I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of the never-ending debate about whether drinking a little wine is good or bad for you.

If the average American consumer is totally confused by now, I don’t blame her. Wine causes cancer. Wine prevents cancer. Wine lowers the risk of strokes. No, it doesn’t. Wine prevents heart attacks…or maybe it doesn’t.

My own opinion is that humankind has been drinking wine for thousands of years, and when a dietary and behavioral habit like that is so engrained, it must have positive value, from an evolutionary point of view. Species do not develop traits that tend to cause their demise. Quite the opposite. Evolution made food tasty to us so that we would eat and thrive. Evolution made sex delightful to us so that we would reproduce. (I’m not saying reproduction is the only reason to have sex, but you get the point.) And evolution made wine taste good because wine is good for us. End of story.

Yet there are always those neoprohibitionists who work overtime to get the rest of us to stop drinking wine. Case in point: a lady, Pat Ferguson. She wrote the other day “that the word is out (and I’ve been saying this for a long, long time) that wine ain’t so fine for your health after all…” and that “those who purported its benefits for so long were owners of vineyards.” !!!!

Easy target here. I’ve covered a lot of news over the years about scientific research on wine and health, and I can’t recall a single instance in which the studies were conducted by owners of vineyards. Or winemakers. Or cellar rats. So that’s a silly statement. More to the point is Ferguson’s citation of a study that (quoting Ferguson) points to moderate wine drinking “as causing an increase in breast cancer risk by as much as 15% in women.” The study was by a medical professor at Brigham Women’s Hospital, Wendy Chen.

You know that’s going to cause millions of women to worry about drinking. I did a little research into this study and found that it’s far less conclusive than Ferguson would have you believe. For one, even if it’s true, the study stressed that the slight risk of higher cancer “is more than offset” by the positive benefits to the heart, according to this article.

Furthermore, “the study authors said no evidence exists to show that giving up drinking will lower a woman’s risk of breast cancer.” Another article, in the Nov. 1 Washington Post, covered Chen’s study, but also reported a new study on resveratrol’s possible prevention of diabetes and obesity, which would “extend [people's] lives” and explain the French paradox whereby some people eat vast quantities of fats and cholesterol (paté, cheese, butter, eggs) and have low rates of heart attacks and strokes.

We live in an information-saturated society. Every day, scientists around the world are conducting studies at universities and research institutes, and if you pay attention to the news, you’re going to hear totally contradictory information about everything, sometimes in the same news span. Instead of knee-jerk reactions to studies such as Ferguson’s, wise consumers ought to take the wide view, taking into account everything they know about wine drinking (including–and maybe especially–its soothing psychological effects) and then coming to their own conclusions. Anyhow, Ferguson’s reporting itself seems to have a personal agenda. “Having been a wine consumer at one time in my life,” she explains, she now abstains, implying that the alcoholism her father suffered from is the reason why. I, personally find the advice of recovering addicts to be notoriously unreliable.

When I was in Napa yesterday, I was talking to a guy who’s pretty tuned into the valley’s wine culture. Our conversation ranged over a variety of topics, not just wine, but the economy, politics, Occupy Wall Street, etc., and obviously we got onto the issue of the declining middle class, which seems to be the big domestic story in the country.

At one point, we were driving down Highway 29, through Oakville and Rutherford, looking at all those famous wineries, and I said that I often wonder how they’re all doing in this recession. I said I can’t believe they’re not hurting. My friend had actually read my post from a few days ago on “Why more wineries aren’t failing” and he agreed that the banks probably are holding back from doing more foreclosures; but he agreed also that even if the wineries aren’t going bankrupt or having to sell themselves, many of them are probably deep in debt and struggling, especially those whose retail prices are in the medium tier (hard to define, but let’s say $20-$60). The extremely low-priced wines, such as those produced by Bronco, some Gallos, Bogle, some of Don Sebastiani’s stuff like Smoking Loon, Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi, Red Truck and Big House are probably doing pretty well, because they make sound wines at around $10 a bottle, and that’s the sweet spot for consumers these days. But the middle class isn’t going to buy a middle-priced bottle these days, the way they used to, because they either don’t have the money, or are afraid to spend it.

“If you think about it,” my friend said, “the middle-priced wines are kind of like the Middle Class Americans. They’re both being squeezed out of existence.”

Middle class Americans are indeed under pressure, a fact that Republicans, Democrats and everyone in between can agree on (although solutions to the problem appear to be intractable). The problem with the mid-priced wines is that they’ve pretty much targeted themselves to Middle Class consumers. High end drinkers won’t buy them (I don’t want to get into naming specific brands, but think of the stretch of wineries from, say, just south of the Oakville General Store to Calistoga along 29. You can choose just about any one you want). High end wine drinkers want Harlan, Hundred Acre, Futo. On the other hand, the financially strapped consumer (student, blue collar worker, housewife on a budget, retiree) can’t afford $20 and up for their regular house wine, and so they turn to the cheapies. As a result, the more the Middle Class in America is pinched, the less wine the mid-priced wineries are able to sell to them.

It’s a vicious cycle, but I think my friend got it exactly right. These wineries have got to be hurting, but the banks are going light on them, for now. Things won’t recover for the mid-priced wineries until the economy recovers, employment starts rising, and consumers feel like they have some discretionary money to spend again.

I do want to comment on some remarks that Rob McMillan, who I think is a banker with Silicon Valley Bank, made on my “Why more wineries aren’t failing” post. Rob said “Only 7% of wineries describe themselves as being significantly weak,” which is a statement that needs examining. First of all, self-professed status reports, in any poll, are notoriously misleading, so I suspect that the percentage of wineries that are actually “significantly weak” is considerably higher than seven. Secondly, you’d have to define “significantly weak,” as opposed to merely “weak,” to understand this number precisely. Perhaps 67% described themselves as “weak,” but not “significantly weak.” These surveys all depend on how you ask the question.

Secondly, Rob wrote “grape prices are going up.” I suppose this could be true, especially after this vintage, which is going to be very low-yielding, by every account. However, the 2010 crop was a large one, the third biggest of the decade, and according to the California Dept. of Food and Agriculture, grape crush prices, measured as dollars per ton, were down considerably in 2010 from their 2009 highs.

Even if grape prices go up in 2011, such is the law of supply and demand that, if demand remains low for high end wines, it won’t matter. Soft demand will balance out high prices, which will put an additional squeeze on those $20-$60 wines. It’s all tied together: restore the Middle Class to fiscal health, and the mid-priced winery tier will recover.

I’ve often wondered why there haven’t been more winery failures or sales in California over the past three years, given the length and severity of the Great Recession. Sure, we’ve seen some, but nowhere near the quantity one might have thought.

It’s been my supposition either than (a) the pressure’s building and we’ll see a steadily increasing number of bankruptcies or forced sales in 2012, providing the recession continues, or even deepens, as now seems likely; or (b) that many winery owners, who are personally wealthy, simply have the means to hang on, until and if things turn around.

The problem with (b), I’ve realized, is that it’s not true. Some winery owners are indeed wealthy and can hunker down, perhaps for an indefinite period of time. But many aren’t. They lead pleasant lifestyles, and aren’t exactly poor, but most of their profits are plowed right back into the family business. So that leaves (a) as the likely scenario.

However, I had a conversation yesterday with someone well known in the wine industry as a veteran leader–someone who understands everything there is to know about leading a medium-sized family winery and navigating the tricky shoals of financial rapids. I asked him why we’re not seeing more changing of hands of winery ownership, and here’s what he replied, pretty much verbatim:

There’s actually a lot less wineries for sale than people might think, and the sellers are doing pretty good.

[Me] How could that be?

There’s a lot of liquidity in the market chasing not many deals.

Why?

The banks and wineries are working through a difficult economy and they’re much wsier than in the past: You don’t have banks foreclosing on wineries. You don’t see a lot of wineries in the press financially strained, even though they may be. The banks and wineries are managing this crisis better than in the past. I think the banks learned their lesson from the housing crisis. The’re wiser this time not to put everyone into foreclosure and run everything down.

The way I’m interpreting this is, there may well be a lot of winery owners who are “underwater,” not in the real estate sense but in the sense that they owe a tremendous amount of money to their lending institutions–money they don’t have, and don’t foresee having anytime soon. This historically leads to the classic foreclosure scenario Hollywood loves to portray–recall Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, fighting to persuade the Board of Directors of the Bailey Building and Loan Association to keep home loans flowing to the working poor, in It’s a Wonderful Life.

We hear a lot these days about banks not lending because they’re afraid of the security of their loans in this devastated economy. We do hear about foreclosures on homes. But maybe it’s true that, in wine country, the banks are much more hesitant to crack down on wineries. Most financial arrangements in wine country are made with local banks, and often there is a personal relationship between the winery family and the lending officials at the banks, the way there isn’t between an ordinary mortgage holder and, say, Bank of America.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the banks aren’t nervous. As financial institutions, they need their loans repaid. But they’re forced into the uncomfortable position of being between the Devil and the deep blue sea: if they crack down on late payments, thus forcing the family winery out of business, they lose, because they’ll probably never get repaid; the winery will be forced to sell at a loss, or only a fraction of what the business would be worth in a sound economy.

Better, from the bank’s point of view, to let things drift, come to some kind of private arrangement with the family, and keep their fingers crossed that 2012 will bring about an improvement in the economic climate.

Let’s all hope for that.

I’m asked to nominate people every year for induction into the Vintners Hall of Fame, but I never do, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s my aversion to groups, I don’t know. Anyhow, this year’s inductees were just announced, and I’d like to pay them hommage.

Peter Mondavi, Sr. Of course he belongs there, and it’s good that they put him in while Mr. Mondavi is still around to see it. He never was as famous as his older brother, Robert, but Mr. Mondavi truly is a living legend in Napa Valley, and it’s wonderful that the family has managed to retain ownership of Charles Krug Winery this long, while so many others have sold out to corporate interests or gone belly up. Here’s hoping Mr. Mondavi and his famous twinkle in the eye remain with us for many years to come.

Joe Heitz. People can quibble about what the first boutique winery and cult California wine were. For my money, it was Heitz, and the Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. It was the hottest wine in America for two decades; a great year, such as 1968 and 1974, set auction records. Heitz Cellars may not be as standout as it once was, but Joe Heitz, who started it all, deserves this recognition.

Myron Nightingale. He was Beringer’s chief winemaker for a long time, and trained his successor, Ed Sbragia, who brought Beringer to its highest highs during the 1990s. Mr. Nightingale less famously pioneered the use of the botrytis spore in the laboratory to artificially produce the dessert wine, called Nightingale in his honor, that is one of the best in California.

Richard Sanford. For my money, the most obvious choice this year. A Hall of Fame inductee should be a true pioneer, and Mr. Sanford is one of the most pioneering winemakers California has produced in the last two generations. He (and his former partner, Michael Benedict) practically invented the Santa Rita Hills appellation, planting its first grapes (at their Sanford & Benedict Vineyard) and early establishing its reputation for Pinot Noir. Mr. Sanford and his wife, Thekla, nowadays own and run the Alma Rosa Winery, continuing his still evolving legacy in Santa Barbara County.

John Parducci. Parducci Wine Cellars dates to 1933, the year Prohibition ended and so many new wineries sprang up. The winery has had its ups and downs, with the Parducci family eventually selling it, but Mr. Parducci has remained active in a number of ventures. He really helped put Mendocino County on the wine map.

With 2012’s five new inductees, the Vintners Hall of Fame now has 38 members. Only two of them are women: Zelma Long and Carol Meredith. I’m not smart enough to calculate that as a batting average (do you divide 2 by 38? 38 by 2?), but a major league baseball player would be returned to the minors if he was 2 for 38 (unless he was a pitcher. Timmy Lincecum AKA The Freak was 5 for 61 this year, for an average of .082). Granted that California (and the wine industry in general) has been female-weak for nearly all of its history, it’s still bizarre that the Hall of Fame can’t improve on this inequality. Maybe it’s partly my fault for not nominating anyone. Right off the top of my head, I can come up with suitable candidates, starting with Margrit Mondavi. And if a relatively young winemaker like Randall Grahm can be inducted (2010), how about Marimar Torres, Heidi Barrett, Genevieve Janssens, Margo van Staaveren, Merry Edwards? What about academics, like Linda Bisson and Ann Noble? Would anyone truly object to Julia Child, even though she wasn’t, strictly speaking, a wine person? I mean, neither was Gerald Asher (2009). While Mr. Asher was a wine writer while Ms. Child was a food writer, still, Ms. Child’s contributions to wine, via her books and T.V. shows, were stronger and more lasting than Mr. Asher’s, profound as his have been.

I’ve been something of a debunker about social marketing advice companies that claim they can help wineries increase sales through the use of social media. Whenever I see such claims, I usually think that the only sales that are going to be increasing are those of the social marketing advice company!

