Bill Smart is the head PR guy at Dry Creek Vineyard, a talented communicator and a nice guy, to boot. He was at the Bloggers Conference back in June, and has now written a thoughtful piece about his impressions over at Palate Press.

I agree with lots that he wrote — but not all. So let me respectfully set out a few of my differences, while emphasizing that, overall, Bill’s article is an accurate representation of where winery P.R. stands in relation to social media.

Bill sets up something of a straw dog when he posits a fundamental difference between bloggers (the implication is that they’re younger, although there were plenty of older bloggers in Walla Walla) and “traditional media.” “For starters,” says Bill, “bloggers do not want to be talked ‘at.’ They want to have a conversation.”

Okay, deconstruction time! First of all, I’m going to start pulling out what few hairs I have left, next time I hear the dreaded “TM” phrase: “traditional media.” This has become a form of invective and an expletive that displays some kind of bias — whether along age or other grounds, I couldn’t say; but when it’s used in a pro-blogging article, it’s usually freighted with negative implications toward print journalists. Why?

Since when is it true that “traditional media” wants to be “talked ‘at’”? I don’t. Anybody who’s ever known me in this business knows that’s not true. You can’t talk ‘at’ me because if you try to, I’ll interrupt and engage you in a conversation — yes, the same type of conversation Bill Smart says bloggers want.

And I’m not the only “trad media” guy who doesn’t want to be “talked ‘at.’” I know a lot of Baby Boomer wine writers and none of them wants a lecture, diatribe or sound bite from anybody. So let’s dispense with this notion that bloggers are somehow fundamentally different in the form of human interaction they like. We’re all the same.

Bill also celebrates the speed with which communication between a P.R. guy like himself and a blogger occurs. “I can pitch a blogger a story or idea in the morning and before lunch that idea may have turned into a blog topic, posted and available for comment.” Yes, this is true. But it’s a double-edged sword, or maybe a triple-edged one. First, such immediate publication basically rules out any form of research or investigation by the blogger. Maybe that’s what P.R. people want: Just take what I say and throw it up there on the Internet, without bothering to find out if it’s true, or put it in context. That’s a huge problem with instant publication.

Then too, because of “the sheer volume of information that is published and made available for consumption” (Bill’s words), today’s blog post has a life span of 24 hours, at most. The next day, there’s another blog post, and yesterday’s content is as fresh as an expired carton of milk. So, yes, blogging can give a P.R. guy 15 minutes of fame. But with a thousand wine blogs out there, all competing for content, everybody else is going to get the same 15 minutes, sooner or later — and nobody is going to get repeated exposure (unless his name is Randall Grahm). That doesn’t give an individual winery an advantage. It just means everybody’s profile is raised a little higher.

Bill’s final point about the advantages of blogging is that “Wine blogs have allowed, for the first time, the consumer to enter into the dialogue about a particular wine topic. Traditionally, media never allowed their consumers to have a voice.” I would phrase this a little differently: “Wine blogs have expanded the opportunity for the consumer to enter into dialog with the wine press.” I mean, when he says traditional media “never allowed…consumers to have a voice,” Bill makes it sound like this was a deliberate, calculated elitist intolerance by “traditional media” to shut the public up. It’s like trad media were Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”

Traditional media never took that approach — at least, I didn’t. We made use of the technology as it became available. I’ve always had telephone calls from readers who demanded answers and explanations, which I was happy to give. When email became available, the number of people who talked — and complained — to me increased exponentially. Now we have blogs and other forms of social media that have pushed that envelope even further. I welcome that. So I don’t know if Bill meant to imply that we trad media people knowingly shut ourselves into ivory towers, pulled up the drawbridge and stocked the moat with piranhas. I hope not. I’ve always made myself accessible, and in all honesty, I don’t think that bloggers are any more personally accessible than I ever was. Someday, technology will bring us much further into hyper-interactivity and inter-connectedness than we are even today, but the fundamentals will still apply, especially in terms of P.R. A good pitch will still be a good pitch, and a lousy one won’t be made any better by being instantaneous.

I happily and heartily subscribe to Bill’s closing: “Ultimately, knowing your audience and creating lasting relationships built on trust and confidence will be the basis of success for any well integrated communications and marketing plan.” Amen, brother!

P.S. I told the Mondavi and Morton’s people I’d provide this link to the big event they’re planning for Oct. 7 to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Consider buying a ticket for a worthy cause.

Oded Shakked, at Longboard Vineyards, shared the below email with me yesterday. He thought I’d get a kick out of it. I’m reproducing it here, because I think you’ll get a kick out of it. (I’ve edited the email a little, and also removed the sender’s name.)

