Peter Mondavi, Jr., of Charles Krug Winery, was interviewed on the Fox Business online site, and the interviewer asked him four open-ended questions that allowed him to free-range his answers. Read the interview, then come back here. I’ll ask myself the same questions.

What is your death row wine?

Champagne, always. My desert island wine, my honeymoon wine, my go-to toast wine, my birthday wine, the perfect wine for any festivity. I can’t think of any other wine that even comes close. We shouldn’t even call Champagne “wine.” It’s beyond wine. (I include the world’s best sparkling wines in this category, not just real French Champagne.) Calling Champagne “wine” is like calling Thomas Keller’s Mon Poulet Rôti “a chicken dish.”

What region produces the best wine?

You might think I’d say “Champagne”–in France–and I’m tempted to, but I don’t want to offend my California friends, so I’ll just keep my answer to California. It depends on the type of wine. Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux blends? Easy: Napa Valley. Chardonnay? The narrow coastal strip extending from the ocean to about 30 miles inland, from Santa Barbara County in the south to Anderson Valley in the north. The accidental fact that geopolitics has sub-divided it into different counties doesn’t mean Mother Nature has been trumped. This is all one region, courtesy of the constancy of the temperature of the Eastern Pacific Ocean, which is cold all year round. Pinot Noir? Ditto for Chardonnay. Everything else can be made well in a lot of places.

What is the best wine and food pairing you’ve ever had?

I like that Peter Mondavi picked one of the simplest dishes: bread, olive oil and goat cheese, drunk with–what else?–Sauvignon Blanc. I suppose Champagne would work with that; it works with everything. But Sauvignon Blanc and goat cheese are so perfect, why would you tinker with it? I’ve had so many memorable combinations. One was beef tacos that Kathy Joseph, from Fiddlehead, fixed for me at her house. She paired them with one of her Pinot Noirs, and it was a revelation. I’m not saying it was the greatest pairing I’ve ever had, but somehow, it has stayed in my head. Oddly enough, I remember few of the foods I ate with the very greatest wines I ever drank (most of which were served to me). That’s probably because the wines were the stars of the show; the food stayed in the background. The best pairings allow both food and wine co-equal roles in the drama (or comedy, as it were). By the way, if you open the Kathy Joseph link, above, you’ll see that Kathy asked herself some questions and then answered them. I’m going to add her questions to this post. But first, the fourth Peter Mondavi question:

What will the U.S. wine industry look like in 10 years?

I don’t know, but acting in the belief that things in general don’t change that much in a mere decade, I’d say pretty much like it does today. More corporate takeovers at the top, more proliferation of little wineries and brands, often via negociant, at the bottom. As more Americans drink wine, the industry will experience growth, so there will be room for increased competition. If I get all this wrong, come back in 2022 and sue me.

The Kathy Joseph questions:

If you had $10, what would you buy?

Cold-smoked salmon and crême fraiche.

What would your mother say is your most attractive feature?

My honesty.

What’s your favorite indulgence?

Not gonna say.

When you grow up, what do you want to be?

Independent.

Biggest time waster?

Watching T.V.

What are 3 words to describe yourself?

Physically fit [all right, that’s two words, but only one concept]. Polite. Inquisitive.

What are your 5 favorite places?

Cuddling with Gus, my dog, anywhere. Any good restaurant. The gym. Lakeside Park, in Oakland. The fifth, I ain’t gonna tell you. Even wine bloggers deserve a little privacy.

Paul Mabray, from VinTank, sent me this study, from Institut du Management du Vin, in Burgundy, on wine blogging in China and America, two opposite ends of the world and also, as the study says, one from a mature market and the other still developing.

The study examined 308 American wine blogs (out of perhaps 1,000). It’s an interesting snapshot of the current wine blog scene. Here are some key findings:

- “wine bloggers are getting younger every year,” quote.