Their claims are often hyperinflated, based on taking advantage of the ignorance and insecurity many winery personnel feel when it comes to social media. They may take a single instance of success, and use it to imply that you, too, can achieve similar results–if only you hire the company. There’s something of the late-night T.V. infomercial about it: get-rich-quick real estate schemes, lose weight instantly, tone and harden those buttocks! Call now, operators are standing by!

I’ve asked, many times on this blog, for concrete evidence that a professional approach to social media (whatever that means) can increase sales. And to tell the truth, nobody’s risen to the challenge. Oh, here and there someone will talk about some anecdote, or they’ll argue, on purely theoretical grounds, that it works. But theory and reality don’t always agree. If they did–well, I better not get into politics!

But then I was reading the N.Y. Times on Tuesday and saw this article describing how a social marketing advice company called BzzAgent is apparently succeeding in boosting sales of Black Box, the Constellation-owned 3 liter wine to which I’ve given plenty of Best Buy reccos (and even the occasional and highly valued Editor’s Choice) over the years in Wine Enthusiast. (I’ve also panned their wines. At the equivalent of $6.25 for a regular bottle, it’s not likely they’re all going to be good.)

Black Box/Constellation hired BzzAgent (clever name, with hints of “buzz” and busy bees) to jack up sales, after the company concluded that it did not want to do traditional advertising, for a number of reasons. So I guess this is a form of guerrilla marketing: the article tells how a BzzAgent representative, who seems to have been hanging out at a supermarket, accosted a stranger who was about to buy another brand of boxed wine and warned her, “Don’t do it!” Instead, the agent told the woman to buy Black Box. The Times story implies that she did.

Never mind that there are all sorts of bizarre inconsistencies to this version of events. Did the BzzAgent person (who is described as “an unemployed lawyer”) just happen to be in the supermarket wine aisle when this event transpired, or was she trolling there? If the latter, did the supermarket management know that a weirdo lady was lurking in the wine aisle, approaching innocent strangers and interfering with their shopping? If I had been the shopper, I would have told the lady to stop bothering me. When strangers stop you in public and start talking at you, the general instinct is to assume they’re crazy or panhandling, and move on.

Still, I’ll take the Times story at its word. It tells also how the BzzAgent lady hosts “blind tasting parties” for her friends at her home and serves them Black Box. When those friends see how good the wine is, they buy it, or so the article suggests.

Supermarket encounters and blind tasting parties are not, of course, social media, but they are birds of the same color: they all bypass the traditional marketing and P.R. approaches in favor of what might be called consumer-to-consumer communication. The supermarket approach is one on one; the blind tasting party approach might be one on twenty; and a Tweet might be one on a hundred thousand: but the principle is the same.

I checked out BzzAgent’s website. By this morning they already had a lead link to the N.Y. Times article, a good sign that their people have a fast reaction time. There are also a lot of interesting articles, including one on how not to waste time online (which is something I think a lot of people and companies do). Number 4 is “Mix it up. Dull content is like Spam.”

That is so true. The biggest mistake most wineries make online is to establish a website, put some stuff up, and then let it molder for months if not years. I routinely get tasting samples in the mail for which the accompanying information is inadequate. So I’ll go to the website for info, only to find that the vintage hasn’t been updated for two years! That would be a scandal in the Heimoff household. When I missed a post last month due to my hangover, I heard from some angry readers. I almost expected mobs with pitchforks to hunt me down here in Oakland. So, yes, “dull content is like Spam.” In fact, it’s worse than Spam. With Spam (I don’t mean the meat, I mean junk email), you expect nothing, which is why most of us set up spam filters to weed it out. But when you deliberately go to a website expecting something new and useful, only to find a bunch of old, boring stuff, it’s an insult. You actually feel resentment to the company for being lazy and uncaring and unprofessional. Not good.

So in the case of Black Box, I’d have to say they’re being pretty smart about it. I’m not clever enough to say whether or not traditional advertising would or wouldn’t work for them. But if they can get buzz going at house parties, in the supermarket and online, more power to them. Just keep those unemployed lawyers away from me!

My old friend, Alan Goldfarb, who works in winery PR, asked for my views on the future of PR–what works, what doesn’t. Here’s what I emailed him. I’ll go into more detail later in this post:

I think PR is more important than ever to help a winery stand out from the competition. But it has to be good PR in order to be effective.

