The following is an synopsis of two conversations I had recently. One was with a winemaker who allowed me to taste only if I visited the winery. The other was with a proprietor who interrogated me at length before deciding whether or not to send me his wine. (I don’t know if he’s decided yet.)

There are serious and complicated issues at play. The overriding factor is that proprietors and wine writers have conflicting interests. The interest of the proprietor is to obtain for his wine the best, most compelling publicity he can, in order to drive sales and justify prices. The interest of the wine writer–if he’s ethical–is to tell the truth about the wine, as best he can given his skills and experiences.

Most wineries in California send me their wines for review, which greatly simplifies my job. But more than that: by having large quantities of wine at home to choose from, I can set up blind tastings. I think most people would agree that a blind tasting is the fairest way to evaluate a wine. Not a double blind tasting: I want to know some context about what I’m tasting as, for instance, that the wines are all Cabernet Sauvignons from California. That’s an example of a single blind tasting.

Most proprietors comply with my request to send me wine. You’d have to ask them individually, of course, why that’s so. I think, if you did, most would say they understand that the wine critic is unable to visit every property in California. They’re eager to have their wines reviewed, even though they know there’s some risk involved, and so they’re happy, or at least willing, to send me their samples.

Then there are the proprietors of the kind mentioned in my opening paragraph. Invariably, they produce wines that are very expensive and eagerly sought by people who can afford them. Now, there are many proprietors in this category who send me their wines regularly: Shafer Vineyards, for example, or Williams Selyem. I’m grateful to them for doing so, and I like to think they send me their wines because they trust that I’ll review them responsibly. Because they know that their wines are very good, and they believe I have a pretty good palate, they figure it’s a safe bet I’ll give the wines high scores, which I usually do.

But we then come to the relatively small number of proprietors–maybe 50 in the entire state–who have decided never to send their wines to anyone. I’ve had this conversation with them many times. If I can paraphrase what they say, here’s their reasoning:

You can’t really even begin to understand our wine without visiting our property, seeing the vineyard, talking with the winemaker and perhaps even the vineyard manager, and hearing the philosophy behind what we do. It’s not fair to our wine, which we work so hard at, to stick it in a box, send it to you in Oakland, have you shove it in a paper bag, and then have a beauty contest you call a “formal tasting” in which you don’t even know what you’re drinking. We’re perfectly happy to host you here at the winery, but that’s the only way you’re ever going to get to taste our wine for free.

There’s a certain integrity to this line of reasoning. I do understand it. If I were a proprietor, I might argue along the same lines, especially if my wine were so in demand that there was a waiting list to get on the mailing list. I might think, Who the heck needs the critics? Besides, at the core of these coveted wines is mystique. If they are too accessible–if every Tom, Dick and Nancy can review them–they become common. Commonality is the enemy of high pricing.

However, as much as I can respect this reasoning, it has flaws. One is that, beyond all the talk about “understanding our vineyard, meeting with the winemaker,” etc., the reality is that a wine tasted on the premises, under those conditions of exclusivity, will almost always taste better than it will in a blind flight among its peers. It is nearly impossible under any circumstances to evaluate a wine all by itself, no matter where you taste it. You need other wines to compare it with, to “calibrate the palate,” a stuffy but accurate phrase. Any experienced taster knows that.

So do the proprietors. It’s the way they, themselves, taste, when they’re assembling the final blend: evaluating barrel samples instead of bottles of wine. But they also know that, once they have you on their turf, so to speak, they’ve got you. It gives them the edge they need to have that score creep up the few points it invariably will when tasted at the winery.

I said earlier that I recognize a certain integrity to the proprietors’ argument. I always try to see things from the other person’s point of view, and, maybe because I’m a Gemini, I usually can. I think that if someone is very proud of his or her artistic achievement, that person might want an admirer to experience it in a certain totality–not pass a swift judgment upon it. Having said that, I’ll stick to my guns and confess my belief that some of these proprietors are simply afraid to send their wines to critics in the normal way. They don’t want the public to see the little man behind the curtain who’s pretending to be the Wizard of Oz.

If there’s a lesson for the consumer in anything I’ve written, it’s this: when you see those massive scores from certain critics for certain famous wines, try to find out under what circumstances they were reviewed. If anybody ever wants to know how I reviewed any particular wine, feel free to ask. I don’t have any secrets.

Was it just me or was the Wine Writers Symposium ending today at Meadowood pretty much a repeat of last year’s? Which was also pretty much a repeat of the last few Wine Bloggers Conferences.

