David Bowman is vice president of premium and fine wines for E&J Gallo. His portfolio consists of brands like Louis Martini, Mirassou, MacMurray Ranch and William Hill, but not, say, Barefoot. In other words, Gallo over $9 a bottle. When I asked to be connected with Gallo’s top social media person, Bowman, 38, is who they hooked me up with. We spoke by phone last Friday.

SH: Does Gallo have a social media strategy?

DB: It’s all starting to develop. We’re in the early stages of trying to understand what role it should play in our media mix. We’ve taken a watch and wait role. Is it disruptive to something we’re already doing? It defies some of the characterizations we generally apply as marketers. What is the intent? What is the net result? But because social media is very democratic, it appeals to a broader audience than a Wine Enthusiast reader.

That’s all very theoretical, but what are you actually doing?

From a public relations perspective, Michael Heintz [Gallo’s PR director] is actively spending time with bloggers. He does outreach to certain bloggers. We send wines to certain bloggers.

How are those bloggers chosen?

The criterion is how influential we think they are, how broad an audience they garner.

How do you determine that?

A lot of it is based on the facts you can see. A lot of them make claims, “This is how many people read my blog.” Some of it is by reputation.

What would you consider a good enough readership?

I wouldn’t put a specific number on it. It might be geographically based, or this person has credibility in a particular region.

What does “credibility” mean?

Well, this is why I said it defies characterization. You’re going to a place where an individual consumer can instantly become a wine reviewer and influence a wider circle of people. This has to do with the democratization of wine.

So is print becoming less relevant?

From a credibility point of view? It can become much more marginalized in importance.

What will replace print?

That’s the hard part, with 1000 blogs out there, as opposed to setting up one meeting with a famous wine critic. He [Michael] is now interacting with hundreds of people. And that becomes difficult. How do you tell if someone’s credible or not? There are no rules. How do you know if they have reach? It’s very, very hard.

Can there be a single strategy at a company like Gallo where you have so many dozens of brands?

Great question. Each and every brand has a personality and a set of reasons for the consumer, retailer or restaurateur to believe the brand makes a great wine and has a good story.

Does anyone at Gallo actually blog?

From us on behalf of the brand? Not as of today.

Why not?

Well, we’re trying to figure out the best way to do it. Here’s the challenge. Think of Facebook: There are issues of protecting your trademark. And how relevant will you be in that context? Five or six years ago, everyone ran to the Internet thinking they needed a website. But what brings people back? So when you enter Facebook, I say make sure you have something to talk about! The last thing you want is to have a site on Facebook and say “I’m here” without having anything to talk about.

How do you figure out what to talk about?

Depends on the brand. Take Barefoot, which is in Stephanie Gallo’s group, not mine. They’ve been assertive in moving into the social media space.   Now, I could argue we haven’t done anything on our premium portfolio, but it appeals to a much more narrow audience [than Barefoot], and we’re still trying to figure out what we want to talk about so someone will log in. For example, what role will Michael Martini play [at Louis M. Martini]? What’s happening on Highway 29 today? Because if the content’s not fresh, why should the consumer care?

Well, how long will it take to figure out what you want to say? You can’t just think and think about it forever. Eventually, you have to just get out there and start talking.

I agree. I’m just saying it’s important that you have something to say. If you have nothing to say, don’t get out there and say it! For you, Steve, you have something to say. From my seat, as an individual brand, I wonder if there’s enough for the consumer to come back, because the last thing I want to do is bore them.

How do you keep that concern from becoming an impasse?

I understand where you get to a point of paralysis. We do have a lot to say — we just haven’t organized around it to ask who’s responsible for policing our site?  Who’s in charge? It’s like any company that’s new to this social media space — defining who’s accountable. This is why this area lacks so much definition in our industry. It defies characterization. You want people to be passionate. But somebody also has to be responsible to make sure there’s relevant content that’s fresh and accurate and doesn’t subject us to liability.

Is it conceivable that, ultimately, social media might not be a strategy that’s in Gallo’s future?

My answer is unequivocally no.

So what concrete steps can I expect to see you take over the next six months?