Otherwise, the winery is just throwing money away. The best PR firms identify the relevant media outlets, and then work to cultivate relationships with key people. A pitch that’s simply sent out in a blast email or mailing is a waste of time, in my opinion.

There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to a pitch. A good PR agent knows her writers and editors. She crafts pitches individually and personally. Finally, a smart PR agent understands that writers often are looking for trend pieces, which are very popular with publishers these days. Instead of just pitching your client’s particular story (e.g., “used to be a belly dancer, now owns a winery”), try pitching a story on “The trend of nightclub entertainers, including belly dancers, standup comics and vocalists, to start up wineries.” That is much more likely to elicit a writer’s interest than one particular story.

[That's what I wrote.] PR, properly speaking, is simply the function of getting a writer’s or editor’s (and, via them, the public’s) attention for the publicist’s client. What the writer does, once you’ve attracted his notice, is beyond the publicist’s control, of course. But there are things a publicist can do to increase the chance that the writer will take the bait and actually write about the client.

In this market of increased competition from all over the world, not to mention downward pressure on prices and an increasingly volatile, unpredictable market due to the entrance of a brand new demographic, people under 30, wineries need more help than ever in getting people to notice them. Unless the winery has a captive audience (maybe they’re selling 90% through the tasting room and/or club), or if they’re exceptionally well known and in demand (Harlan), most wineries really do need to get out there and hustle.

When I say the best PR firms identify the relevant media outlets, and work to cultivate relationships with key people, I know whereof I speak. I’ve dealt with a lot of PR people for a long time. I’ve seen them come and go, and learned a few tricks of the trade, because it’s people like me whom the publicists practice their craft upon. When you’re on the receiving end of the pitch, you see how the pitchers do their thing.

If a publicist sends out a mass email, it has a deadening, boring effect. I don’t want to feel like the sender didn’t even know my name, like I’m just some digital bit in a faceless electronic mob. I want my publicists to know who I am, who I work for, what my needs are. I want them to want to help me do my job better, so I can help my editors do their jobs better. That’s what this thing is all about: we all have jobs, and we all should be trying to help those with whom we work do their jobs better.

A mass email tells me nothing. Besides, they’re usually so blandly written that they’re more like a lesson in how not to write a press release. Publicists try to inject a sense of excitement into a blast email, but it almost never works. Instead, it just feels phony-excited–like the publicist herself was bored with the assignment, and couldn’t even pretend to find anything interesting to say about it. Of course, that’s a dilemma for a publicist. What do they do when the client has an essentially boring story, and insists on telling it in a boring way? I don’t know. But a good publicist, it seems to me, must be like a good psychotherapist–be willing to tell the client when the message sucks, and how to improve it.

The trend thing I wrote about is real (although the specific example of the belly dancer is pretty silly). I could have substituted “professional athletes”, “rock and roll stars” or “movie stars.” Which do you think would make a more compelling story: Boz Scaggs has a winery, or “Rock stars, seeking life after the hits stop coming, turn to the wine business.” I might read the former, but if I saw a headline, with some familiar names, along the lines of the latter, I would definitely read it.

I, personally, don’t know how many rock stars (or athletes, or movie stars) are starting wineries, so when a publicist pitches a specific instance to me, I’ll reply, “If you can do your homework and come up with a list of six other rock stars [or athletes or movie stars] who also have started wineries in California, I’ll write the article.” That turns the story into a trend piece. Of course, the publicist has to do a little more work, but she’s basically guaranteed to get a story that will at least mention her client–which is better than no story at all.

It’s very hard these days to succeed in anything to do with the wine industry if you’re lazy.

One final consideration: Under other circumstances, I might have thought that PR is a dead science, like alchemy or midwifery, a practice that thrived once upon a time, but has now lost its rationale. There is something medieval about PR: the publicist as cloaked magician, in possession of mystic secrets that, with a dash of eye of the newt and a swift “hocus pocus,” can unlock the mysteries of political and economic success. Surely, in this age of the Internet and social media, there must be more modern ways of publicity.

But as it turns out, there aren’t. PR may someday be an anachronism, but today it remains a vital, if someone untransparent, way of doing business. The tools of PR have changed–the press kit is on the way out, replaced by electronic tools, for example–but the underlying concept remains the same: to persuade the public to pay attention to the client.