The same workshops: the future of wine writing. Monetizing your blog. How to get a real paying job. How to write profiles, columns, pitches, books. The same panelists. The same audience. The same coaching sessions at which hopeful wine writers take frenzied notes: Do this. Do that. The same issues and questions, the same debates, the same non-answers. The same handful of power players who can actually pay real money for wine writers and are eyed covetously by the hungry. The same feeling of frustration: if you already have a job, good for you. If you don’t, come back next year, pay your fees, and we’ll have exactly the same workshops as we did this year, with exactly the same ambiguities.

It’s getting boring.

The WWS reminded me of a big rig stuck in the mud, spinning its wheels, trying to get somewhere, but unable to go forward.

I do not, repeat not, re-repeat not, assign blame to its organizers, or particularly to Jim Gordon, who pulls off this complex feat every year with seemingly effortless ease. Jim is a class act. The problems with the WWS are due, not to any lack of due diligence on his part, but to an inherent stagnation that has beset the wine writing industry itself.

It’s mired down.

Some memorable quotes:

“I represent the Ghost of Wine Writers Past.” Blake Edgar, the esteemed acquisitions editor at U.C. Press who published my last 2 wine books. Do you hear the note of resigned sadness in his voice?

“We are spending a lot more money than we meant to.” The brilliantly engaging, entrepreneurial Corie Brown, founder of ZesterDaily.com, on the difficulties of making money online even when you have an intelligent, superior product.

“I don’t really think that everyone does have a voice, or a voice worth reading.” Richard Bradley, Editor-in-chief of Worth magazine, basically telling 99% of bloggers they’re not worth a bucket of warm spit.

If I were a beginning wine writer, I would have left this year’s WWS deflated and pessimistic.

Why does it feel like we’re slogging through molasses? With all this new stuff happening—iPads, phone apps, digital magazines, blogs, twitter, Facebook—we all know that stuff is changing faster than ever. The problem is that despite the pace of technological change, nothing really seems to be changing for wine writers hoping to make a living doing what they love.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room was advertising. Except for a handful of exotic publications, such as Worth, magazines, whether print or online, need advertising money to pay writers. But advertisers are getting increasingly aggressive in this economic slowdown. They are telling publishers, in effect, “We’ll advertise, if you let us dictate content.” And the most frightening takeaway for me from WWS was an apparent willingness on the part of some people to say, Okay, if that’s the only way to get paid, we’ll play. Pay to play, is what it’s called. And there were some influential voices in that room, whom I won’t mention but they know who they are, who were saying, basically, “Hey, that’s where reality is going. Get used to it. I have. Your morality is old-fashioned.”

I personally was very proud to be sitting next to Wine Enthusiast’s executive editor, Susan Kostrzewa, during these sessions, and I believe we shared many of the same reactions. We live in this world where the line between pressure from advertisers and independent editorial decisions is constantly tested. At Wine Enthusiast, I am happy to say, we have a culture in which that line is respected. It’s bright red, a real third rail, and if anyone tries to cross it, they get electrocuted. I’m not saying we’re perfect, but after the disturbing talk I heard today about compromise and the nefarious, untransparent practice of letting a caramel candy company talk you into writing a Halloween article about caramel recipes in exchange for an ad, I felt clean and unshoddy. I cannot see how any self-respecting person could write much less authorize such a travesty, especially without a warning label. If there’s a lesson to take home from the WWS, it’s this: beware what you ask for. You may gain the world but lose your soul. In fact, you may lose your soul and end up gaining nothing at all, except having helped destroy journalism.

I arrived at the end of Gerald Asher’s talk, so I didn’t hear it, but Joe Roberts told me Mr. Asher basically said that wine descriptions are silly. Mr. Asher is a great wine writer and a personal hero to me, but he’s never been the type of writer who went in for elaborate wine descriptions (much less scores), so he’s entitled to that opinion. After Mr. Asher’s talk there was an interesting workshop on writing personality profiles. Profiles, if you don’t know, are those personality pieces that The New Yorker is famous for. I like writing profiles. I like to get inside a subject’s head and see where they’re really coming from, not where they want you to think they’re coming from. One of the co-presenters was Corie Brown, who’s a principal at zesterdaily.com. She did a live one-on-one interview with a winemaker to show us how it’s done. The winemaker was talking about how important family tradition was to him, and then he said he hadn’t gotten married until he was 45. I thought Corie would immediately ask him why he’d waited so long. Nerves? Didn’t meet the right gal? Stress? Working too hard? Was he gay? But she didn’t, and I thought, “She’s teaching us how to do an interview the right way, and she doesn’t ask the logical question.”

Well, I sat with Corie at lunch afterward and shared this with her, and she told me she had talked with the winemaker beforehand. He’d actually had an earlier marriage that ended with a messy divorce, so she didn’t want to get into that at the workshop. I can understand that, but my first rule of interviewing is THERE ARE NO WRONG QUESTIONS. You can and should ask anything you’re curious about, no matter how much it seems like you’re prying into somebody’s business. You never know where a weird question will take you–potentially to some incredibly interesting place. After all, if someone lets me interview them, they have to expect I’m going to ask anything I want, within bounds (and there are very few bounds). And a person can always answer an uncomfortable question with, “I’m not prepared to discuss that.” Of course, if they do that, they’re in that infamous position of having to explain when they stopped beating their wife.