Well, you’ll see without a doubt some of our brands start to enter into a more active participation on Facebook, blogging, Snooth, podcasts, talking about what we’re doing at the winery. In my portfolio, the brand that makes the most sense is Martini.

Could you see Gallo hiring a Director of Social Media to oversee all brands?

Probably not. As it relates to individual brands, from my perspective I’d rather push that responsibility down. It will be up to the brands to make it work and keep the content fresh.

What did you think of the Murphy–Goode thing?

I thought it was an interesting P.R. exercise. They hired this blogger to be a blogger but the tent was for P.R. They capitalized on the broad interest in social media to exercise a P.R. tactic. It said, “This brand is progressive and thinking about the future.” But from my point of view, whatever we do it has to be based on authenticity.

Is it possible for any winery to be perceived as authentic in social media, when people know what you’re really trying to do is sell a product?

The consumer of today, my generation, Millennials, they are very sensitively marketed to. They tune it out instantly, and they want a sense of truth and authenticity. They understand if you’re online and have something to sell. They’ll enter into the relationship already knowing that. But they’re willing to accept it, because there’s something of value to them.

Are there any wineries you respect in the social media sphere, other than Murphy-Goode?

Umm. [long pause] Not in the true sense of social media. Everybody’s still toying with it. A lot are doing it to capture consumers for the wine club. The funny thing is the consumer and someone like yourself who blogs are most empowered by this format, but brands are still trying to figure out what this means. It’s not like a traditional P.R. campaign or buying a TV or magazine spot.

Do you yourself regularly Facebook or blog?

I do not. It’s a conscious decision. Mostly I’m in a sensitive position given what I do. If I’m online talking about wine, anything I say could be construed by consumers or press, so it’s more self-restraint. I’m very opinionated but right now it would be irresponsible for me to do so. But I’m online a couple hours a day, and I do it inbetween [other tasks]. Snooth has an interesting operating model. And Michael [Heintz] brings stuff to my attention constantly.

It’s time somebody replied to Fred Franzia’s claim — repeated endlessly in interviews and again the other day — that “No wine is worth more than $10” and various permutations thereupon.

It’s a good line, and Fred’s a good showman who knows the value of controversy. But let’s put this one to rest, along with other shibboleths such as Obama’s death squads, the birthers and the moral superiority of the Republican Party.

Some wines are worth a lot of money. Why? For starters, there’s the law of supply and demand, which you’d think Fred — a shrewd businessman — would understand. If everybody wants Harlan Estate, and there’s only so much of it to go around, then it’s worth whatever price people are willing to pay. By the same token, if everybody wants Two Buck Chuck, and there’s enough of it available for everybody who wants it, then it’s worth exactly the two or three bucks you pay at Trader Joe’s. (ABC News online reports that Fred is about to sell his 500th millionth bottle of TBC, so evidently there is a lot of it to go around.)

There are other reasons why some wines cost a lot. Viticulture at an estate like Harlan, which has winding vine rows set on steep hillsides that are picked by hand, is expensive, whereas Fred’s Central Valley vineyards, which can be miles long and utterly straight, can be cheaply harvested by machines. Fred eschews expensive new French oak; Harlan doesn’t, and that also pushes the price higher.

I could go on and on about why superior viticulture and enology makes superior wines. But we now come to the crunch of the argument, which needs to be addressed squarely. Is any wine worth more than $10?

The answer is obviously, indisputably, uncontestedly yes.

Fred, at his Bronco Wine Co., makes a lot of wines that I give “Best Buys” to, which is a strict bottle price-rating formula we use at Wine Enthusiast. Brands including Forestville, Forest Glen, Crane Lake, Silver Ridge and Harlow Ridge routinely score between 83-86 points and cost below $10, which automatically gives them a Best Buy ribbon. I applaud these wines and Fred’s other brands because they’re priced at a level everyone can afford, and Fred deserves huge credit for helping make sure that consumers can drink clean, sound wine at a good price.

But let’s not kid ourselves that there’s no difference between a ForestVille Cabernet Sauvignon and Shafer Hillside Select! I mean, come on. Now, it may well be that Fred prefers to drink his own wines over any of the world’s great, expensive bottles. That’s his privilege. But it’s just incorrect to say that no wine is worth more than ten bucks.

