A blogger wrote the other day:

Even traditional curmudgeons such as Steve Heimoff benefit from the growing wine blog trend, even as he disparages it. Several well known wine writers have at least explored, if not fully embraced, moving their wine writing to blogs. It’s our belief that, once the ad dollars show up in sufficient numbers (i.e. the tipping point), wine writing will move online with such speed that people will no longer bemoan the passing of print wine columns.

Sorry, but this guy is living in lalaland, and I don’t mean Los Angeles. He should have come to yesterday’s panels here at the Wine Writers Symposium, Alder Yarrow’s on monetizing new media writing (which I was on) and mine on wine writers, ethics and income streams. It was made abundantly clear on both that anyone who believes the ad revenue “tipping point” is moving with “speed” is completely out of touch with reality. When you surround yourself with ideology instead of perceiving with clear vision, you have lost the ability to say anything useful.

The people who participated in the 2 panels were a diverse lot. They consisted of famous bloggers, authors, editors, publishers, web wizards, technology experts, social media entrepreneurs, winemakers, chefs, academics and others interested in social media and who are ardent believers in its future (including me). But I don’t think a single person who was there — no matter what they thought or hoped when they walked into that room — walked out with any thoughts but these:

Ad dollars are not migrating online.
Ad dollars are not going to migrate online anytime soon.
There is no tipping point.
Just ain’t gonna happen anytime.

This was the take-home message, the bottom line, the irrefutable truth. It’s true not because I say it, not because I’m a curmedgeon, not because I hate social media, but for the same reason pigs don’t fly.

The reason ad revenue isn’t going to pour into wine blogs is because ad revenue isn’t going to pour into anyone’sblog in any field, much less a niche one like wine blogs. All the wine blogs put together have a readership that’s maybe equivalent to that of a top wine magazine. Ninety nine percent of individual wine blogs don’t have the hits or visits to generate $50 a month from ads if they’re lucky. No one can change the fact that wine blogs do not have the traffic to sustain ad dollars and are not likely to in the foreseeable future. Yes, the very top 3 or 4 make a little money from ads. But I believe they’re nearing their maximum, and nobody else is going to achieve their numbers for years.

I have reached these conclusions the old-fashioned way: through journalistic digging, mainly interviews. I know most of the top wine bloggers. I’ve picked their brains. They’re the ones who are pessimistic about making a living through ads. I also know a lot of top executives at the biggest wine companies. They tell me they’re not prepared to invest ad revenues online. If a big wine company won’t pay to advertise on a wine blog, do you think a little family winery will? And if wineries won’t advertise on a wine blog, who will? Microsoft? Nike? The NFL? Disney?

I mean, get real!

Hopes and dreams are good. They keep us going, waiting for a better day. But hope needs to be tempered by reality; otherwise, it descends into madness. Anyone who holds his breath waiting for the ad revenue tipping point to tip is going to suffocate.

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: