I think about my job of wine tasting and reviewing a lot. One aspect of it that I turn over in my mind is, Would my take on wines change if I reviewed only wines from prime coastal areas? Now, as you know, I taste everything that’s sent to me, whether it’s from the Central Valley or the Anderson Valley and all points inbetween.

California, being the vast state it is, produces a vast range of different quality wines. Some are truly dreadful. Some are world class. That’s no insult. I could say the same about France or Italy.

Since I taste everything that comes in, that means I’m tasting a lot of awful wine. Readers of Wine Enthusiast will never know just how many awful wines I actually taste, because it’s the magazine’s policy not to publish scores below 80, not even in the public online database. But there are plenty of them, believe me. And due to the limited number of pages in the Buying Guide, most scores from 80-82 don’t get published either. So let’s just say I’m tasting a great many flawed, indifferent wines.

I’ve often wondered how tasting bad wine affects my palate and my judgment. Does Rajat Parr taste bad wine? Does Parker? I honestly don’t know, but I doubt it. I think Rajat Parr and Mr. Parker taste only good wines — or, at least, wines that come from “superior” growing regions and are likely to be good if not great.

I put the word “superior” into quotation marks for a region. I don’t think anyone would differ if I said that Pauillac or Corton-Charlemagne are superior growing regions. I would hope no one would object if I say that Oakville is a superior growing region. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything from those areas is a great wine, but you get my point.

However, I want to be fair and delicate in how I phrase this. Is Lodi a superior growing region? Well, lots of people who make wine from there think it is. And maybe it will be, someday. But, to judge from my scores over many years — which is really the only objective way I have of knowing — Lodi is not a superior growing region. There may be good wines coming out of Lodi. There may be bargains. But for whatever reasons (we can debate that at another point), Lodi has not yet demonstrated that it is superior, the way Oakville is superior.

That means that the wines of Lodi are not as good as the wines of Oakville. What agonizes me is that there are some really smart, committed winemakers working in inland California whose efforts I support. Twisted Oak, for example. They’re in Calaveras County, which has not been a hotbed of quality. But they’re doing some really interesting things, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that just because they’re in Calaveras, their wines aren’t worthy of attention.

But I’m just trying to make a point. No one person can taste everything. So, if you’re a critic like I am, is it better for your palate to taste just wines from superior growing regions, or to at least try to taste everything, until the quantity of incoming becomes impossible? (Which, in my case, is not the case. Yet.)

I can see an argument on both sides. If I taste everything, I’m better able to draw distinctions between greatness and mediocrity. That seems obvious. On the other hand, tasting a lot of bland wine can have a coarsening effect on the palate. That can be detrimental to one’s ability to detect very fine differences, even between great wines, such as come from Oakville. That would not be a good thing to happen to a wine critic.

So I’m torn. I really wonder what my readers think. The great tasters of history and literature — Michael Broadbent, Hugh Johnson, Alexis Lichine, Professor Saintsbury, H. Warner Allen — tended to taste only great crus and growths. In our own time, the master sommeliers probably tend only to taste wines that, in their estimation, are likely candidates to be served in their white tablecloth restaurants. They taste, in other words, at the most rarified levels. Whereas I, Steve, in California, am the most democratic (with a small “d”) of tasters, treating the Central Valley and Napa Valley with precisely the same level of respect, namely, wrapped in a brown paper bag.

Would I do my job better if I gave up the “inferior” places and concentrated only on the coast? Would that be an insult to all the hard-working winemakers who labor inland? Would it make me — Steve — a better, more reliable taster? Like I said at the beginning, I think about my job a lot, and I’ve just taken you on a little tour of my mind.

Bill Smart is the head PR guy at Dry Creek Vineyard, a talented communicator and a nice guy, to boot. He was at the Bloggers Conference back in June, and has now written a thoughtful piece about his impressions over at Palate Press.

I agree with lots that he wrote — but not all. So let me respectfully set out a few of my differences, while emphasizing that, overall, Bill’s article is an accurate representation of where winery P.R. stands in relation to social media.

Bill sets up something of a straw dog when he posits a fundamental difference between bloggers (the implication is that they’re younger, although there were plenty of older bloggers in Walla Walla) and “traditional media.” “For starters,” says Bill, “bloggers do not want to be talked ‘at.’ They want to have a conversation.”

Okay, deconstruction time! First of all, I’m going to start pulling out what few hairs I have left, next time I hear the dreaded “TM” phrase: “traditional media.” This has become a form of invective and an expletive that displays some kind of bias — whether along age or other grounds, I couldn’t say; but when it’s used in a pro-blogging article, it’s usually freighted with negative implications toward print journalists. Why?

Since when is it true that “traditional media” wants to be “talked ‘at’”? I don’t. Anybody who’s ever known me in this business knows that’s not true. You can’t talk ‘at’ me because if you try to, I’ll interrupt and engage you in a conversation — yes, the same type of conversation Bill Smart says bloggers want.

And I’m not the only “trad media” guy who doesn’t want to be “talked ‘at.’” I know a lot of Baby Boomer wine writers and none of them wants a lecture, diatribe or sound bite from anybody. So let’s dispense with this notion that bloggers are somehow fundamentally different in the form of human interaction they like. We’re all the same.

Bill also celebrates the speed with which communication between a P.R. guy like himself and a blogger occurs. “I can pitch a blogger a story or idea in the morning and before lunch that idea may have turned into a blog topic, posted and available for comment.” Yes, this is true. But it’s a double-edged sword, or maybe a triple-edged one. First, such immediate publication basically rules out any form of research or investigation by the blogger. Maybe that’s what P.R. people want: Just take what I say and throw it up there on the Internet, without bothering to find out if it’s true, or put it in context. That’s a huge problem with instant publication.

Then too, because of “the sheer volume of information that is published and made available for consumption” (Bill’s words), today’s blog post has a life span of 24 hours, at most. The next day, there’s another blog post, and yesterday’s content is as fresh as an expired carton of milk. So, yes, blogging can give a P.R. guy 15 minutes of fame. But with a thousand wine blogs out there, all competing for content, everybody else is going to get the same 15 minutes, sooner or later — and nobody is going to get repeated exposure (unless his name is Randall Grahm). That doesn’t give an individual winery an advantage. It just means everybody’s profile is raised a little higher.

Bill’s final point about the advantages of blogging is that “Wine blogs have allowed, for the first time, the consumer to enter into the dialogue about a particular wine topic. Traditionally, media never allowed their consumers to have a voice.” I would phrase this a little differently: “Wine blogs have expanded the opportunity for the consumer to enter into dialog with the wine press.” I mean, when he says traditional media “never allowed…consumers to have a voice,” Bill makes it sound like this was a deliberate, calculated elitist intolerance by “traditional media” to shut the public up. It’s like trad media were Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”

Traditional media never took that approach — at least, I didn’t. We made use of the technology as it became available. I’ve always had telephone calls from readers who demanded answers and explanations, which I was happy to give. When email became available, the number of people who talked — and complained — to me increased exponentially. Now we have blogs and other forms of social media that have pushed that envelope even further. I welcome that. So I don’t know if Bill meant to imply that we trad media people knowingly shut ourselves into ivory towers, pulled up the drawbridge and stocked the moat with piranhas. I hope not. I’ve always made myself accessible, and in all honesty, I don’t think that bloggers are any more personally accessible than I ever was. Someday, technology will bring us much further into hyper-interactivity and inter-connectedness than we are even today, but the fundamentals will still apply, especially in terms of P.R. A good pitch will still be a good pitch, and a lousy one won’t be made any better by being instantaneous.

I happily and heartily subscribe to Bill’s closing: “Ultimately, knowing your audience and creating lasting relationships built on trust and confidence will be the basis of success for any well integrated communications and marketing plan.” Amen, brother!

P.S. I told the Mondavi and Morton’s people I’d provide this link to the big event they’re planning for Oct. 7 to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Consider buying a ticket for a worthy cause.

I’m back from the American Wine Bloggers Conference, up in Walla Walla, where they had invited me to give the Friday “keynote” speech.

A strange, archaic word, “keynote.” I worked really hard writing that 30-minute talk, because there were lots of issues I wanted to address. I also took seriously the fact that the organizers had invited me. I’ve heard many speeches that were total B.S., boring, irrelevant, and so devoid of content, they seemed to have been written on the way into the conference hall. I didn’t want to commit any of those sins.

I thought it went pretty well. I’d been warned beforehand that the audience — 300 strong, most of whom had been drinking — might be a little hard to control, but they were polite, even intense as they listened. Over the next two days, at least 60 came up to me to say “thank you” and tell me they’d been touched. Well, good. I wanted people to feel touched, because I reached out to them. Those thank-you’s meant more to me than I can put into words. I’m an emotional guy, and my swim in the Blogosphere Sea has not been without choppy waters. To continue the maritime metaphor, I’ve sometimes felt like my little boat was surrounded by maneaters.

Random notes

On Live Wine Blogging: I first saw this phenomenon two years ago, when the Conference was in Santa Rosa. LWB is where all the attendees sit around tables in the ballroom, 6-7 to a table, laptops in front of them, and Twitter away like crazy as winemakers wander from table to table like minstrels, each allowed 5 minutes to pour and deliver a spiel about their wine, trying to make themselves heard above the 120-decibel din, while the bloggers record their mini-reviews (in 140 words or less, of course) before sending them into the ether. When the 5 minutes is over, an organizer rings a bell, and the winemakers wander off to their next table.

Looked at from the outside, it’s a bizarre spectacle. It reminded me of the Bingo games they used to have at the temple when I was a kid. I felt like Margaret Mead, parachuting down to observe the Samoans perform their exotic rituals. I told Reno Walsh, from Zephyr Adventures, one of the conference organizers and a good-looking blond, that it seemed a little weird evaluating wine under such crazy circumstances.

Reno Walsh

“It is kind of weird,” Reno acknowledged, “but, you know, speed blogging at least exposes them to the wine, and if they want to know more about it, they know where to go.” A little later, a blogger further enlightened me on speed blogging. “It makes me focus my thoughts, under pressure, and quickly come up with a few words to describe the wine.” And I thought to myself, “Hmm. That’s not so different from what I do.” After that, I relaxed and started getting into it. Just goes to show how easy it is to judge something from the outside without bothering to understand it. So Margaret Mead went Samoan — or was it a case of Stockholm syndrome?

What everybody was talking about: That Starbucks store in Seattle that will start serving wine and beer this Fall. If the concept works, Starbucks across the country may do it. Lots of buzz among the buzz-hungry bloggers.

Drinking beer with the townies: Late on Friday night, after the downtown wine bar crawl (Walla Walla is said to have the cutest Main Street in America), all I could think of was beer. So I parted ways from the rest of the bloggers (who were headed off, far as I could tell, to an after-hours party at Hardy Wallace’s cottage) and went to the hotel bar for a brewski. The place was packed with rowdy young locals drinking beer and shots. I took a seat and waited for the barkeep to notice me when one of them said to me, “Hey.” I looked over. “You one of those bloggers?” he asked.

Uh oh, I thought, I’m about to get the crap pounded out of me by Eastern Washington State rednecks. After all, Walla Walla isn’t far from the survivalist camps of Idaho. But no. The kids wanted to hear all about the conference. In fact, they seemed to know a little about wine. One of them was heavily into tattoos (double sleeve), so we bonded. When the barkeep wandered over and asked what I wanted, I said, “Beer — but why don’t you guys pick something local for me.” This elicited a conference and Tattoo Man finally called for something in a mug that was pretty good. We drank and talked for the longest time, without a word about blogs or social media. It was all good.

Wine discovery of the weekend: Washington State Semillon-Sauvignon Blanc blends.

A wish: Please, Lord, no more panels on “The Future of Wine Writing.” (Why do I suspect this prayer will not be answered?)

A vow: To give Twitter another try, after my ill-fated attempt last Spring. This, even though I warned the bloggers that the more they’re online tweeting, Facebooking, etc., the less they’re actually writing, and learning to write. You can’t be a good wine writer unless you write good, spell good and have good grammer.

