Evil villains are a staple of literature and entertainment. From the snake in the Garden of Eden (a precursor, the world’s first diabolic liar), to Snidely Whiplash in Rocky and Bullwinkle to Adolf Hitler and Hannibal Lector (we might more lately include Bernie Madoff), the semiotics of the human narrative requires and includes some incarnation of misanthropia to be complete.

Evil villains are not desirable–you don’t want to come across any in the course of a peaceful life–but they do serve a useful purpose: we can blame them for what’s broken and detestable in the world. (Which is not to say that they do not actually behave detestably.) If evil villains did not exist, it would be much harder to sort actions out into “good” and “evil,” which seems to be the basis for much of organized human society. Madoff, for example, reassures us that, because he was an “evil” investment manager, he was an outlier; and so we can sleep at night believing that the people who manage our money are good.

In the new movie Contagion, the arch-villain is, of course, the germ that’s hell bent on killing everyone in the world. But the evil villain in human form is a blogger (from San Francisco, no less) with the unlikely name of Alan Krumwiede (“crumb-weedy”, played by Jude Law), who not only is “the obvious villain” (in the words of Manohla Dargis, who reviewed Contagion for the New York Times), but is a “creep”, “fear-monger” and “sell out”, as well. Another critic, Ryan Fleming, says Krumwiede “teeters between prophet and charlatan”, which implies that he [Krumwiedge] plays fast and loose with the facts; indeed, Kenneth Turan, in the L.A. Times, notes warningly that what Krumwiede writes in his blog “is not necessarily information you can take to the bank,” while Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sum Times, calls Krumwiede’s “concerns…ominous but unfocused.”

Granted that this view of bloggers as untruthful, or disdainful of telling the truth, or incapable of it, or being too lazy/stupid/power hungry/unfocused/paranoid (Matt Stevens‘ review, at E! Online, calls Krumwiede a conspiracy theorist) is director Steven Soderbergh’s own. Still, it’s noteworthy that the director of Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich and Traffic chose a blogger to be the vehicle for evil in his morality tale. Not a banker, nor a politican, money-hungry corporate CEO, reporter for a filthy little tabloid rag or even a standard movie psychotic, but a blogger! We have to dig a little and figure out why.

This is, to my knowledge, the first instance in the popular culture wherein a blogger has been cast in the role of the skunk, but it may not be the last. Once these die are cast, they tend to remain so. In the case of blogging, it’s not hard, when you think about it, to figure out why bloggers fit so easily into the role of the villain. The pieces already are in place, in the mass-public imagination. Bloggers (we all know it; it’s been part of the gestalt for years) can write anything they want, without substantiation or proof, making them a pretty irresponsible lot. They’re dangerous, too, because they can take whatever drivel they invent and instantly publish it on the Internet, where, if they’re lucky, or possessed of some talent for creating buzz, they may attract a following. Bloggers like Matt Drudge have inculcated this idea in most of our heads, while our knowledge that anyone can blog–a child, a drug-addled teenager, a wacko in a mental ward–suggests that the majority of what is blogged must, ipso facto, be irrelevant and incorrect. Since so many of us spend so much time online, we are necessarily exposed to wicked, stupid bloggers, in exactly the same way that the poor victims in Contagion are exposed to the killer bug. They cannot escape it, because it is everywhere, and it is lethal. By comparison, we, in real life, cannot escape the untruthfulness on the Internet, because it, too, is everywhere, and–in a moral and intellectual sense, if not in a physical sense–it also is lethal.

Thus the blogger as the new evil villain. This is, of course, a caricature of reality, since not all bloggers are the same. (I like to think that some are the epitome of virtue.) But it should stand as a warning, to bloggers, to thinkers who analyze the phenomenon of blogging, and to people who read blogs, that the trustworthiness we would all like to repose in blogs now has been called into question, by a movie that is sure to be a huge hit, and that will have ramifications that echo down the years. Indeed, we might even come to refer to bad bloggers as Krumwiedes–pot-stirring a-holes we should avoid.

Slow Sunday yesterday, nothing to do and not wanting to do anything. So just sat around the house and read the paper, caught up on the Irene news (which included hearing from old friends in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and seeing some scary YouTubes of the rampaging Deerfield River which, when I lived there, was just a pleasant little stream). Then I decided, since I’m paying for premium movie channels anyway, I might as well watch one.

I’d seen Julie and Julia when it first came out and to be perfectly honest, didn’t much care for it. True, Meryl Streep was awesome as usual, but  Amy Adams’ Julie seemed self-centered and annoying (she herself admitted to being a bitch), so much so that I had an unpleasant memory of the film. But, as sometimes happens, on second viewing I liked it considerably more.

One of the more interesting aspects for me was Julie’s experience with blogging. As you know if you saw the film, she began blogging more or less as a lark, with no expectation that anyone would read her or that blogging would bring her to the brink of a real career. And yet, in that climatic scene where she finds 67 phone messages after the Christian Science Monitor wrote about her, overnight Julie was sought after by editors, publicists and all the other denizens of the celebrity world looking for the next big thing for the next 15 minutes.

I thought, why did Julie start blogging? Why did she go through all that work–not just holding down a fulltime job all day, but then cooking all night and, when the cooking and eating was over, far from laying her weary body down (with her husband), she then prolonged her workday by blogging about it? This line of thought naturally brought me, by extension, to my own reasons for blogging and–by extension from that–to all the other bloggers, both known and unknown to me, who cannot sleep at night, or who cannot wake up normally in the morning and go about their lives, until they’ve put their thoughts online for all to see.

At first, this seems like very self-centered behavior. Why would anybody think that one’s thoughts would be of the slightest interest to anybody else, much less a bunch of strangers out there in cyberspace? It’s very strange. I can see why (for example), people might be curious about what Dick Cheney has to say in his new book.  Regardless of what you thought about Cheney, he impacted our lives. But why would anyone care about the thoughts of a wine writer? It’s not as if we’re smarter than anyone else, or wiser. I’ve been reading classic Greek literature lately and am working my way through The Apology, in which Socrates/Plato makes the point that he who is wisest is the one who knows that he is utterly without wisdom. The older I get, the more I feel precisely that way, which makes it even weirder that this blog would attract the attention of anyone.

I know that some of it has to do with the fact that I am said to possess a certain kind of “power” through my job as a wine critic. People are curious, I suppose, how I perceive that supposed power, how I use it, how it shapes my thinking. The answer is: I perceive it as an illusion. It is an accident of my history and karma that came without my conscious bidding and will disappear just as abruptly as it arrived; and my responsibility as its vessel is to preside over its loss, when it goes, with equanimity. Which is to say that, like Plato’s Socrates, I’m aware that “power,” like “wisdom,” is a forgery.

The rest of the question had to do with you. Why do you read this blog, or any blog, for that matter? I like to think (maybe I flatter myself) that it’s because the writing pleases you. I’m not much for social intercourse in person, and I seem to get lamer with each passing month. It’s hard for me to be myself with others, unless they’re people I know extremely well and trust. Otherwise, my life’s experiences have made me rather mistrustful of people; and especially if they’re in the industry, I can never be sure exactly what their motives are. It’s hard having all the time to guess what’s really going on behind somebody else’s smiling facade.

Still, like most people, I’m a social animal. I think, I drink, I think about drinking, and wine–more than any other beverage–stimulates the deepest, best thinking because wine is the best beverage. It’s simply easier for me to frame the thoughts I want to share in words on a computer screen than to express them verbally in a social situation. Conversation happens quickly; half the time our words just fly out of our mouths, surprising even ourselves. With writing, you can take the time to express a thought articulately, so that you’re sure that what you just wrote is precisely what you meant. Which reminds of of something Meryl Steep’s Julia Child character said in the movie. She wanted (she said) to write down her recipes with “scientific precision” so that nobody who attempted to use them would ever make a mistake. That’s the way I feel about writing, and wine reviewing in general. I want to get it right.

Just in: Wine Enthusiast’s 2011 Wine Star Award nominees!

The old blog is taking today off, due to a bizarre virus like thing that hit my computer and late nights with too much booze and too little sleep. First time in 3-plus years I missed a daily post! Back tomorrow (Wed.)

