It used to be, for most of my wine writing career, that I visited winemakers (and winery owners) to listen, not to talk. In the beginning, I had much to learn: about viticulture and enology, about the business side, about how they had gotten into wine, about the local history and terroir and so on.

I’m a good question-asker, with a natural curiosity, and since most people enjoy talking about themselves, the conversation between me (or the reporter in me) and my interviewees never flagged. But these days, I find myself talking to winemakers (and winery owners) more than I used to. Why? Read on.

During a typical visit, the winemaker, who’s been expecting me, has probably gone over in his mind what he wants to tell me. Maybe it’s about his over-arching philosophy. Maybe it’s about a new vineyard he’s developing, or a new winemaking team he’s hired, or a new cave they’re building. Usually, the winemaker wants to taste with me, which opens up whole new areas of conversation. Often, I’ll take out my old-fashioned pen and pad of paper and take notes. This is all in the tried-and-true journalistic tradition of a Q&A where I’m “Q”, the winemaker is “A”, and the result is that odd bit of literature called “an article.”

But I’m afraid I’m turning into a gadfly lately, which is turning the tables on the old way, but when it feels right — when it feels like the winemaker has given me an invitation — then it has to be done. Here’s how it might go.

Winemaker: So I hear your blog is pretty popular.

Me: Thanks. It’s a lot of fun. [Here, there might follow a bit of chatter about how long blogging takes, why I do it, etc. Then I might ask:] So do you blog? Do you do any kind of social media?

Winemaker: [laughing] Me? No. None of that stuff.

Me: Why not?

Winemaker: Oh, I don’t even have a computer! [or a cell phone]. I don’t have the time. It’s too hard; I wouldn’t know where to begin. And I wouldn’t know what to say.

Me: It’s not as hard as you think. You probably have somebody in your employ who’s working with computers, right?

Winemaker: Yeah. [In fact, it could be the winemaker’s son or daughter.]

Me: All you need to do is have them set up the back end, the actual format of the blog. Once that’s done, all you have to do is type in the words. It’s just word-processing. If you’re not comfortable working with a keyboard, just write your blog out in longhand, and have somebody transcribe it for you. It doesn’t have to be long. Maybe 400 words.

Winemaker: [thinking] Well, but what would I say? I’m not a writer.

Me: Well, for example, you met me here this morning, right? You greeted me as the sun was rising and the mist was lifting off the hills. It was cold. Then we piled into your pickup, and you drove me around the appellation, showing me the various vineyards. I asked you questions, remember? About the difference between the hillsides and the flatlands. You talked about alluvial soils, about landslide soils, about limestone outcroppings uplifted 20 million years ago from the sea. Then we drove back here to the winery, where we’re now sitting, tasting through your ‘09 Pinot Noir barrel samples: the 114, 115 and 667 clones, the Pommard, the Swan, the Martini. Don’t you think you could write up 400 words on that?

Winemaker: [frowning] I guess.

Me: So you see, you do have something to say. Every day you have something to say.

Winemaker: Well, who would want to read about it?

Me: Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t?

Winemaker: Anyway, I have a gal I hired who does that for me. She set up our Facebook page and our Twitter account.

Me: Do you even go there?

Winemaker: Not really.

Me: Look. Nobody knows if this “social media” stuff is going to matter for a winery. It may never move a single case; it may be the future. But I can tell you two things: One, it’s basically free, so why not play around with it? You have nothing to lose. And two, don’t let someone else speak for you. Speak for yourself. A P.R. person or a social media employee can never be you. The whole point of a blog is authenticity. Believe me, artificiality shows through a blog like patch of ringworm on a face. You can’t hide it. People want to read blogs written by people who are being themselves — who let it all hang out. They don’t just want to read about facts, which can be spun and manipulated. They want to feel your personality come through, with all its joys, uncertainties, fears, hopes, dreams, enthusiasms, humor. You’re a real person. You’re being real with me right now. All you have to do is write 400 words 3 or 4 times a week and get it up there on your blog.

Winemaker: Well, how would I know if it’s working?

Me: You won’t, initially. You might not get any comments for weeks or months. You might have not have any idea if anyone even reads your blog. But like I said, what have you got to lose?

That’s when I usually see the winemaker lose interest, and I wonder if maybe I’ve overdone it — if I’ve somehow been inappropriate and lectured (or hectored) somebody who was kind enough to be my host. But then I ask them the killer question:

Me: You say you’re increasingly relying on direct sales for your business, right? Like through your tasting room and wine club?

Winemaker: Right.

Me: I bet your direct sales customers skew older, right?

Winemaker: Yes, they do.

Case closed.

Yet another winery has hired a social media marketing manager. This time, it’s V. Sattui, known to generations of Napa Valley visitors for its picnic facilities right on Highway 29.

I don’t know how many wineries have created social media manager jobs. It all started with Murphy-Goode, of course. St. Supery jumped on the bandwagon soon after. Gallo recently posted a job offer for someone to “Utilize social media technologies/networks to listen, engage with, and converse with brand consumers in the digital space.”

But even if a winery doesn’t have a full-time social media director job opening, chances are that proficiency in social media is part of the job description for an administrative assistant or marketing manager or some similar title. For example, at winejob.com, Saddleback is looking for a sales associate who is “Proficient with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In) and the Internet.” Another winery, which wouldn’t name itself, is hiring a P.R. person who “Must be extremely proficient with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In) and the Internet.” Boisset Family Estates is looking for a wine club manager with a social media background, Opus One wants a marketing manager with “a strong understanding of…web conversation monitoring tools (social media etc.),” and an unnamed winery in Santa Rosa is seeking a winery operations person to manage “social media development.”

Surely the words “social media” would not have existed in a winery job description one year ago. You’ll forgive me for noting that there’s a sense of frantic catching up here, as though the managers responsible for pushing these job openings through are thinking, “OMG, I don’t know what to do, but I have to do something or else I’ll get fired, so let me hire someone who…” etc. etc. Of course, wineries aren’t the only companies looking for social media directors. Wrigley, the chewing gum and candy company, is seeking a social media manager, a “Self starter with an entrepreneurial spirit,” which most social media hounds I know seem to be. Right here in my home town of Oakland, Clorox is hiring a “Corporate Counsel- Social Media/Talent Rights” to protect the company’s advertising. Sutter Health, the giant health insurer, is looking for a communications coordinator for news and social media, someone who can raise “awareness, understanding, acceptance and/or preference of the Sutter Health network through high-quality strategic communications plans and activities.” (That person will have his or her work cut out for him; Sutter is frequently under attack by consumer groups.)

Most of these jobs envision social media as part of the company’s P.R., media relations and external communications divisions, and that’s exactly what makes me wonder if the successful applicants may not be setting themselves up for failure. After all, the essence of social media is transparent authenticity, right? People read my blog and Facebook postings because they know Steve has no reason to post things except for a desire to express himself, with no hope of gain. But if you’re blogging, Facebooking and tweeting about a company that employs you, the inference can surely be made that you’re not being particularly authentic, but are saying what the company, through your direct supervisor, wants you to say, or not saying what they don’t want you to say. I don’t see how a company can get around that inescapable conclusion.

Now, I hope people won’t interpret my remarks as social media bashing, although I expect some will. I am just making a very common sense point. Everybody knows that P.R. is never neutral. A paid spokesperson, whether it be the President’s press secretary, a celebrity endorser in an advertisement, or a blogger who gets a cut of the profits off products she plugs, never can have total credibility. If I owned a winery, I’m sure I would also hire a social media manager. I’m not blaming anyone who does; it’s the right thing to do, now; they’re all making a necessary move. But I’d like to know if, in 2, 3 or 5 years, these dedicated positions are going to exist. I have a hunch that social media managers are going to see their jobs morph into more conventional areas, and that tweeting, blogging and Facebooking will be incidental, not central, to their everyday work. And some of them will be laid off.