It kind of reminds me of a tasting at Beaulieu about 6 years ago. Joel Aiken, the winemaker, had opened every bottle ever made of Georges de Latour Private Reserve and invited a pretty stellar audience, which included Robert Mondavi and Ernest Gallo. After we went through them, Joel asked people what they thought. Mr. Mondavi stood and eloquently praised the wines for their beauty, elegance and longevity. Then it was Mr. Gallo’s turn to have his say. He said (I paraphrase from memory) “I don’t like any of them.” He added that none of them measured up to Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy. I remember wondering if he really meant it, or if he was just trying to shock the audience (which he did). And it may be of some interest here that Ernest Gallo was Fred Franzia’s uncle.

There’s one more reason why some wines are worth a lot of money, and it tends to get overlooked. It’s the psychological satisfaction of drinking a great wine that has a story behind it. Not just any story (“I got this Two Buck Chuck at Trader Joes!”) but something that makes the person who serves the wine, and his guests, happy to know about because it stirs the imagination and intellect. The story could be as simple as “This is Lafite.” It could be “I own a share in the chateau.” Or “My Dad bought this for me on the day I was born, to open on my 21st birthday.” Or “Parker gave this wine 100 points.” Or “I’ve followed every vintage of Sloan so I’m really looking forward to the new one.” Or “This is the new wine from Heidi Peterson Barrett, and I love her style.” Cheap wines tend not to have stories because they’re industrial products. They get the job done, which is their purpose in life. A great wine, on the other hand, is so much more than simple organoleptic impressions, or something to wash down food with. It involves thinking and feeling and emoting and loving and remembering and contemplating and, yes, conversation. These are attributes of great wine as much as are barrels, and for them, we pay a premium. That is why many, many wines are worth more than $10, and sometimes, a lot more.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that by-the-glass wine prices in restaurants are “plummeting” in the Bay Area, as the recession takes an ever-deeper toll on wineries.

That’s what NBC News is reporting on its local website. Apparently, wineries that are gearing up for harvest, with its cash-hungry demands, are dumping unsold wine on restaurants, giving diners some of their best bargains in years.

Before the recession hit, the high price of wine in restaurants was always a sore point for diners. Restaurants argued that they had to charge high bottle and glass prices to compensate for breakage, etc. but diners didn’t buy that and frankly neither did I. In recent years, I’d seen a shift away from gouging. Some restaurants, like Dry Creek Kitchen in Healdsburg, let you bring your own wine for free, as long as it was from Sonoma County. Others reduced the price of corkage or dropped it completely, if you bought one bottle off the wine list.

Despite these innovations, you could sense restaurateurs tip-toeing around the issue of price. They didn’t want to outrage patrons, and yet they wanted to maximize their profits. Caught between a rock and a hard place, they’re now being squeezed from top and bottom by the worst recession since the 1940s. Our local wine bar, Franklin Square, now offers $1 wine tasting on Thursday nights. I don’t think this even covers Rick Mitchell’s costs, but it does let him stay connected with his customers, and vice versa, which is a valuable investment for when (if?) the recession  ends.

One question raised is whether casual-dining restaurants and fine-dining restaurants are feeling the same pressure. An interesting study released last month from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and titled “Wine List Characteristics Associated with Greater Wine Sales,” looked at just this issue. It found that “casual-dining restaurants seem to have downward-sloping demand curves, implying that their consumers are price sensitive and less apt to buy wines as the price per bottle increases.” This suggests that casual restaurants will make more money if they offer lower-cost wines (because they’ll sell more). However, the study also found that “no statistically significant evidence of a downward sloping demand curve was observed for fine-dining restaurants, which suggests that offering more low-cost wines would not increase their wine sales.”