- At the same time, “out of our 308 blogs, we have 94 bloggers aged between 26 to 40 and 93 between 41 to 55.” That adds up to 187. Since the study emphasizes “The dearth of contributors in the under 26 group,” we are forced to conclude that the remaining 121 bloggers (of the sample of 308) are over 55! That doesn’t seem likely, and is impossible to square with the statement above.

- Of the 308 bloggers, 62 are “non-wine professionals”, followed by 33 who are “journalist/writers.” (That would be me, I guess.) Ten are sommeliers. Eight are wine store owners.

- In America, California has more wine bloggers (15% of the total) than any other state, followed by New York. The study found 105 active wine bloggers in California.

- The motives given for blogging are not entirely clear. The study cited everything from “documenting the blogger’s life” and “improving writing” to  “making money, attracting clients and hoping to get published.” A “new and interesting category” of bloggers, the study found, is people “writing about their own wineries or the winery they work for.”

- Of the types of blogs, the majority are wine reviews. Next is wine and food. Wine and culture, wine business and “other” are further down the list. I wonder how the study’s authors would have stereotyped my blog.

- Thirty-eight percent of the wine bloggers post daily (which I assume means 5 days a week).

- Concerning monetization, “very few bloggers are making a living out of their blog or even making any money out of it. The only type of bloggers earning a salary are ‘corporate’ bloggers–working for a company.” However, some bloggers make some money taking advertising.

- Of the 308 U.S. bloggers, about half maintain both a Facebook page and a Twitter account. (I do.) However, most of these have very few followers or friends. (I’m in the minority in that I have thousands of both.)

That’s it for the American wine bloggers. You can get info on the Chinese bloggers by studying the review. I’ll just cite this interesting conclusion: “Americans tend to blog for pleasure and by passion when Chinese are still very much educating themselves and their readers.” From my perspective, that is certainly true. I don’t try to “educate” my readers in the basics of wine because I trust and assume they already know. I do try to share my pleasure and passion.

Every wine critic, or wannabe, has to face the truth sooner rather than later: Since you can’t taste every wine in the world, you have to pick and choose what you can.

Circumstances compel it. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to deal with this situation. You can be a globe-trotting generalist, like Jancis Robinson, who can fly anywhere in the world and be welcomed with open arms by the most famous wineries in that region. (All right, if you detect a teensy weensy note of jealousy there, I’ll own up to it.) Or, along similar but less celebrated lines, you can be a Joe Roberts/1WineDude. He has, I suspect, fewer options than Jancis (at this point in his career, anyhow), having to depend on junkets or whatever comes across his transom (archaic metaphor). But he’s still a generalist: a little Italy, a little California, a little Spain, a little whatever, here’s what I think.

Being a generalist has its advantages. You get, over time, a grounding in the world’s wines. But generalism has its drawbacks. You can never really get to thoroughly understand a particular region; and if you can’t do that, then you can’t help your readers do it. Another drawback of generalism is that the peripatetic wine critic tends, most likely, to pay attention only to the best known wines of whatever region she’s covering at any particular time. New wineries, younger winemakers, innovative producers tend to be ignored by the generalist.

On the other hand are the specialists, like me in California, Paul Gregutt in the Pacific Northwest or, for that matter, all of Wine Enthusiast’s regional editors. I’d also include Lenn Thompson, at New York Cork Report, Alfonso Cevola’s On the Wine Trail in Italy and HaKerem: The Israeli Wine Blog as examples of specialists.

The neat thing about specializing is that you get a top to bottom understanding of your region, which you can then share with your readers. But I can see both sides of most things, including the specialist-generalist spectrum.

There are hundreds of wine blogs of both types, more than anyone can keep track of. To get just a taste, check out Alltop, a source that many bloggers go to every day to see who’s saying what about whom. I celebrate this diversity. It’s so different from when I started, when your choices were limited to 3 or 4 American critics with any credibility, and a handful of English writers whose knowledge of California wines was woefully inadequate, and limited to what they thought were the “important” wineries. It was all top down. New wineries didn’t have a chance of being discovered, unless they had a friend somewhere.

At the same time, this diversity puts the consumer in a bind. Whom to believe? That’s what’s so interesting about the Alltop website (which itself represents only a fraction of all wine blogs). There never have been so many choices, so many opportunities for consumers to obtain information and opinions on wine. That’s good, I suppose; but it’s also an unstable situation in need of resolution. This proliferation of sources reminds me of a Rube Goldberg machine, an overly complicated, irrational way of getting something simple accomplished.

Which is why wine critics have to make their choices. This chaotic situation will resolve itself, probably within the next few years. There will be a winnowing out. Who survives the coming shakeout cannot be known in advance; but, in retrospect, we’ll be able to look back and understand why “many were called, but few were chosen.” The chosen ones will be those who made the right choices, and stuck to their game plan.

I don’t know why it’s controversial anymore that some of the better wine blogs can be effective in driving sales. Didn’t we have that conversation in, like, 2010, and decide the answer is Yes? I thought it was over. But then somebody writes something that gets the whole issue percolating again, and we find ourselves knee-deep into another faux controversy.

That’s my considered reaction to reading this Vintank posting that purports to tell the “wine industry” that they’re “looking at wine bloggers all wrong.”

There’s something really retro when the pro-blogging community (of which I obviously count myself as one) gets all defensive about themselves. Go on, read the Vintank post. It’s entirely correct in its claims that some blogs drive sales, that wineries should reach out to them, etc. No argument there. What sets me off about these kinds of articles, though, is the underlying sense that it’s bloggers versus people like me: mainstream wine critics, as if I were in the mixed martial arts octagon with Joe Roberts, battling it out for supremecy. See the old guy get his ass whipped by the hot young blogger! See print journalism go down for the count! Oh, my word, the blogger just gave a mawashi geri to the print guy’s head, then followed it up with a driving punch to the chudan! [Sound track: riotous cheers and applause from the blog fans, boos and moans from the few print people still alive.]

No, no, no! The pro-bloggers have got to get over this bruised sense of having been hurt or disrespected by the print critics. Can’t we all get along? Yes, I’ll take the author’s word (which Alder Yarrow modestly confirms in the comments section) that a good Vinography review moves product. That’s great. I’ll accept the author’s claim that a good Joe Roberts review sells wine. That’s good, too. But so does a good Steve Heimoff review in Wine Enthusiast, and I would wager that a high score from me, printed in the magazine’s Buying Guide, and reproduced as a shelf talker at Costco, sells a heck of a lot more wine than a good 1WineDude or Vinography score.

The Vintank post argues that “WE [i.e. wineries] FAIL if we don’t use [bloggers’] tasting notes, scores, badges, or whatever, not only on our sites, through social media, and in email and other communications with our customers, but also distributed to our retail partners on our sell sheets.” I couldn’t agree more with this (although if I were a winery I wouldn’t be sure which bloggers to send samples to).

The Vintank posting makes a number of statements I don’t agree with, though, because I think they’re based on false premises:

1. It’s “unfair” to hold bloggers to the same traffic standards as “mainstream critics” like me. Why? If I reach 1,000 times as many eyeballs through the magazine than a wine blogger can, why disregard that fact? Wine sales people understand that eyeballs is the correct measurement for a wine writer, be she a blogger or a print person. And wait until Wine Enthusiast hits the China market, in June. Our little local wine bloggers will be as dust in the wind.

2. Print writers are declining in power because “the decades of stories that have already been written about wineries, regions, and varieties make it a struggle [for them] to generate new and interesting content.” Well, I don’t think there’s anyone better than me to reply to that! Let me assure you that generating “new and interesting content” is no harder (or easier) for me today than it was 20 years ago. And even if you think it is hard for me, why would it be easier for a blogger?