Benjamin Franklin liked reporters, whom he called “printers.” He was one himself, and set down the premises for good journalism in a famous column, “Apology for Printers,” which he wrote, in his The Pennsylvania Gazette, on May 27, 1731. Addressing the inevitability that, no matter what the printer wrote, somebody would be pissed off, he said, “…if all Printers were determin’d not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed.” He concluded on a note of defiance to his critics: “I shall not therefore leave off Printing. I shall continue my Business. I shall not burn my Press and melt my Letters.”

The importance of a free press is taken for granted in Western democracies. Somebody has to be watchdog over the powers that be, whether they’re political, economic or religious. Granted, a free press often takes things too far. But ask yourself if you’d rather have the cacophony of America’s journalistic howl, or a one-party press such as exists in North Korea and Iran.

Journalism unfortunately is in a hard spot now. We all know it; we’ve been watching the pressures on traditional journalism mount up for years. First, the Internet, which promised everything for free. Then, the Recession, which pulled the [adverising] rug out from under journalism’s feet. And now, the rise of a Millennial generation which, we are told, reads nothing in print.

The problem of journalism’s future is like the weather: everybody talks about it but no one does anything about it. Well, not quite. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission — established in 1914 under an activist Wilson administration to protect American consumers and eliminate anti-competitive business practices — released the “discussion draft” of a 47 page “Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism.”

Yes, you read it right. Recognizing the “significant transition” that journalism is undergoing, the document’s crafters are troubled by the “significant losses of news coverage” occurring as newspapers and magazines shut down. The draft proposal suggests measures the government can take to make sure there will be enough competent reporters in the future.

Among the most interesting of these is “additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” As every wine blogger knows, our blogs are reprinted in all sorts of online places whose owners receive direct financial benefit from them. I, personally, never have been particularly upset by this, but I know bloggers who are. The draft document suggests that some sort of tax on “parasitic aggregators…would better enable news organizations to obtain revenue from aggregators and search engines.” It would prohibit “free ride” sites that “without permission, post enough material to render the original news stories redundant.” Since blog posts that are aggregated are frequently found by search engines, the draft considers “legislation clarifying that the routine copying of original content done by a search engine in order to conduct a search (caching) is copyright infringement not protected by fair use.” (“Fair use” is a key concept in “third party” use of original material. Third parties are allowed to reproduce material for “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching…scholarship, or research,” but in general are not allowed to economically benefit.)

The draft also explores the possibility of providing “government-fostered pilot programs to investigate new business models” for journalism, basing their thinking on certain European models. There are various versions of this, including tacking on a service fee to Internet service providers, which in turn would be passed on to audited publishers (of course, that fee would invariably be passed on to Internet end-users.) There is even a suggestion of taxing electronic devices, like iPads.

The FTC’s draft document predictably was greeted by howls of derision by entrenched interests. The rightwing is calling the tax on aggregators a “Drudge tax.” Steven Brill, whose now defunct “Brill’s Content” was a pontifical attempt to finger-wag journalism by a school-marm moralizer, told the New York Times, “You’re going to create a fund so a bunch of kids from Ivy League colleges can get jobs going to zoning board meetings with pens and pads? It’s like you’re living on another planet if you think this is going to happen.” An opinion piece in the New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch) complained that publishers “don’t need government help. They need to be left alone with the assurance they won’t be interfered with by the FTC.” So intense was the blowback that, last Friday, reports surfaced that “The FTC is running for cover in the wake of reports it plans to tax websites and electronic devices in order to rescue dead tree dinosaur corporate media.”

I think bloggers ought to be thinking about these things incessantly. They may not, on the surface, care about all this; it doesn’t affect them directly, not yet. But they’re the ones who are going to have to figure out whether unfettered, unafraid journalism survives in America. They may agree that “dead tree dinosaur corporate media” needs to wither away; but I hope they understand the importance of a free press — and I don’t just mean a thousand blogs speaking with a Tower of Babel incoherence. I mean a press powerful enough to speak truth to power. I hope and expect that bloggers, like Ben Franklin, will declare, “I shall continue my Business. I shall not burn my Press and melt my Letters.”

“Who has real talent and staying power or merely the ability to sell themselves effectively?” That’s what the New York fashion scene wants to know. Not that I’m part of New York’s fashion scene — okay, I have some Calvin Klein briefs, and I once saw Tommy Hilfiger at Macy’s. But I wouldn’t know Vera Wang from Veracruz. A fashionista, I’m not.