Anyhow I enjoyed getting to know Corie and will make zesterdaily.com part of my daily read. Corie has lots of interesting ideas on how to monetize a website and I wish her luck.

After lunch I met with Joel Aiken, by pre-arrangement, at the front desk. Joel, as most of you know, was the longtime winemaker at Beaulieu. He wanted to show me the vineyard of a new winery he’s consulting for, owned by a couple, John and Sharon Harris. The brand is called Rarecat (yes, there’s a story behind  it), and the estate vineyard is in Jericho Canyon, which is in a pocket canyon of the Calistoga appellation. Since I’m writing a story on Calistoga for the June issue of Wine Enthusiast, I was, well, enthusiastic to tour an area I’d been pretty much unaware of. Jericho Canyon is wild and remote and beautiful. John Harris says he’s seen mountain lions partrolling his vineyard. If so, these majestic animals are losing their fear of humans, because the saying used to be you’d never see a mountain lion because they’d see (or smell) you first, and run off. If they’re not running off from John Harris, they’re no longer afraid, which isn’t good news for them or us.

The first Rarecat wines won’t be bottled until later this year; Joel hasn’t even crafted the blend. We went through barrel samples of the Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and a blend of Petiit Verdot and Cabernet Franc. The first was aromatic and delicious, but thin. The second was profound, and so was the third. John said he hopes to keep his bottle price under $100 retail. We had, of course, the inevitable discussion about the marketplace, and cult wines, and how so-and-so is doing, and is there room for another $90 Napa Cabernet, etc. etc. I don’t think John Harris has the answers anymore than I do or anybody else, but it’s his money. Anyway, I expect the wine will be great, especially with Joel at the helm.

Afterwards, got together with the young winemakers Bruce and Danielle Devlin (Three Clicks) and Peter Heitz (Shypoke) for dinner at Jolé, in Calistoga—really of the best restaurants I’ve been too lately, followed by late cocktails at Solbar. The three of them, between their two wineries, are trying to produce authentic wines of terroir at affordable prices, something I can support. At Solbar, I remember there was a bunch of conventioneers there and we tried to guess who they were (I said proctologists) but it turned out they were property and casualty insurers who joined us and were quite friendly. Then I had a dream I parked my car in the city and couldn’t find it the next morning—a recurrent dream. Then I woke up, mildly hung over, for Day #2 at the Wine Writers Symposium, which I will dutifully write about tomorrow.

I’m off this morning to the Wine Writer’s Symposium at Meadowood where, unlike last year, Mr. Gordon, who runs the show, didn’t ask me to participate in any of the sessions. I’m glad, because I don’t have to stress over presentations, etc., and can wander around freely, checking things out, inspecting the scene, and trying to figure out if this event has legs, which it may or may not have.

I mean, God bless the people who drop a bundle to come to this expensive event, but America has only so many slots for paid wine writers, and whatever that number is, it’s way less than the number of people who pay for multiple nights at Meadowood.

Most of the breakout sessions do not interest me. “Employing Storycraft in Winemaker Profiles, with writing exercise.” “Write Better Opinion Columns and Blog Posts.” “Get Your Book Idea Published.” Been there, done that. What Mr. Bill LeBlond, from Chronicle books, will probably not tell the audience concerning the latter–which I and many others know too well–is that publishing a wine book, hard as it is, may burnish your reputation, but won’t make you any money. And that’s after months and years of effort, which makes writing a wine book earn less than comparable hours working at Taco Bell.

So why am I going? Truthiness: Wine Enthusiast is paying my expenses. Otherwise, I couldn’t justify the cost. I’m enormously grateful to the magazine. I know I’ll have fun and I will try to represent my magazine with dignity.

What do I plan to do? Number one on my list is to to go the presentation that my beloved editor, Susan Kostrzewa, is heading up on “Holy Cow I’m a Freelancer! Now What Do I Do?” Obviously, I don’t need advice on that, but Susan is one of the finest, most morally upright editors I’ve ever worked with, and I want to hear what she has to say. In that audience may be someone who eventually has my job at Wine Enthusiast.

But that’s the only breakout session I’m looking forward to. Other than that, here’s my schedule, strictly unofficial. I’m going to get together with Joel Aiken, Beaulieu’s former winemaker and such a brilliant protege of Andre Tchelistcheff, to find out what he’s up to. I’m having dinner with the winemaker at Shypoke, Peter Heitz, whose wines have so impressed me. On Thursday, Francoise Peschon, the winemaker at Araujo, has kindly invited me to tour and taste; I mentioned the other day that Araujo’s 2006 Eisele Cabernet, their estate vineyard, was my top pick at the cult Cabernet tasting Jeremy Nickle invited me to.

For me, going to the Wine Writers Symposium is an opportunity to check out what’s happening. I have some concern about protecting the future of wine writing. I don’t want it to fall into the hands of incompetents who by virtue of hitting the “publish” button can send ill-informed nonsense for all the world to see. I’ve been rather heavily sunk down into the Napa Valley scene lately and I suspect there’s a lot of uncertainty how to deal with this brave new world. Does Abreu send their wine to Joe Roberts, or do they continue to depend on the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against, of a handful of too-potent influencers who distort reality? These elitist producers do so at their peril. Egypt and Libya are far away from Napa Valley, but eventually kingdoms topple.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reporting from the front lines of the symposium.

Jeremy Nickel, the son of the late Gil Nickel (Far Niente, Nickel & Nickel and Dolce), invited me and a few others to the little, 19th century vineyard house he owns, on the edge of the Stelling Vineyard, which their other winery, Nickel & Nickel, vineyard designates. The purpose was a series of three blind tastings comparing his new wine, which he calls The Vineyard House, against other Napa Valley Cabernets, all of which cost more than the $175 Jeremy is asking for the retail price.

I think $175 is an awful lot of money to ask for an unproved wine, and I expressed some surprise to Jeremy. He explained that, one, he’s doing this not necessarily because he needs another brand (Far Niente, Nickel & Nickel and Dolce are quite enough for anyone to run), but because he wants to pay hommage to his father, who died 8 years ago. I also had the feeling Jeremy wants to prove that he can accomplish something from the ground up, not just succeed in running something his dad left to him.

Jeremy organized three blind tastings on three consecutive Mondays this month. I sadly missed the first one, last week, because I was down with the flu. Damn flu! But they told me The Vineyard House scored third out of six among the tasters; the other wines included Screaming Eagle, Hundred Acre, Levy & McLellan, Scarecrow and Harlan Estate.

This Monday’s tasting was one I was fortunately able to go to. I’ll also be at next week’s. At this Monday’s, The Vineyard House again came in third in the group ranking, behind Araujo Eisele and Bryant Family (which tied for first) and Schrader Beckstoffer To Kalon, but ahead of Abreu Cappella and Grace Family. (All vintages were 2006.) Those were group rankings, which very closely approximated my own scores. I placed the Araujo first, Grace Family second but just by a hair, with a tie between The Vineyard House and Abreu for third. The Schrader was my #4, while the Bryant was my last choice.

When Jeremy asked for my comments, I began by saying that the difference, in this particular group of wines, between a 1 and a 6 is not as great as would appear. We’re talking about minute distinctions between wines that are all very fine. In a way, it’s too bad that we have these beauty contests that are so subjective in the first place, but that’s the way things are.

Jeremy said he’s unsure how to market The Vineyard House and when I asked him if he was having these blind tastings for the P.R. value, he said no; it was to learn from others what he’s doing right and wrong, with respect to the other brands. I told him that these sorts of tastings can be valuable from a P.R. point of view. Years ago, St. Supery had a big blind tasting with lots of well-known writers and sommeliers (I remember Wilfred Wong, Dan Berger, Larry Stone and Karen MacNeil being there, and I hope my memory is right). As things turned out, St. Supery came in #1, beating the likes of Opus One, and they must have gotten about $1 million in free publicity from that.

I don’t know how Jeremy is going to fare with The Vineyard House, especially in this economy. When I asked him why he doesn’t do what everyone else does–tell his distributors they can’t have Far Niente, Nickel & Nickel and Dolce unless they take a case of The Vineyard House–he shook his head and said No, that wouldn’t be ethical or moral. It’s not often you find morality and business uttered in the same sentence, but I believe Jeremy feels that way. He’s going to have to sell The Vineyard House the old-fashioned way, by hitting the streets and schmoozing.

But even at $175 a bottle, it’s a good buy considering that every one of the other wines at the three tastings costs far more. (The Abreu, I understand, which came in last yesterday, retails for $525.) Which makes The Vineyard House a comparative value. It’s  beautiful wine, made by Bill Ballentine (William Cole), and while the wine now is made from purchased fruit (I believe), Jeremy is planting a vineyard on the hill above the property–remember, this is Harlan and Far Niente country–so the wine should be spectacular.

In general I’m not a fan of over-hyped, ultra-expensive wines that sell the sizzle, not the steak, but Jeremy Nickel has convinced me it’s possible to create a Napa Valley great Cabernet from scratch and to do so with integrity and taste. I wish him luck and am glad to bring The Vineyard House to your attention.