Before the hate mail starts coming in from the blogging crowd, let me repeat that I firmly believe blogging is an integral part of the wine writing community. At the same time, the pro-blogging people really have got to stop complaining about “the mainstream media.” Honestly, they’re starting to sound like Sarah Palin.

And with all due respect to Alder Yarrow, let me answer the question he asked in the comments section:

Q: “What are all your new customers over the next five years more likely to do when they hear about your brand or one of your wines and want to know whether it’s any good or not: a) Go to the store and buy a copy of the Wine Spectator or b) type the wine name into Google?”

A: Yes, of course they’re going to Google it. But what does that have to do with the continued popularity of Spectator, Enthusiast or other wine magazines? This is a straw-man issue: Alder poses two hypothetical behaviors, the first obviously absurd, the second having little to do with the premise that wine bloggers will “win” some kind of Google search contest over “mainstream” writers. If you Google a winery brand looking for reviews, chances are the first several hits will take you to the winery’s website and to their “Reviews” link, if they have one (which they should). And which critics will most wineries publicize first? What Vintank calls “the power critics.” Would it hurt for the winery to also link to 1WineDude? Of course not; I hope they do; I hope Joe Roberts is making a ton of money by the time he’s 50.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media isn’t going anywhere. Look, we’re all one wine writing community, whether it’s print, blogging or whatever. We all should respect that fact, and quit the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle trashing and resentment of print.

I’m always surprised by how negative the reaction of some people is to the field of wine writing/journalism/reviewing. If you read through the “Comments” section from yesterday’s blog, you’ll see what I mean. Why do these people get so upset to the point of almost losing their minds?

I wrote “wine writing/journalism/reviewing” on purpose, because a “wine writer” does all three. There’s a difference, you know, although the critics of wine reviewing tend to conveniently overlook it, preferring instead to focus on the 100-point system and what they perceive as the critic’s “elitism.” So let me explain to these people, most of whom are not legitimate wine writers as far as I can tell, just what the job entails.

Wine writing: I define this is the artistic or esthetic side. It’s what I tried to do in my first book, A Wine Journey along the Russian River, and, to some extent, what I try to do here on the blog. It’s literature, nicely defined in my Webster’s as “writings considered as having permanent value [and] excellence.” When you do “literature”  you really exercise the art of writing. It borrows from literature you’ve loved in the past (my writing is heavily indebted to Churchill but also will dip its toe into whatever book I fancy at the moment. I went through a Hemingway phase of short, snappy sentences). But you also develop your own style.

Wine journalism: This is good, old-fashioned reporting. You interview somebody, or do research on something, then you write it up, answering all those “w” questions: who, what, when, why, where (and, in wine, “how” and “how much?”). Journalism is not literature: it’s too truncated, too formulaic, which is why so many journalists like to stretch their wings and try actual literature.

Wine reviewing: Well, we all know what that is. It’s one of the things I do and in fact pays most of my bills.

I’ve never met an actual, employed wine reviewer who was upset by wine reviewers, or who thought that the act of wine reviewing somehow is elitist or evil or arrogant or condescending or any of the other epithetical terms anti-reviewers toss around. Oh, before you object that there are people in the blogosphere and in the social media who review wine but who criticize wine reviewers (there are), I’ll add that, as wine reviewers, they’re not particularly influential. I mean, anyone can scratch out some wine reviews and put them up on a blog, but it’s the proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one around: Does anyone know or care? There is some jealousy out there, on the part of the have-nots for the haves.