Fortunately, we have the New York Times’ Thursday Styles section to keep us in the loop. Yesterday, they ran this cool piece about how the fashion scene is going gaga over young “runway darlings of the moment,” including a “heartthrob” with the mildly sadomasochistic-sounding name of Simon Spurr (who happens to have the Hollywood good looks of a young Matt Damon). There’s grumbling that the people who decide who’s in and who’s out are picking young designers, not because they’re talented, but because they’re cute.

Mr. Spurr

“Just because you’re cute, connected, rich and famous doesn’t necessarily mean you design great stuff,” one Kim Hastreiter said in a talk at a recent Council of Fashion Designers of America gabfest. (This was taken as a swipe at Sarah Jessica Parker, who was named a fashion designer for Halston earlier this year.) Even Prabal Gurung, another “runway darling of the moment,” told the Times that he was “in complete agreement” with Hastreiter. “Talent should not be instantaneously celebrated, but rather nurtured and grown steadily.”

Mr. Gurung, nurturing his talent

Well, steveheimoff.com isn’t going to insert its nosy nose into a catty New York fashion war. Those rag peddlers have sharp claws! But I am going to make the (not very difficult) leap over to two other areas in which “runway darlings of the moment” vie with more established stars. Consider Project Runway’s 51-year old Michael Kors, who told the Times, “I waited three years before I ever had a fashion show…Today the spotlight is so quick that…I don’t know if you can still let a business percolate and grow naturally.”

One area in which we see the same sort of overnight rush to stardom, or unnatural growth to use Kors’ words, is with instantaneously created “cult” wineries that pop up almost overnight, charging a fortune for wines with absolutely no provenance, except that the same old, tired, famous-name consultants are hired to give them the aura of — I was going to say “quality,” but it’s not that. To give them an aura of celebrity. In this sense, having David Abreu’s or Michel Rolland’s name attached to a wine is pretty much the same as Halston hiring Sarah Jessica Parker. The famous name pushes the brand, not vice versa. If this seems calculating and cynical, hey, it’s just business. And it works.

The other area where these “runway darling” rules of the road apply is with wine blogs. We do have  something approaching the fashion wars in the wine blogosphere today. On the one hand are establishment figures who’ve been around the block a few times, and taken their hits. Like the Times said about Michael Kors, “his journey has not been without its bumps, including a bankruptcy…When Mr. Kors was starting out, he…went in and out of business with the seasons.” I suppose I’m an establishment figure, but that doesn’t mean my career has been easy. It hasn’t. There are ups and downs, and every up seems like it’s immediately followed by a downer. I guess it’s just human nature to think, “Hey, I earned what I have the hard way. If you want it, go out and earn it on your own.”

And then there are the young wine bloggers, our heartthrob equivalents of Mr. Spurr and Mr. Gurung. Heady has been their rise to prominence. The entire wine industry is gazing upon them with admiration, and perhaps even envy, certainly with a degree of, yes, lust. Their entrée into the realm of importance has been amazingly rapid, satisfactory (for them), and complete: not a serious wine company in the world dares to ignore them. They are “playaz” (as we say in Oaksterdam), our own runway darlings of wine writing. Yet even Mr. Spurr told the Times, “It may be easier to become a designer [today], but it’s a lot harder to make it as a designer.”

Becoming vs. making it; aye, there’s the rub. There’s a big difference between launching a successful wine blog, which instantly turns you into a published wine writer, versus making it as a wine writer, which implies, yes, staying power. It’s not that difficult to get off to a flying start anymore.  Nicole Miller told the Times, “All these new designers start out and they immediately have showrooms and accessories lines.” With bloggers, they too start out, and almost immediately get free samples, paid junkets, book contracts, advertising, speaking gigs — the industry’s way of showing its love. To the establishment, it looks like it’s all happening too fast, too easily. Don’t you have to earn your stripes anymore, go to the School of Hard Knocks? Michael Kors spoke for all establishment types when he told the Times, “Just when you think you know the rules, the rules change.” On the other hand, maybe they don’t. We will, at any rate, know sooner or later who has staying power and who doesn’t.