“My name is M.___ and I am reviewer of wine. I live in Brooklyn, NY and I am meticulous with keeping a record of every wine I drink. I am one of the highest sheer volume reviewers on wine social networking site Snooth (I am not an employee of Snooth)…and I have synched up my Twitter account to automatically post any wine I review on Snooth. (I have over 1,300 Twitter followers)

I would love to be added to your mailing list for sample bottles. I can GUARANTEE an online review of any bottle you send me. I realize that there are many wine bloggers out there and you must be inundated with requests, but I don’t know how many bloggers can guarantee a review (along with any descriptive info you send along). If a bottle is flawed or oxidized I will email you before I write anything about it. I also generally wait at least month from receiving the bottle to account for travel or bottle shock.

I just would like for you to think about the percentage of the bloggers you send samples to that actually give you coverage…i know for a fact that many bloggers out there simply write about a few of the sample bottles they receive and either re-gift or drink the rest without any fanfare…I can guarantee a review on a website that is almost always on the first page of natural search results on Google when someone searches for a particular wine.”

Oded used the word “chutzpah” to describe M.____. Chutzpah, in case you don’t know, is a Yiddish word, derived from the Hebrew, and is used with reference to people who are so audacious in their approach as to approach insolence. It can be used positively (e.g., George Steinbrenner was said to possess chutzpah, which is a quality New Yorkers like) or negatively, in the sense of tasteless self-promotion.

Let’s look at this from M.____’s point of view. Of course he would “love” to be added to Oded’s sample list. (And how many other vintners did M.____ blast his email to?) Think of all the free wine! I can’t say for sure whether or not M.____ is correct when he accuses “many bloggers out there” of not even bothering to write about the samples they get. Maybe some P.R. and marketing people who read my blog will write in and let us know how they determine which bloggers to send samples to, and how they follow up to see if the wines are actually written about.

I did a little Googling on M.____ and found that he’s been sending this same email out for more than a year. He seems to be a young guy; his Facebook page (at least, I think it’s his; all the clues add up) says his interests are “poker, TV, red wine, live comedy, live music, Sirius satellite radio” and he’s married. M.____ and I have 14 Facebook friends in common, all from the wine industry.

Actually, I can’t get too upset about M.____ and his email. He’s just using today’s technology to bust into the industry. When I was busting in, I used the telephone and the U.S. Postal Service, and I was pretty aggressive in my own way. I knew what I wanted, I knew whom I wanted it from, and I pounded on their door until I got it. I had, in other words, chutzpah. So does M.____. I don’t know what else he’s doing to become a wine critic, other than sending out blast emails. I would hope he has a few other tricks up his sleeve. But you know what? I wish the guy luck.

Dept. of Oops!

“Napa Wine Co., which annually crushes 7,000 tons of grapes for more than 60 wineries, apparently contaminated some wine with cleaning detergent,“ the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat is reporting. The paper says Jayson Pahlmeyer’s Pinot Noir “was being tested to determine how much, if any, was impacted by the accident.”

As most of you know, I went to the Wine Bloggers Conference in June, up in Walla Walla Washington. The sponsors, a great group of guys who work out of a Colorado outfit called Zephyr Adventures, have been doing followup polling. Yesterday they sent an email blast summarizing their polling of the wineries who sponsored the conference. They got 16 replies.

The wineries seemed very happy with the conference and their sponsorship of it. Fourteen of the 16 said they were glad they signed up. When asked why they sponsored the conference, 14 said they wanted “to connect with bloggers who will remember my product or company name for possible future posts.”

The Zephyr guys concluded their email this way: “Our tip to bloggers? Remember the sponsors at each conference you attended. Write about their wines if you come across them at a later time. Contact the wineries and other companies, tell them who you are, and ask questions! The sponsors will love you for it.”

What I find so interesting about this concerns the concept of advertising, and particularly of wine magazines, such as Wine Enthusiast, that accept advertising in its pages. I’ve read much criticism of magazines accepting advertising, both in the comments made to this blog over the years and in other blogs. The implication from some blogging quarters has been that any magazine that accepts advertising cannot be pure — that it has to be suffering a conflict of interest, because how can it rate wines objectively from wineries whose ads support it?