Ambitious wine writers who haven’t yet made it in their chosen career would do well to put aside reviewing and take up wine writing and wine journalism, in the sense I described above. I ask them: When’s the last time you wrote something that glowed, that you were proud of? When’s the last time you really had to dig for a story, chase down the facts, get people to say things they didn’t want to, go through archives, search through the indexes of old books, spend an hour on Google to find a specific quote, make a scientist explain something in plain English, walk through the woods to hear what walking through the woods sounds like, lie on your stomach on the forest floor and bury your face in the dead leaves and dirt to smell what it smells like, transcribe a long tape, look through an almanac, use a calculator to figure out the rate of increase or decline of a particular grape variety in a particular region…I could go on all day. I do all of those things, too, not just rate wines, and all of those things make me a better wine reviewer, in the mysterious alchemy of that task. Antonio Galloni expressed it well when I talked with him the other week: We live surrounded by wine, by the lore of wine, by its traditions, by the business of wine, in the culture of wine. It fills our brains as it fills our bellies. When we’re not tasting it–not reviewing–we’re thinking about it, about the people who make and sell and write about it, about the next story we’re working on, the deadline, about the question we forgot to ask during that interview, about what time to leave for tomorrow’s appointment to avoid rush hour, and what time to try to get home so we can do a flight. And inbetween everything else, we’re going back and re-reading that draft, refining it, throwing out a clunky phrasing for a more pleasing one, replacing a misleading adjective with the correct one, and maybe even buying a Meyer lemon to see how it smells and tastes different from an ordinary lemon. Yes, all of those things. And reviewing, too.

It must drive wineries crazy to read stuff like Joe Roberts’ post today at 1WineDude.

Winery owners are doing everything they can to keep afloat in this dour economy. Most of them are tinkering with social media to some extent; some of them even have dedicated employees for it, if they can afford it. Inbetween buying corks and capsules, hoping the bottling line doesn’t break down, filling out employee forms, patching up hoses, worrying about drought or swamps in the vineyard, pruning, staking, riding the mule around the vineyard, topping off, racking, tinkering with valves and dials and switches, deciding on blends, driving to the hardware store, going on the road to sell wine, meeting with distributors and wholesalers, having staff meetings, and, oh, trying to find an hour to spend with the wife and kiddies, here’s Joe telling them they need to “just start using that time on social media to connect with customers already.”

What time? You mean those few hours between midnight and dawn when everyone’s entitled to a little sleep?

I pity these poor vintners. Everybody’s telling them to do social media, “to reach younger wine consumers” through the Twitter machine, to check their Facebook feed every three minutes, to blog, to make YouTubes and put them up on Oinga-Boinga or Diddly-Squat or whatever the hot new social platform is that’s about to go public. And those vintners are just sitting there, like, What? What are you talking about? It’s easy for someone who doesn’t have a real job to tell them to hang out on social media all day long, as that will magically solve all their problems. It’s also easy for that same blogger to tell winemakers “But if I were a small-production winery, I’d be worrying a hell of a lot more about how to reach, engage, and keep customers I had (as well as engaging new ones) than trying to get a crazy-good review with critics.” Why would a blogger tell winemakers not to be concerned with the critics? That’s crazy talk. And it must drive winemakers nuts (like I said) to think that they’re not doing enough to “engage and keep” their customers. When you accuse a hard-working vintner of being lazy when it comes to engaging customers, it’s like asking a guy when he stopped beating his wife. There is no answer that’ll get him off the hook. If he admits he’s not reaching out enough to potential customers, he subjects himself to feelings of guilt and suffering, because he knows that, no matter what he does, it can never be enough.

I agree that winemakers or owners should play around with social media, if they want to and like it. I spend a lot of time at it myself. But I don’t think it’s helpful to tell them that they’re bad if they’re not living online. When Joe (whom I like a lot, I really do and he knows it) says, “Honestly, I’ve got no idea what producers (especially smaller wine producers) are waiting for when it comes to outreach,” he’s really doing a disservice to the people he says he’s trying to help. How does he presume to know that producers are “waiting for” something? He doesn’t know the myriad ways that each producer is reaching out and engaging, whether it’s through a wine club, or working the tasting room, or hitting the road for a winemaker dinner, or writing thank you notes to valued colleagues, or visiting Wine Enthusiast’s headquarters in New York and tasting with the staff. Winery people work really hard, long hours. Telling them they have to put social media at the top of the list of things they’re already overwhelmed with is really no help at all.