But the study did not deal with the effect that the recession is having on fine-dining restaurants, which by every anecdotal account are suffering more than their casual-dining cousins. So it’s very hard for me to believe that fine-dining restaurants are not having to lower prices and resort to other means, in order to keep customers coming. Evidence? Check out this link which is on Masa’s website. (Masa’s is one of San Francisco’s toniest restaurants.) Reprinted from 7X7 Magazine, it quotes the sommelier at Waterbar (another top restaurant): “People are not ordering that second bottle. We’re seeing more corkage, and people are going straight for the value-driven wines.” Alan Murray at Masa’s, Rajat Parr at Michael Mina, Matthew Fitch at Coi and other sommeliers are pitching more affordable alternative wines to traditional icons (e.g., Wolf Family 2004 Cabernet for $160 instead of Bryant Family for $700). This is glaring evidence that even the highest of high-end restaurants are having to substitute reality for dreams.

We’re all wondering what the permanent effects of the recession will be on the wine industry and all its moving parts. I’m hoping that one residual impact will be that restaurants have more user-friendly wine pricing policies. I know they’ll complain, but I think that a restaurant that has an inexpensive, interesting wine list (as well as good food) will be stronger than one that’s equal in every respect, except that its wines are expensive.

Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that fast-food restaurants increasingly are selling wine. Americans have lost a ton of money during the last year, trillions of dollars by all accounts. The U.S. is much poorer than it used to be. Just how much poorer remains to be seen, but this is simply not the same, self-satisfied country it was at the start of 2008. I think people will be looking for bargains and spending less money for a long, long time. Restaurants are going to have to factor that into all their equations, including wine lists, and so are the wineries that sell to them.

I read with interest the press release put out last week by my friend and fellow wine blogger, Tom Wark, about his scheme to monetize his blog. Briefly, as I understand it (and there are many levels of this that have yet to be analyzed), wineries will send Tom baseball caps with their logos, and then Tom will make videos for each winery, where he wears the winery’s cap and plugs them.

I’m stunned that no one thought of this before. Here we are, years into the wine blogging phenomenon, with scores of bloggers putting their collective intelligence into figuring out how to make money, and lo and behold, Tom, in one swift, brilliant stroke, has solved the problem! But it’s the least one would expect from this pioneering guy.

Admittedly, Tom actually devised only one way of making money — by selling his collection of caps to the Smithsonian Institution. I’m sure he could make a vast profit — the Smithsonian is funded by the Federal government, after all — but the problem is that the money wouldn’t come in for many years. So the scheme really won’t help Tom in the short run.

In pondering Tom’s CAPitalization plan, I thought of implications that may have eluded him. I freely share the possibilities opened up by this revolutionary new development.

1. Tom should charge the wineries money for giving them publicity in the videos. Of course, he’d have to do this surreptitiously, because otherwise all those investigative bloggers out there would bust him for “selling out.” But this shouldn’t be difficult. What happens in wine country stays in wine country.

2. Tom could move beyond caps to other articles: T-shirts, designer sneakers, jeans, underwear, sportswear, sunglasses, suits, ties, swimwear, evening gowns, even rubber ducks. The list is endless. Automobiles? DVDs? Golf clubs? Think of all the free stuff!

3. Once Tom compiles a huge collection of clothes and accessories, he can develop his own line of WarkWear. He could sell it on QVC and perhaps even team up with Joan Rivers. Fashion-savvy consumeristas who are into wine would find his Spring and Fall collections irresistable.

4. As Tom achieves worldwide fame as a couturier, he would need P.R. bloggers (proggers; see “Hardy Wallace”) to help him do publicity. He could have a contest to pick the winners. He could call this contest “A Really Good Gob.” This would give other bloggers hope that there’s actually some money to be made at the end of the rainbow.

5. But sooner or later, someone is bound to reveal the fact that Tom had been taking money for his cap videos. This would of course destroy his credibility as a blogger forever, but by the time it happened, Tom would be so rich, he’d be able to flip off his critics and laugh at them as he sailed off on his private yacht to his various villas in fashionable spots around the world.

6. Upon winning a MacArthur grant, Tom — now easily the most famous wine person on Earth except for President Franzia — would forgive all those bloggers who had been criticizing him so heavily for so many years. He would invite them to his ranch (located probably in the Russian River Valley) for a giant Kumbaya singalong.

7. President Franzia appoints Tom Secretary of Social Media. Tom, now holding infinite power over Twitter, Facebook et al, and funded by a multi-billion dollar budget, hires all his blogger friends for sub-Cabinet jobs. He holds auditions in San Francisco, New York, etc. and the applicants line up and down the street.