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.

Another celebration of stupid

So there’s this D.C.-based guy, Charlie Adler, a wine and food educator, who has a new book out called I Drink on the Job, that seems to be the latest expression of the “you can be stupid and still like wine” movement that is so reminiscent of the teabaggers. [Confession: I haven’t read the book and know its contents only from published material on the web, including the author’s website.] The book, according to this review, “is a series of vignettes illustrating why wine should be enjoyed organically, rather than studied and dissected.” On his book’s website, Adler writes: “’I Drink on the Job’ takes an anecdotal and often humorous look at wine from a slightly different perspective than your average wine book and draws an immediate conclusion – it’s better to ‘drink first and ask questions later’.”

This “wine is humorous” thing (you know who you are, bloggers) is really starting to get annoying. It’s like saying, “Hey, if you don’t feel like taking the time to understand something, just make fun of it, and tease people who do try to understand it.” It’s demeaning and insulting to suggest that wine drinkers aren’t intelligent enough to enjoy wine and study it at the same time. That’s like saying a person can’t like going to the movies unless he also is a film buff. I don’t know any wine writers who ever made that claim. If anything, America’s best wine writers have stressed exactly the opposite. It’s not Adler’s message, it’s the way he says it, by inferentially putting down knowledge in favor of some kind of blue-collar ignorance. “[H]e just wants Americans to consume wine with their meals – everyday!” Adler writes, third-person, on his website. Well, so do we all. But this anti-elitist stance (which is really a dumbed-down form of elitism) doesn’t help advance that goal.

Speaking of new books

We come now to The Wine Trials 2010, which was co-authored by Robin Goldstein, who many of you will remember was the prankster behind that hilarious phony Italian restaurant that won a Wine Spectator award. The new book “recommends 150 wines under $15 that outscored $50-$150 wines in brown-bag blind tastings.”

This time, the book is for real, and fine, as far as it goes; I myself frequently come across relatively inexpensive wines that out-score expensive ones, and I love pointing that out to Wine Enthusiast readers. What I find interesting is the discussion going on behind the scenes of Robin’s book. For example, in this review, Joe Briand, a wine buyer for a major restaurant group, digs into the concept of blind tasting and declares “I believe blind tastings tend to leave the subtle wines that I prefer at a distinct disadvantage to bigger bolder wines which ‘stick out’ more when consumed blind.” That remark, plus others, prompted Wine Spectator’s executive editor, Tom Matthews, always first out of the gate to defend blind tasting, to clarify [in the Comments section] his earlier assurances that Wine Spectator reviewers always taste blind. “I agree with you that we can learn more from a wine the more we know about it,” Tom wrote, and then immediately added, “But in order to evaluate a wine without biases (conscious or not), it’s important to taste blind.”

Do you see the inherent contradiction here? How can both statements be true? If you can learn more about a wine by knowing more about it, then why is it more important to taste it blind, instead of in some sort of context? Well, the answer, of course, is that context is vital for a proper tasting, as Tom knows. There are not simply two ways to taste, blind and open. There are gradations. But the blogosphere has created this impression than it’s an either/or proposition, and Tom, I think, is replying out of intimidation from the Woodward/Bernstein gotcha! crowd.

(By the way, Tom’s job now seems to be damage control: to peruse the wine blogosphere and reply immediately to anything that could possibly be negative.)

Goldstein himself points out the complexities of tasting in this Feb. 13 blog posting, in which he laments that certain luxury producers (he names LVMH [Yquem, Dom Perignon] in particular) “are overpriced,” and he indicts “the mainstream wine media” for not taking “brands to task for this.”

