows Without Profit.” Now here we are in the most serious recession since the Great Depression, and wineries are expecting their angels to be in China, India, Russia and Brazil, where Google (YouTube) and News Corp. (MySpace) are struggling to make money from that infamous “next generation” that was supposed to supply the cash to keep the world running.

Hmm. And now we have swine flu. Interesting, challenging times for wine, and us all.

We in the wine blogosphere began, but never finished, this conversation last summer — the one about ethics and manipulation of bloggers by wineries. Now, the Wall Street Journal has picked up on it. “Paid to Pitch: Product Reviews by Bloggers Draw Scrutiny” was the attention-grabbing header last week on an article on “paid blogging,” in which readers believe (or are falsely led to believe) they’re being offered unbiased, independent opinions, when exactly the opposite is happening.

It’s blogging’s version of Blagojevich-style “pay to play” and here’s an example of how it works. Jessica Smith is a blogger at Jessica Knows, where she says, “I’m a mom. And I blog.” On her blog, you’ll see a link to something called EA Sports Active 30 Day Challenge. Click on it, and you’ll read how she worked out with Oprah’s personal trainer in Santa Barbara, all part of her “efforts to go from a ‘size 6 with a muffin top’ to a ‘bikini babe.’” It’s a chatty, cute blog, the kind millions of moms write all the time for their friends and family, but what you might not realize is that it was all a big junket paid by EA Sports. According to the WSJ, Smith stayed at the Four Seasons Biltmore Resort (rates $495/night and up), and the paper also quoted an EA Sports P.R. manager as saying, “We think virtual fitness will be something adopted by digital moms like Jessica Smith,” whom she describes as “evangelists.”

Well, it may say in Jessica’s contracts (she also blogs for Ford and Wal-Mart) that she’s not obligated to deify their products, just as last summer’s Rockway bloggers weren’t arm-twisted to say wonderful things about that wine (although they did). But If Jessica’s experiences with any of her paymaster-sponsors were anything less than delightful, you’d never know it. In the article, Jessica is quoted as saying she never writes anything negative in her product endorsements because “I choose not to be critical.” The brand new Ford Flex she was given (for 1 year, with paid insurance)  by the motor company is “awesome.” It brought out “the exciting and rebellious side of me,” and she even posted a cuuuute video of her 3-year old son, Tucker, revealing its name: Monty (after Scott Monty, Ford’s, umm, head of social media).

Ford Flex: MSRP $28,550

The best you can say about Jessica is that’s she’s at least semi-transparent. Down in the white-on-pale-green (i.e. hard to read) tiny fine print at the bottom of the page, it says ” The owner(s) of this blog is sometimes compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics.” But an unalert blog-reader might not have the time or digging skills to know that. Which is of mounting concern to certain regulators in Washington, D.C. “The Internet is becoming so rife with paid blogging that the Federal Trade Commission..is examining whether it should police bloggers,” the WSJ wrote.

The Journal also spotlighted an “Internet entrepreneur [who] is building a business around selling blog posts for money.” In one of them, he paid bloggers $11 to tout an apparel sale at Sears. Check out zengrrl’s blog. Oi.

Wine bloggers make a big show of transparency and honesty. They bash the “old media” for having blurry lines between advertising and reviewing. I, myself, have been accused of being a paid shill. I know this sort of thing is happening, nascently but firmly, in the wine industry. Recently, I was approached by an online wine retailer who wanted me to write glowing reviews about (non-California) wines in a blog-like space that would have the appearance of independence. For every click-through that resulted in sale, I’d get a piece of the action. That never happened. (Disclosure: in my financial situation, I briefly considered it, but then realized what a huge mistake it would have been. Some things just aren’t worth the money.)

With 1,000 wine blogs (and counting) out there, it’s time for wine bloggers to submit to an absolute, Good Housekeeping-type seal of approval. Such a seal would guarantee, in a provable, convincing way, that their wine reviews are completely independent and that the reviewer doesn’t stand to make a penny from them. For those blogs that accept paid advertising, the seal would require them to expose any potential conflicts to the antiseptic of sunlight.