8. By then, of course (I estimate all this to happen around 2018), a whole new generation of younger Tween wine bloggers has arisen. They see the founding generation of bloggers selling out to “The Man” by taking high-paying jobs (with generous healthcare and retirement benefits), and they criticize these elders mercilessly.

9. Meanwhile, the older generation of Baby Boomer print critics has retired to “Geezer Island,” a tropical paradise in the Caribbean funded by President Franzia to honor all those wine reviewers who helped make Two Buck Chuck successful. Twice each day, air cargo planes parachute pallets of Bronco Wine onto the island so nobody goes thirsty. President Franzia makes Geezer Island off-limits to the healthcare death squads, the only place in the world they’re not allowed to go.

10. President Franzia is stricken by a rare disease and forced to quit office. Under the new Nested Succession laws (passed by the TTB in 2015), Tom becomes President of the United States of America. His money and girlfriend woes are gone forever.

11. President Wark’s first executive order is to eliminate all bottlenecks to the free interstate shipping of wine throughout the United States and its territories. A place is prepared on Mount Rushmore to carve his image. The drinking age is lowered to 18, and all is well.

And it all started with baseball caps! It could happen…

Wineries get bought and sold all the time, but when there’s a recession, especially one as bad as this, we take special notice. When a veteran goes down it’s taken as a harbinger of evil times. And when two go down, fears arise that the sky is falling.

A few things are in order. First, nobody knows if these two sales would have gone forward even in a good economy. I suspect they would have, because such things are many months if not years in the making, which means the initial plans probably preceded the current slowdown. The two wineries, Sebastiani and Raymond, have much in common. Both have been around for a long time (1889 and 1971, respectively, although the Raymonds’ roots in Napa Valley go back to the 1870s). Both were associated with large families (Sebastiani was privately held, while Raymond passed into the ownership of Kirin Brewery, of Japan, in 1988, but Kirin kept a light hand, and most people assumed the Raymonds still owned the company). And both did a less than stellar job of adapting to the changing conditions of the 1990s and 2000s, although, as I’ll point out, this wasn’t entirely their fault.

The 1990s were an extraordinarily turbulent time in the California wine industry. The initial excitement of the boutique winery era had settled, and it was time for wineries to provide a burgeoning, Baby Boomer-based wine culture with adventurous and enticing wines. This, Sebastiani and Raymond failed to do, or were, at least, perceived as having failed. And in wine, perception is reality.

Wine has always been about fashion, and the American consumer in modern times has shown a fickleness that drives marketing managers crazy. It’s the new kid on the block syndrome: consumers (and, often, writers) gravitate to the new wineries and new regions, which means the older ones tend to get left behind. Whatever you may say about Robert Mondavi Winery’s management practices, they, too, fell victim to precisely the perception that they no longer were relevant.

There are many older family-owned wineries in California whose long-term survival makes me wonder. It would be wrong to name any of them, but if you have a directory of California wineries, go through it. Any winery founded before the 1980s could be the next shoe to drop, even some well-known Napa properties. Not only does the public get bored with them, but sometimes the owners just can’t figure out the right mix of product, promotion and price. As for resting on their laurels, to those of my age, these famous boutique names remain synonyms of quality. But people under 35 or so may never have even heard of these great estates founded in the 1960s and 1970s. Out of sight, out of mind — maybe out of business?

You also have to factor in who bought these two properties. After all, a sale requires a willing buyer as well as a willing seller. Bill Foley (Sebastiani) and the Boisset family (Raymond) evidently have the money, or are able to get loans even in these times when banks are stingy, which means that even as some people’s fortunes decline, others are on the rise. Foley’s been on a buying spree for years, while Boisset has been a little more cautious, but both have been clear about their intentions: to build up as great a portfolio as they can, within the limits set on them by money, time, staff, strategy and the like.

California wineries are always in a state of ferment, recession or not. I imagine we’ll be shocked, over the next year or two, as additional wineries are scooped up or simply shut their doors. The recession may hasten the end for some, but it’s not the cause. California has too many wineries anyway; in capitalistic terms, there’s an over-supply of product. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” will take care of that.