Well, as a representative of that mainstream wine media, here’s my reply. Anybody who reads my reviews knows that I’m not a slave to prices. I give crummy scores to expensive wines all the time. I don’t have to overtly accuse a wine company of taking advantage of image; my scores are the ultimate accusation. But in general, I agree with Goldstein. He’s on the mark when he writes, “My sense is that, especially when it comes to hazy markets like wine, real human beings—within certain constraints — generally anchor themselves to market prices that are imposed upon them, and generally pay for things what they’re told those things are worth.” That’s true; always has been in the luxury department, and always will be. But it’s also good to let people know that, if they’re serious about not wanting to get ripped off, they need to take the time to educate themselves. A stupid consumer will be taken advantage of every time; an informed one is far more impervious to manipulation.

Two articles recently caught my eye. Although they were not apparently related, I saw an underlying connection that speaks, perhaps, to the future of social media.

The first, on the front page of last Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle, was headlined “Cafe asks customers to turn off laptops and start talking.” It seems there’s a coffee shop right here in Oakland whose owner “is asking customers to leave their laptops at home and actually speak to each other.” Anyone who’s ever been in a free wi-fi environment like Starbucks is familiar with the situation: people hunkered down at tables, nursing a $3 latte for hours while surfing the web. “I don’t have anything against technology,” said the cafe’s owner, a young, hip-looking guy with a goatee (i.e. not some dinosaur Boomer who “doesn’t get it”), “but it’s not the same as looking someone in the eye and pressing the flesh.”

I’ve expressed some negative feelings in this blog over the last year about the way laptops and other personal digital devices, like cell phones, are intruding into the social contract. That contract is an old one, understood pretty much by everyone, and it relates to how we behave in shared social situations. In a crowded elevator, for example, most people will be silent and avoid making eye contact with strangers. On an airplane flight, passengers understand the concept of personal space, which includes audio space: don’t let your arms stick over into your neighbor’s area, don’t make unnecessary noise, etc.

What technology is doing to us is destroying the traditional social contract. Now, that person next to you in the elevator is just as likely to be yakking into a Bluetooth. The other day at my gym, a woman was screaming at the top of her lungs into her cell phone for a good half-hour, while the rest of us had to endure her drama. With laptops in cafes, it’s just the opposite: where ten years ago patrons might have been debating about politics, gossiping, or playing chess, today they’re absorbed in their own little worlds. They might as well be on the Space Shuttle as in a crowded room with other human beings. “It’s now socially acceptable to text during dinner parties or stand alone at a party and check email,” the Chronicle article acidly observed.

Not at my dinner parties!

The second article was sent to me by Ron Washam, the famous Hosemaster of Wine. It is an excerpt from a new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” by a Harpers Magazine writer, Jason Lanier. Lanier deconstructs many myths surrounding social media in a way I strongly agree with. His underlying message is that social media is not only not bringing us closer and making us better, more dextrous communicators, but in fact is achieving exactly the opposite. “I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished,” Lanier writes, in a devastatingly pinpoint j’accuse whose truth is hard to deny. Lanier also demolishes one of the more persistent myths of social media: that its “hive mind” nature, in which thousands or millions of individual human minds are collectivized digitally, is somehow superior to a mere “organic human.” This is the assumption made by those entrepreneurs (and I’ve recently written about them) who are launching all these new “people’s wine tastings,” in which the collective wisdom of the crowd is said to be more trustworthy than the judgment of an individual expert. “The most tiresome claim of the reigning digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than antediluvian paid experts,” Lanier writes. Tiresome, indeed.

The connection between the two articles is that there is a backlash setting in against social media. In the first case, real people, such as the cafe owner, are starting to understand how divisive technology can be (and it’s interesting that their customers are beginning to agree with them). In the second case, academics are questioning the metaphysics of social media, not just analyzing it, but peering into its destructive potential. So we have two prongs moving together in a pincer movement: normal people on the ground and the philosophers of the academy. That is now movements form, and generate momentum.