By the time you read this I’ll be in New York, at Wine Enthusiast, where we gather every summer around this time for our annual editorial conference.

That’s when we put together a tentative outline of all the major stories the magazine will run in 2012. I say “tentative” because it’s always subject to change. There’s a creative tension between an editor-planner’s need to know what’s coming up in every issue, and the spontaneity of events that can and by definition do erupt unpredictably, shoving previous plans aside.

We writers work feverishly for months to come up with our “pitch lists,” the stories we hope to be able to write. Of course, not everyone will get to write everything he wants. The magazine would have to be the size of the Manhattan phone book to accommodate that. (Speaking of phone books, aren’t they outdated? We could save a lot of trees by ending them.) So when we gather around the old editorial table, there’s a lot of negotiating going on. Everybody has a say as to whether any particular article is approved, but a lot of it depends on the pitcher’s passion and logic.

I cover coastal California, so I’m always looking to write about regions I haven’t written about before. That’s nearly impossible, since I’ve covered just about everyplace in the state, so I look back at my previous articles to find places I haven’t written about for a while. A lot can happen in a wine region in five years.

New faces are also always fun to write about: readers like discovering them, and so do writers. On the other hand, winemakers who’ve been around for decades are generally at the top of their games. They may not be the new kids on the block, but the best wines in California are coming from the stalwarts, not the newbies.

Editors love trend stories. The latest this, the hottest that, insider’s secrets. The trouble with trend stories, though, is that they often amount to little more than hype. In the rush to find a new trend, a writer might be tempted to exaggerate things, and an editor may let her get away with it. In this way, faux trends are created. Don’t get me wrong: there are certainly real trends. Pinot Grigio was a trend from several years ago that was real. Prosecco is a real trend. Moscato, I don’t know. We’ll see. It’s easier to be trendy in cocktails, where recipes change by the day, but I don’t report on cocktails. Wine, for better or worse, is sturdier, or stodgier. Things don’t change that much. Is there a low[er] alcohol trend happening in California? A lot of writers are saying there is, but we’re going to have to look back in 5 or 10 years to know for sure. An example of a faux trend is to say there’s a trend for red Zinfandel. You see these stories from time to time. It’s not so, but it’s easy enough for a writer to pick and choose facts, artfully combine them with opinion, and then convince an editor (usually one who’s overworked) that it’s a good story. Readers then read that red Zinfandel is a trend, because it said so in print–and if it’s in print, it must be true. Right?

Not! But don’t get me started on bad wine writing.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I like being edited by my New York editors. It can be hard. Sometimes an editor does things I don’t like, or disagree with. They can ask tough questions. Tim Moriarty, in particular, will take one of my articles that I like a lot and tell me he doesn’t think it makes any sense. I get pissed, but when all is said and done, my articles end up better–much better. That’s a lesson I’ve learned over the years. In every interview and speech I give on writing, I’m careful to praise and thank editors. Bloggers, of course, are mostly unedited, but then, blogging may be a short form of writing that doesn’t need editing. My blog isn’t edited, except by me, which is the way I like it. I think if someone else were editing my blog, you, my readers, wouldn’t trust it. But that’s never going to happen. So “No reason to get excited,” the thief he kindly spoke.

I’m back from my panel at The Chardonnay Symposium down at gorgeous Bien Nacido Vineyards and man oh man, what a fun time it was. Only in its second year, TCS is growing by leaps and bounds, and is destined to be the premier Chardonnay event in the U.S.A. (Actually, it already is, but you ain’t seen nothing yet!)

After my panel, on oaked and unoaked Chardonnay, people asked me, what was your favorite wine in the flight? And I said, I can’t actually say. There are different ways I taste wine. Tasting at home for review is a very specialized form of wine tasting. It’s how I taste at work, but it’s not how I, or any normal person, would taste wine anyplace else. It would be dreadfully boring to always be formally tasting wine.

For example, at my seminar, the way I tasted was to look for what was best and most exemplary in each wine. So although we had 12 wines, and they were all quite different from each other–grown in different regions, made by different winemakers, some entirely unoaked, some with 200% new oak, some at 13%, some at 16%, some from barrel, some 8 years old–I looked for the best qualities of each. And I found them, because you generally find what you’re looking for, whether it’s in wine, people or life.

On the other hand, when I taste critically, in blind flights, what I’m looking for are faults. I’m seeking to eliminate wines from the lineup, one by one, due to certain flaws. They may be excessive in acidity, or flabby, or too hot in the finish, or too oaky, or not fruity enough, or have raisin tastes, or be too sweet; it could be anything. Last one standing wins. So, just as I said you always find what you’re looking for, if you’re looking for faults, you’ll find them.

This leads to the question, is it better to look for faults or for virtues? The answer is, you can’t say one approach is better than the other. Different approaches are suitable for different purposes. When I’m reviewing and scoring, it’s appropriate to look for flaws. When I’m leading a panel of invited winemakers, each of whom I’m honored to sit beside, I’m looking to find those qualities in the wines that are the topic of the symposium. And let’s face it, the winemakers on my panel are not accustomed to making ordinary wines! Each of the twelve samples was extraordinary in its own unique way.

(Thanks by the way to Ellen for being a wonderful traveling companion!)

The Wine Blogging Awards

Of course I wanted to win Best Wine Blog at the Wine Bloggers Convention. And I didn’t. But I can honestly say that there’s nobody whom I would more have preferred to beat me than Tom Wark and his Fermentation blog.

Tom deserved this award by every measure. He’s easily the most important person in wine blogging history. He not only had one of the first wine blogs, he began the Wine Bloggers Conference and he started the Wine Blog Awards. Those achievements alone put Tom in the pantheon. Tom is to wine blogging as Walt Disney is to animation, as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were to the personal computer. In other words, the creator.

More personally, Tom has been my mentor in wine blogging. Not in the most direct way, but still importantly. It wasn’t Tom alone who persuaded me to be a wine blogger. But he was incredibly supportive of my efforts from the start. When I began wine blogging, Tom wrote one of the first reviews, which he headlined “Steve Heimoff and the Active Mind.” I was so proud of that, because Tom really “got” what it was I was trying to do (as I already had “got” what he was trying to do).

Since then, Tom has been a friend and ally. I like to think he’s had my back, and I know I’ve had his. It was Tom who advised me to blog 5 days a week. I’ve had offline conversations with Tom over the years. I’ve asked him questions and for advice; he’s always kindly answered. He’s asked me questions; I’ve given him my opinions, I hope helpfully. I respect the hell out of Tom Wark (and by the way, Tom is absolutely leading the fight against monopolistic distributors). Like I said, if I couldn’t win this award, there’s nobody on Earth I would rather have seen win. So my heartiest congratulations, Tom. You singularly deserve this honor.

Dodge: to use tricks, deceits, or evasions; be shifty; to evade a question, charge, etc. by trickery, cleverness [Webster’s New World Dictionary]

Dodge, synonyms [Roget’s Thesaurus]: elude, evade, escape, swerve, turn aside, duck

At first my reaction to Dan Berger describing wine writing as a “dodge” was one of curiosity. Why would Dan (an old friend) call it that? A funny word to use for an occupation that he, I and many others of us have practiced honorably for a long time.

But Dan is one of the senior members of our profession, a respected veteran who was making a living as a wine writer when I was still drinking Bob Red, so I decided to mull his remark over for a while to discern his true meaning.

I re-read the exact context in which “dodge” appeared:

“It was an event staged by a winery for a small group of media people, all of whom have been in the wine writing dodge for decades…”

Let us deconstruct this statement and see if we can get to its bottom. First of all, Dan is at an event staged… This is vital information. He is not relaxing with friends at home or a bar. He is at an event, a word that is to be interpreted with some alarm by those in the know. An “event” is not a natural occurrence in the world. It is a fabrication, an artificial social gathering to which people are invited who can further the agenda of the people who host it, by writing about it, creating buzz about it, and whose aim is to make more money for the host than the host has spent on it. Yes, an event is staged, and any media invited to an event must be aware that they are simply being called upon to be players in someone else’s drama.

Dan certainly is so aware, and this consciousness on his part must be taken into account when we move onto the next deconstruction concerning his use of the word “dodge.”