I have repeatedly defended wine magazines for accepting advertising, and tried to explain that doing so does not cross any red lines — at least, I can vouch for that at Wine Enthusiast. But I still have the feeling that that suspicion exists out there in some parts of the blogosphere. So now, I find it funny that even the Wine Bloggers Conference is conceding that it depends to some degree on winery sponsors (and a sponsorship is really just another form of paid advertising, when you think about it). It’s interesting, also, that the Zephyr guys are suggesting to bloggers that they write about the sponsors’ wines.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing this practice. In the world of business, where nobody can afford to launch a product or service that doesn’t make money, you have to make certain concessions to your advertisers. You don’t have to promise to review their wines favorably, or to give them extra attention if they haven’t done anything to merit it. But I see nothing wrong with giving your advertisers a little love from time to time. If you’re writing a regional roundup and have the choice of including winery “A” or “B”, if “A” is an advertiser, “B” is not, and all other things are equal, why not include “A” in the article? Again, that doesn’t mean that if winery “C” is doing the best job there is, you don’t include them just because they’re not an advertiser. You do. The key phrase is “all things being equal.”

Does this mean that newsletters that don’t accept advertising, such as Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, have the moral edge over magazines that do? Nope. At some level, readers have to buy in to the discernment, good taste and honesty of any wine critic, regardless of how he publishes his content. They also have to buy into his or her expertise.

The wineries who sponsored the conference did so for exactly the right reasons: They wanted to be remembered by bloggers, and they hoped to be written about, in what I assume would be a positive light. What’s wrong with that? Any winery these days that doesn’t get out of the cellar and try to connect with as many people as possible is in trouble. I salute the wineries that sponsored the WBC; it’s the ones that didn’t I wonder about. I think that WBC 2011 should be flooded with winery sponsors. And since it’s on the East Coast this time (Charlottesville VA), this would give non-California wineries an opportunity to show bloggers what they can do.

Bottom line: advertising, or paid sponsorship, is not a dirty word. It’s a fact of life. And people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

I’m back from the American Wine Bloggers Conference, up in Walla Walla, where they had invited me to give the Friday “keynote” speech.

A strange, archaic word, “keynote.” I worked really hard writing that 30-minute talk, because there were lots of issues I wanted to address. I also took seriously the fact that the organizers had invited me. I’ve heard many speeches that were total B.S., boring, irrelevant, and so devoid of content, they seemed to have been written on the way into the conference hall. I didn’t want to commit any of those sins.

I thought it went pretty well. I’d been warned beforehand that the audience — 300 strong, most of whom had been drinking — might be a little hard to control, but they were polite, even intense as they listened. Over the next two days, at least 60 came up to me to say “thank you” and tell me they’d been touched. Well, good. I wanted people to feel touched, because I reached out to them. Those thank-you’s meant more to me than I can put into words. I’m an emotional guy, and my swim in the Blogosphere Sea has not been without choppy waters. To continue the maritime metaphor, I’ve sometimes felt like my little boat was surrounded by maneaters.

Random notes

On Live Wine Blogging: I first saw this phenomenon two years ago, when the Conference was in Santa Rosa. LWB is where all the attendees sit around tables in the ballroom, 6-7 to a table, laptops in front of them, and Twitter away like crazy as winemakers wander from table to table like minstrels, each allowed 5 minutes to pour and deliver a spiel about their wine, trying to make themselves heard above the 120-decibel din, while the bloggers record their mini-reviews (in 140 words or less, of course) before sending them into the ether. When the 5 minutes is over, an organizer rings a bell, and the winemakers wander off to their next table.

Looked at from the outside, it’s a bizarre spectacle. It reminded me of the Bingo games they used to have at the temple when I was a kid. I felt like Margaret Mead, parachuting down to observe the Samoans perform their exotic rituals. I told Reno Walsh, from Zephyr Adventures, one of the conference organizers and a good-looking blond, that it seemed a little weird evaluating wine under such crazy circumstances.

Reno Walsh

“It is kind of weird,” Reno acknowledged, “but, you know, speed blogging at least exposes them to the wine, and if they want to know more about it, they know where to go.” A little later, a blogger further enlightened me on speed blogging. “It makes me focus my thoughts, under pressure, and quickly come up with a few words to describe the wine.” And I thought to myself, “Hmm. That’s not so different from what I do.” After that, I relaxed and started getting into it. Just goes to show how easy it is to judge something from the outside without bothering to understand it. So Margaret Mead went Samoan — or was it a case of Stockholm syndrome?

What everybody was talking about: That Starbucks store in Seattle that will start serving wine and beer this Fall. If the concept works, Starbucks across the country may do it. Lots of buzz among the buzz-hungry bloggers.

Drinking beer with the townies: Late on Friday night, after the downtown wine bar crawl (Walla Walla is said to have the cutest Main Street in America), all I could think of was beer. So I parted ways from the rest of the bloggers (who were headed off, far as I could tell, to an after-hours party at Hardy Wallace’s cottage) and went to the hotel bar for a brewski. The place was packed with rowdy young locals drinking beer and shots. I took a seat and waited for the barkeep to notice me when one of them said to me, “Hey.” I looked over. “You one of those bloggers?” he asked.