The credibility of truly independent bloggers will suffer if and when the medium is perceived to be little more than a front for personal profit. If the public comes to think that opinions are bought and paid for, it’s the end of this fledgling wine blog industry. We need to know who’s making money, how are they making it, and who’s paying them, and we need to know it now.

I have to respectfully take issue with Dan Berger’s recent post at Appellation America, in which he sets up something of a straw dog.

Straw Dog [from the Urban Dictionary]: something (an idea, or plan, usually) set up to be knocked down. It’s the dangerous philosophy of presenting one mediocre idea, so that the listener will make the choice of the better idea which follows.

In this case, Dan postulates two competing approaches to wine reviewing.

1. One that is “based [merely] on…A person’s likes.” Dan charges that the 100-point scoring system is devoid of “essential criteria.” And “If no criteria exist, the score means nothing other than someone’s lame attempt to say, ‘I like it.’ Higher scores call for, ‘I like it a lot,’ or ‘I really like it a lot,’ or ‘I really, really like it a lot, a lot.’”

2. This is as opposed to his trademarked Best-of-Appellation program, which he describes as a “template that allows for each wine from a region to be credited with ‘bonus points’ for its regional distinctiveness.” Under this approach, a critic may not care personally for a wine, but still praise it for displaying proper “regional character.”

The straw dog Dan sets up here is that he makes the first approach sound so lame that any intelligent reader would have to reject it — and correspondingly be in favor of the second approach.

Is it really true, as Dan asserts, that some of us critics simply assign scores based on “I like it” or “I don’t like it” without reference to any external circumstances? Of course not. If I give a high score to a wine, obviously it’s because “I like it.” But what makes me “like” a wine is when it’s clean, balanced, harmonious, true to its variety or type, and utterly without faults. And the more that wine fascinates and impresses me, the more I “like” it, and the higher the score I give it. So, in that sense, Dan is correct that “score” = “like” and “high score” = “like a lot.” But to reduce it to “I really, really like it a lot, a lot” is a reductio ad absurdum, which, like a straw dog, is a rhetorical trick, not a serious argument. It’s like saying a movie critic should give a good review to a film he hates, because it had good cinematography, good acting, good soundtrack, good screenwriting and good direction. Well, if it was all good, then the critic wouldn’t hate the film, would he?

Now, the other part of Dan’s assertion I want to tweak is this notion of “regional character.” It sounds all well and good, but really breaks down on analysis. For instance, there may be a general Santa Lucia Highlands Pisoni Vineyard Pinot Noir character, but if Vintner #1 prefers to pick his fruit at 23 brix while Vintner #2 waits until 29 brix to pick, the resulting wines will be different. So different, in fact, that trying to pinpoint a “regional character” in both wines would require a very big tent. So that’s one problem  with the “regional character” argument.

There are others. Let’s assume there’s a “regional character” to Tuscan Sangiovese. Let’s further assume that the hidebound officials in Italy and Europe in general wished to protect that character for all time. So they mandate what grapes can be planted, when they must be harvested, and the like. Well, if the Tuscans went only by “regional character,” Piero Antinori would never have given the world Tignanello. So a slavish devotion to “regional character” can inhibit creativity.

Speaking of Europe, “regional character” is a lot easier to identify in wine regions that are 2,000 years old, like Bordeaux and Burgundy. But California is a young region! How do you define “regional character” in a place like Paso Robles, whose wine industry is barely 30 years old? Most of their wines have been soft in acidity, extracted in fruit, high in alcohol, and often with some residual sugar, especially whites. Is this the “regional character” of Paso Robles? Then what happens if someone down there figures out how to make a truly dry, balanced, elegant wine (which, in fact, is happening)? Does it get downgraded because it lacks “regional character”? So the “regional character” goalposts in a new region are constantly changing.

You can’t get away from the “I like it” nature of wine reviewing no matter what approach you take. All Dan is doing is equating “really, really like” with “I think this wine really, really shows regional character.” That’s the straw dog he posited, which I just demolished.