All of whom have been… This is vital information too. Dan is not alone. He is with a group of his peers (not including me. I was not there.) When wine writers who have known each other for a long time find ourselves at events, there is a certain communication between us of which outsiders may be unaware. I won’t call it “jaded” or “blasé,” for that would suggest a corruptness that isn’t so. It’s more like, “Here we are at the old cattle call again.” Someone blew a whistle and we, the wine media, moo obediently and shuffle through the corral to the place where the feed has been dumped for us to chew on. This doesn’t prevent us from enjoying ourselves, or doing our jobs to the best of our ability. But it does bring up that McCartney line from Penny Lane: “Though she feels she’s in a play, she is anyway.” So this, too, has to be taken into account in considering Dan’s remark.

Now we get to the money phrase: the wine writing dodge for decades. Not just “the wine writing dodge” but “for decades.” See the previous paragraph. There is a hint of ennui here, of déja vu, of Groundhog Day. But why the word “dodge”? Is wine writing a trick, a deceit, an evasion? Are we shifty? Do we use trickery or cleverness to duck certain charges? I’m not sure what Dan means. Certainly, one implication of “dodge” may simply have been that wine writing–of the kind Dan and I practice– isn’t the most difficult way to earn a living. No heavy lifting, very little sweating (except for deadlines), no rush hour commute if you work from home, as Dan and I do. We’re not pounding steel in factories or descending into coal mines to hack away at rocks, we’re not bus drivers or janitors or people who pour asphalt onto roads. We’re rather soft-handed members of the intelligentsia, and it’s likely that we work hours of our own choosing and can make time available for long lunches, or naps, or even to take entire days off if we feel like it, without having to ask a boss’s permission. So maybe that’s what Dan meant by “dodge”: we’ve made a good living for a long time by doing something pretty easy, and we’ve gotten a lot of perks along the way (such as a great wine and food that invariably is given to us at events).

Here’s what I hope Dan didn’t mean by “dodge”: that there’s something inherently dishonest about wine writing. A lot of people think there is. They think we make up our reviews out of nowhere, that we’re freeloaders just scrounging for swag. Maybe they think we really are evading making an honest living by doing something so, well, effete. There may well be working men and women who see wine writers as members of the liberal media who “just don’t get it.” Certainly, there’s a lot of class resentment floating around the U.S. lately, and if members of the media are the recipients of it (and they are), then a wine writer in particular must be the object of loathing and scorn, particularly for those people who don’t drink alcohol.

The aspect of cleverness comes in here. People don’t like clever people. The snake in the Garden of Eden was clever. Clever people trick normal people into doing things that are harmful to them, and to society. Yet wine writers are clever almost by definition: all writers are clever. We have to be. “Clever” traces its roots to the Middle English “cliver,” referring to a claw or hand, meaning “adroit with the hand.” Cavemen who were adroit with their hands developed skills others did not possess. Perhaps they were better at chipping flint into arrowheads, or creating spears that could kill a wild animal at 30 paces. So we see that the root of “clever” was not some aesthetically pointless sharpness of wit, the way Oscar Wilde was clever with a quip. No, the earliest form of cleverness furthered the survival of the clan. Writing may not be as central to survival as the killing of animals for food (and to prevent them from eating us), but writing certainly is central to a society’s ability to understand itself and to pass its wisdom on. The framers of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were clever writers.

Finally, there is the meaning of dodge ”to evade a question.” This may once upon a time have been an accurate charge against wine writers. We lived in ivory towers, made our pronouncements from on high, and provided little if any transparency as to how we actually ran our businesses. We expected the public to believe us because we were experts and they weren’t. If they asked us questions, we felt no need to answer them.

Well, obviously, blogging and social media have changed all that. There may still be some wine writers around who won’t let anybody know how they really operate, but most of us–me included–aren’t that way. You can’t be secretive anymore. Discerning readers won’t let you. I don’t think there’s a question I’ve evaded in my blog, except, perhaps, that of my sanity, which isn’t really something I could speak objectively about anyway.

So while I’m still not sure exactly what Dan meant by “dodge,” I’d like to thank him, because I got a blog post out of it that was fun to write!