I was surprised to read that “consumers care about alcoholic strength, and are seeking out wines with lower alcohol levels than before” in four countries: the UK, US, Germany and China.

That’s what a new study found. It was reported online on this South African website.

It’s bizarre, because today (Tuesday) I’m flying up to Washington State to deliver a 30 minute talk on alcohol levels: are they trending up or down, what do consumers want, are high alcohol wines better, etc. etc.

In preparing my remarks, I went over my own attitude toward alcohol levels in wine. I think I’ve said many times on my blog and elsewhere that I don’t particularly care if they’re high or low. As long as the wine is balanced and offers pleasure, ABV can be anything at all. That’s my take; it may not accord with yours or anyone else’s.

Here’s what I wonder. We don’t know exactly what the authors of the study asked consumers. If it was an open-ended question like, “Do you wish your wines were lower in alcohol?” I’m sure people would have said yes. I would answer yes to that question.

But I doubt if that was the context. If consumers were asked this question: “Do you wish your wines were lower in alcohol, even if that made them taste worse?”, I bet the answer would be an unqualified no. Obviously, people wish alcohol levels were lower because they want to be able to drink and drive without getting busted, and they may not want to get buzzed after a glass or two. I hedged that comment: “may not want to get buzzed” because I think most wine drinkers like getting buzzed. Do we really need to overlook the inconvenient truth that wine gets you buzzed? I don’t think so. One of the reasons I like wine is because it makes me high and it’s legal.

But consumers like fruit. We know this from every metric available. They vote with their wallets: if it’s Chardonnay they want pineapples and pears. If it’s Cabernet they want blackberries and cassis. If it’s Pinot Noir they want cherries. And on and on. The report stated, “[consumers’] ideal wine would have an abv of 10.5% or less. In China, most consumers favour wines with 8.5% to 10.5% abv.” Do these “consumers” have even a remote idea how wine is actually made? Do they understand that a table wine of “10.5% or less” would taste acidic and horrible? In fact it would probably have so much residual sugar that it might as well be a dessert wine, and a bad one at that. Is that what people want?

I don’t think so. This debate over alcohol levels is a good one, and I welcome it. Wine quality advances by fits and starts; winemakers need to strike a balance between what they themselves want to make, what their terroir permits them to make, and what the consumer expects. No easy task. But they must be scratching their heads and banging them against the wall when they read that consumers want richness without ripeness, flavor without alcohol, fruit before the pips are brown. My take home lesson is that we have got to educate consumers–not only in this country but in China–that their expectations are unreasonable, verging on insane. If they want alcoholic beverages below 11 or even 12 percent, may I suggest beer.

I came across this YouTube the other day of Michael Mondavi being interviewed by a guy in Italy about wine blogs. Among other things, Michael said: “… my daughter and her friends do not look at Wine Spectator, Decanter. They get emails from friends…they go to the blog…it’s interactive…and they trust the blogs more than they trust the critics and magazines.”

It’s nice to see a guy of Michael’s age give props to the blogs. It’s not always easy for a Baby Boomer to “get it.” But then, Michael is the eldest son of Robert Mondavi, and nobody in the history of wine better understood just how the intricate mechanisms of marketing, P.R. and technology mesh than Bob. I don’t know how much Robert Mondavi knew about the Internet before he died, in 2008 at the age of 94. He’d been in failing health for some time. But I suspect that, had he been physically able, Bob would have been deeply involved online today, especially in videos. He was deeply photogenic, even into old age, and he had a playful, natural way of interacting with the camera, as this YouTube shows. Michael, in his welcoming video on the website of his Folio Fine Wine Partners, seems a bit more self-conscious compared to his father’s effortless ease. Michael’s younger brother, Tim, shows more of his father’s geniality in videos; check out this YouTube as an example. At any rate, it’s probably unfair to compare the sons to the father. Robert was, literally, incomparable.

What Robert got, and what Michael was referring to, was the importance to a vintner of establishing a personal relationship with his customers. Of course, that relationship isn’t really “personal” the way I have personal relationships with my family, friends and neighbors. You don’t really “meet” anyone through the media. My 2,500 Facebook “friends” are friends only in a strictly defined sense of the word. But Robert Mondavi knew that a bottle of wine that has a face, place and personality associated with it will stand a better chance of being bought than one that floats anonymously in a vast sea of bottles. So much the better once a name becomes branded, and no name in the history of American wine has been more potently or successfully branded than that of “Robert Mondavi.” That the company over-extended its brand, leading ultimately to its demise, takes nothing away either from Robert Mondavi’s astuteness (or our appreciation of it), or from his legacy, which teaches us that branding is the essential cornerstone of business success. It’s not possible, obviously, for every winery to have a face as iconic as Robert Mondavi’s; and I suspect that most winery principles would not want their faces out there, the way Robert’s was. Robert was, in some respects, a performer. He used to remind me of a Vaudevillian, an old trooper whose philosophy could be expressed as “The show must go on.” No matter how he was feeling, when it came time for him (and his wife, Margrit) to go onstage, they squared their shoulders and rose to the occasion.

With all the talk nowadays about whether and how much a winery person should tweet, Facebook, blog and all the rest, I wonder why more winery owners and winemakers don’t become the face of their brands. We humans are above all a visual species; before we had invented reading and writing, we used our eyes to scan what was in front of us, telling friend from foe, truth teller from liar. Humans have not changed, only technology. Which California winemakers are doing the best job of getting their faces out there and symbolizing their brands? I’d like to hear your suggestions.

There’s always some tension between wineries and the associations that represent their regions. The association acts on behalf of its members, but ultimately, on behalf of itself: any organization’s #1 Darwinian duty is to survive. A winery, on the other hand, has first and foremost to promote its own interests. Sometimes, the interests of the association and the winery do not coincide.

There’s another problem, too. In some cases, winery members pay association fees based on their case production. That means that larger members can have more say in how the association is governed–or at least, be perceived as having more say. This can lead to sore feelings at little wineries, who may feel that their voices aren’t being heard at management level.

I’m not going to name any specific regional associations here. But I will say I’ve worked with them all, through many of their changes in personnel and strategy. I’ve gotten to respect some for their effectiveness, while not having a whole lot of respect for others that seem to just limp along year after year. So here’s my advice: six things a successful winery association should do.

1. Represent all your members without appearing to favor any of them. The worst thing that can happen to a regional association is to become riven with internal political strife. I’ve seen it happen. An association can go from relevant to irrelevant overnight, and it can take years to recover–if it ever does. The best association executive directors will stand up for what they think is right, even if it means disagreeing with powerful members.

2. Work hard to earn the trust of the media. The media, after all, is your amplifier to the consumer. You, the association, don’t communicate directly with the public, for the most part; the media does that for you. If the media likes and respects you, and if you’re helpful to them, they’re more likely to want to write about your region.

3. Understand things from the winery’s point of view. An association might believe its function is to promote the appellation it represents. This is only partially true. Yes, you want the public to know and trust the region, be it Dry Creek Valley, Santa Barbara County or Fort Ross-Seaview. You want to communicate the unique traits of your region, everything from the climate and restaurants to various recreational things to do. But individual wineries sometimes fear, and rightfully so, that promoting the region has the unintended consequence of promoting their competitors. This is the concern of proprietors. The successful executive director must combine the empathy of a mom for her child with the hard head of a corporate CEO.

4. The way people look for information these days is through the Internet, so why do so many regional winery associations have such boring websites? Granted, things are better than they used to be. But still, some websites are hard to negotiate. They’re clumsy looking, confusingly organized, with inadequate search functions. They’re not places that people want to return to every few days or weeks to see what’s up.

5. Figure out how to keep the association relevant. Wineries today have Twitter, Facebook and other social media outreaches to the public. They blog, make YouTubes, stage events (both virtual and “real”), and in general do a better job of getting out there onto the streets to greet old friends and make new ones. In a certain sense, they no longer even need a big winery association to help them with promotion. Granted, an association with clout can be influential in legislative, international trade and marketing areas, but not all associations have the clout to hire lobbyists or have an office in D.C. or overseas. So the smaller associations in particular really have to offer wineries a reason to support them.

6. Reach out to other, non-wine regional associations in your area and partner with them. Many regions have tourist, convention and other kinds of associations to promote their restaurants, recreational opportunities and the like. This is the age of networking. Nobody makes it alone anymore. It takes the power of collaboration to make things happen, to smash through the clutter of noise out there. As an example, consider ZAP’s (Zinfandel Associates & Producers) partnerships with businesses,  such as The Saint Francis Foundation, Lot18, Wine Enthusiast, BevMo and KQED television. Granted, ZAP is not a regional organization, but it behaves like one. ZAP shows how the power of “we” is greater than the power of “me.”

The subject of corked wine never seems to go away, and never will, as long as wine bottles are stoppered with natural cork.

Fred Swan asserts that the rate of flawed corks is 2%-8%. That’s a big range. I would shy away from the upper estimate, which in my experience is too high. But then again, people have different thresholds of perception for TCA. I think I’m pretty sensitive to it, but I’ve been at tastings where others (usually Dan Berger) detected (or claimed they detected) TCA and I didn’t. So.

Then there’s the Cork Quality Council. For as long as I’ve been aware of their activities (a long time), I haven’t had a particularly high opinion of them. Hard to say why, even after all these years. I don’t blame them, obviously, for being the vocal defender of the cork industry, but there’s always been something heavy-handed concerning the way they go about it.

Fred’s list of “things we don’t agree on” is too interesting to pass by. Here’s my take on his bullet points.

1. The percentage of wines in the market or consumers’ cellars suffering from cork-derived TCA contamination. I’d put it around 2%. It used to be higher, but I do believe the cork industry has made inroads in solving the problem. However, a single flawed cork is one too many.

2. How to measure that. There’s probably no reliable way to measure it. We’ll have to make do with anecdotal information, such as my estimate of 2%. That’s based on about 4,500 wines I taste a year.

3. How to define “wines in the market”. What’s so puzzling about this? Wines in the market means wines in the market.

4. The quality/validity of the cork industry’s supporting data, my data or just about anyone else’s. See #2, above.

5. The interpretation of their data or mine. What?

6. How bad the effects of TCA contamination really are on a wine as compared to other contaminations such as brettanomyces or dimethyl sulfide (obviously this would also depend on the level of contamination). TCA contamination is always bad. Sometimes it’s unbearable. We don’t have to get into the game of “which form of contamination is worse, TCA or brett?” It’s like someone dying of brain cancer who comes down with a case of anthrax. “Which do you prefer, darling, the cancer or the anthrax?”

7. Whether or not there’s any relevance to the fact that “corking” occurs after a winemaker has relinquished control of the wine, as compared to issues with fermentations, sulfides, brett, etc. There’s no relevance. I mean, if you get a horrid bottle of wine, who cares when it turned horrid? It’s just horrid, that’s all.

8. The significance of consumer preference in determining whether or not cork is the best closure for wine. Obviously, marketers have to take consumer preference into account. I don’t think there’s any question that screwtops are cleaner than corks. But it’s also true that consumers misunderstand screwtops and have for years. Why? It’s not the writers’ fault. We writers routinely tell consumers not to panic over screwtops, but they don’t listen to us. Put the blame on sellers, I say, especially merchants and on-premise wine servers. That’s where I think you get the attitude.

9. The pros and cons of alternate closures. I hate most of the artificial closures, especially those rubbery things, often luridly colored, that expand once you get them out, so you’re unable to restop the bottle. I’ll take a screwtop anyday.

10. The type of closure we would prefer to have on wine that we bought for our own consumption, whether immediate or after 15 years in the cellar. Here’s where we get into arcane discussions worthy of Talmudic scholars. Does wine age in a screwtop? I don’t know. Do you? I’m sure that studies will be brought to my attention proving every which way. All I can tell you is that there’s nothing romantic about opening a very old bottle and finding the cork a slimy mass of blackened, filthy goo.

I’m unable to participate in Rusty Eddy’s class on Winery P.R. at U.C. Davis this year, because I have to be–no, make that want to be in Santa Barbara on Dec. 2, but I promised Rusty I’d give the class some promo, so here it is: It’s this Friday, from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. You can sign up online here, for a cost of $190. Worth it!

Participants in the class, at which I’ve guest lectured for years, are winery P.R. people, or those who want to be. They’re looking, I suppose, for any additional insight in how to be better at their jobs. Four or five years ago, there was barely a mention of social media in the class. Instead, attendees wanted to know about stuff like how to prepare a press kit, write a press release, and how to pitch an article to a wine writer. They also wanted to know about the 100 point system and the more arcane aspects of wine criticism.

All of a sudden, around 2008, it began to shift. Suddenly, blogs, Twitter and Facebook were all the rage. It was as profound a paradigm shift as you could ask for.

I wonder what the students will want to know about this year. My own feeling–and that’s all it is, a feeling, because I have no empirical evidence to support it–is that the social media thing may have peaked when it comes to winery P.R. I just don’t sense the excitement, the breakthrough gee-whiz breathlessness that accompanied social media 2008-2010. In that little window of time, social media seemed to be the be-all and end-all of winery P.R. and marketing, the magic bullet that would overturn traditional forms of publicity and replace it with an online revolution in which anyone could participate, more or less for free. Heady stuff, for a winery on a budget.

Looking back now, during this winter of economic and social discontent, it’s hard to believe how naive everyone was. Did people really believe that social media could sell out a warehouse of SKUs, with a single keystroke? They did. But that’s what happens when you have stardust in your eyes: you don’t see things clearly.

Yes, there always were voices of reason arguing that social media was but a single arrow in the quiver, and possibly not even the one that went the furthest or sank the deepest. But those voices were all but drowned out by competing views that social media had changed everything, was destroying traditional P.R., and would reward those who hopped on its bandwagon while punishing everyone who stayed off.

Be honest now. Does anyone still make that claim?

I think a couple things combined to make social media less of a star than it purported to be. One was inherent in the concept itself: social media is merely a way for people to mass-communicate. That’s good, but what does it have to do with selling wine? Not much. People said social media would replace other sorts of sales techniques with peer-to-peer recommendations. Actually, that happened all too well. The peer-to-peer space is shared by an expanding universe of sources. A million peer-to-peer networks result in a million different wines being recommended, each for about 15 nanoseconds of fame.

Another reason the social media revolution failed was because of the Recession. Funny how an event that seemed historic at the time can be vaporized by another event that has truly Historic with-a-capital-H ramifications: namely, the collapse of the global economy. Maybe, just maybe social media could have been more helpful for wineries, if there hadn’t been a meltdown and people actually had the disposable income to buy wine. But that’s a hypothetical situation we can dispense with.

Everything feels like it’s in stasis these days. Black Friday and Cyber Monday aside, nobody’s buying, nobody’s spending, nobody’s hiring, nobody’s lending. If I were a young grad student wanting to move into winery P.R. and attending Rusty’s class, I think my first question to his guests (Sara Schneider from Sunset and Paul Mabray from VinTank) would be: Now that we’ve seen the limitations of social media for winery P.R., what traditional approaches do you believe will work? If I had to answer that question, I’d say that in addition to (not in place of) social media, a winery should have someone representing it who is ultra-skilled at captivating the media. That person might come from internal P.R. or external P.R., or it might be someone like Robert Mondavi, Gary Pisoni or Jayson Woodbridge, none of whom needed P.R. agents at all because they were such dynamic geniuses on their own. Of course, not everyone has that level of flash, which is why God invented public relations. As to the exact form of P.R. that works, impossible to say. It depends on the winery situation. If there were a formula, everyone would know it by now. Obviously, there isn’t.

Anyhow, like I wrote, I’ll be in beautiful Santa Barbara this week, reporting for Wine Enthusiast, doing a big blind tasting of local wines and, hopefully, coming up with interesting posts for my blog!