Uh oh, I thought, I’m about to get the crap pounded out of me by Eastern Washington State rednecks. After all, Walla Walla isn’t far from the survivalist camps of Idaho. But no. The kids wanted to hear all about the conference. In fact, they seemed to know a little about wine. One of them was heavily into tattoos (double sleeve), so we bonded. When the barkeep wandered over and asked what I wanted, I said, “Beer — but why don’t you guys pick something local for me.” This elicited a conference and Tattoo Man finally called for something in a mug that was pretty good. We drank and talked for the longest time, without a word about blogs or social media. It was all good.

Wine discovery of the weekend: Washington State Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc blends.

A wish: Please, Lord, no more panels on “The Future of Wine Writing.” (Why do I suspect this prayer will not be answered?)

A vow: To give Twitter another try, after my ill-fated attempt last Spring. This, even though I warned the bloggers that the more they’re online tweeting, Facebooking, etc., the less they’re actually writing, and learning to write. You can’t be a good wine writer unless you write good, spell good and have good grammer.

I’m flying up to the American Bloggers Conference tomorrow early. It’s in Walla Walla, a part of Washington I’ve never visited, so I’m looking forward to this trip.

I’m a little nervous. I’ve spoken to big groups before, but this will be my biggest — 300 strong, I’m told. This is for the Friday keynote address. When I asked the organizers what they wanted me to talk about, they said, “Focus on this rift between some wine bloggers and some print writers.” I guess they want controversy. I also guess they chose me because I’m a print writer and a wine blogger, so that one-foot-in-both-worlds gives me good straddle.

We talk and talk and talk about the future of print, the future of social media, the future of wine writing, until we’re all hoarse. I can’t count how many panels I’ve been on or moderated that were devoted to these topics. And here I go again, not just in the keynote speech but in a panel on the future of wine writing they want me to be on. I think the plain and simple truth is that nobody knows the answers to any of these questions, because there are just too many unknowns.

I’ll talk about a lot of this in my speech, which I assume WBC will put online, and when they do, I’ll link to it here. So I don’t want to steal my own thunder by blogging about it today. I’ll just draw a couple broad brush strokes.

I think there will always be influencers when it comes to wine. I don’t know if there will just be a handful of them, the way it is today, or if there will be lots and lots of Parkers, maybe even in China or India. I doubt that anyone will ever out-Parker Parker, although maybe Gary V. will prove me wrong.

I also don’t know if there will still be important print magazines around, although I obviously hope Wine Enthusiast will be. A lot of bloggers say print is dead, but I don’t see how they can know that. It sounds like wishful, not realistic, thinking. When you look into the future, all you can see is what you can’t see (which sounds like a Yogi-ism). And I don’t know if there will be important blogs that influence vast numbers of consumers. There aren’t any today, discounting Gary, if you call him blog, which I don’t.

I don’t know if wineries will still be obsessed with having “social media directors,” but I’m willing to make a prediction: No. I think social media, or whatever it evolves into, will become a part of marketing, not a division in itself. I think social media experts will report to marketing directors.

I’m also a little nervous about going up to Walla Walla because, as many of you know, the bloggers and I haven’t always had the most cordial relations. I think most of the unpleasantness is in the past; at least, I hope so. I won’t know very many people at the conference, aside from some bloggers and a few P.R. folks who are supposed to be there. And I’m sure I’ll embarrass myself once again by forgetting the names of people I should know. That’s a lifetime bad habit I just can’t shake. So if I forget your name, forgive me in advance.

There’s a lot of talk already on the blogosphere and other online places about how the kids are going to be staying up all night, partying and drinking until dawn. Not me, unless something very unusual happens. I won’t define what “something very unusual” means, except to say it lies in the realm of fantasy, and in 22 years of wine writing and traveling, it hasn’t happened yet. It almost did, once, and that was also in Washington State, in Seattle; but it didn’t, and I still wish it had.

I’m sure there will be surprises. One of my fellow co-panelists, Ken Payton, from Reign of Terroir, already is talking about “a surprise announcement.” Whatever it is, you can bet that all those bloggers will be live-blogging and tweeting and everything else, every chance they get.

By the way, the Hosemaster of Wine recently blogged about me concerning my WBC panel. In it, he called me “the Justin Bieber of the wine blog world.” I’m sure that’s a reference to my boyishly handsome good looks and sparkling personality, not to mention the legion of teenaged girls who constantly follow me around. It’s a hassle, and so are the paparazzi, but hey, it’s the price of fame. And I love the money.