I leave today for a week on the road. First it’s to Shell Beach, on the beautiful San Luis Obispo Central Coast, for the World of Pinot Noir event, which Wine Enthusiast co-sponsors, and to which I’ve I’ve gone every year since the start, except for once when I was sick. To me, WOPN represents how to do a wine event at a high level of quality and efficiency. Granted, it’s not for everyone: it’s expensive and rather small; in other words, it’s not a ZAP tasting at Fort Mason! But for a working writer like me, it’s manna from heaven. You get to go to incredibly informative seminars, led by brilliant people who know what they’re talking about. You taste as much wine as you could possibly want. You meet old friends, make new ones, and catch up on all the latest news and gossip. Best of all, once the valet at The Cliffs Resort takes your car upon arrival, there’s no more driving until you go home, three days later! Yay! As someone who absolutely, positively does not drink and drive, that’s a godsend.

After WOPN, I continue south, to Santa Barbara County and specifically to the lovely little town of Santa Ynez. I’ll be there for a few days, working through a big, blind Chardonnay tasting. I love big blind tastings, but only when they’ve been very carefully planned out in advance, and include related wines about which something is known (variety or type and region being most important). This is called tasting in context. Only when you are comparing apples to apples can you truly determine a wine’s qualities. Only then, also, can you hope to make terroir generalizations. I’ll be tasting through the Chardonnays from all Santa Barbara’s regions (Santa Ynez Valley, Santa Rita Hills, Santa Maria Valley, Happy Canyon [if there are any Chardonnays from there, which I don't think there are] and the non-appellated areas), and hopefully regional distinctions will appear. But this isn’t as easy as it might once have been. Winemaking styles are so similar (malolactic fermentation, ripe grapes, new oak, acidification, sur lies aging and battonage) that terroir nuances tend to disappear under all that intervention. I’ve never been entirely comfortable making sweeping pronouncements about different AVAs anyway, the way some critics do. There are too many variables that prove the opposite. Still, reaching regional conclusions has its place and is valid, up to a point. The consumer likes reading about regional character, and it makes for interesting, everlasting thinking and conversation. But even if I don’t find clear regional distinctions in Santa Barbara, I’ll be happy, because I love Chardonnay, and they have many fine ones down there.

One item worth mentioning: I have been getting lots and lots of wines sent to me for review that I previously reviewed, in some cases more than a year ago. At Wine Enthusiast, we don’t re-review previously reviewed wines, except under very limited circumstances. So why are so many people resending previously sent wines? The fact that they are shows me that they’ve been unable to sell those wines. If you have to resend the same wine a year after it was first released, you must have piles of it gathering dust. More proof of this is offered by the fact that, in many instances, the wines sent the second time around are priced 10%-30% lower than the first time around. There’s a bloodbath out there, and I don’t see it getting better before this summer, at least.

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.

Jon Bonné, the wine editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote a nice piece yesterday in his blog, The Cellarist, on the topic of Viognier. He nailed the problems — of excessive ripeness and sweetness, mostly, and sometimes heat. I’d add one further issue that Jon didn’t address: bizarre, added acidity, which can make the texture and especially the finish unpleasantly scoury. My guess is that most California Viognier is acidified, as opposed to the “retained” acidity Jon described.

Jon referenced 2 Viogniers he likes: from Calera and from Cristom. I remember the first Calera Viognier I ever had, which was also the first one Josh Jensen made. (I think it would have been the ‘89 or ‘90.) I was visiting with Josh at the winery, which is way out in the middle of nowhere in the Gavilan Mountains of San Benito County, and we’d worked our way through his Mount Harlan Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays when he said, “Hey, do you wanna try something new?” Of course I did. He siphoned off some wine from a tank and filled my glass with the pale yellow-golden liquid. I sniffed, sipped — and the top of my scalp blew off.

Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. That’s a very rare experience for a wine lover — when you taste something new and unexpected and it’s so thrilling, it feels like your brain is exploding. It happened once with my first Hugel Vendange Tardive Pinot Gris. An awesome thing you never forget.

Anyway, Josh was very pleased with my reaction. I can’t say, though, that I’ve liked every Calera Viognier I’ve had since. There are certainly ones I’ve admired more: Alban’s, in particular, and also Failla’s (is there anything Ehren Jordan can’t do?). Pride Mountain always manages to make these amazingly gigantic Viogniers that somehow retain elegance and balance. How, I don’t know. Minerals? Acidity? Dryness plays a part, which is why I never really cared for Kent Rosenblum’s. Too sweet. Tangent also makes a very nice Viognier (as well as a range of other “alternative” white wines). That winery is owned by the Niven family, of Baileyana in the Edna Valley, and Tangent wines (which come in screwtopped bottles) always are unoaked. That way, you get to taste what the variety really tastes like. Viognier, at its best, is a big, fruity, floral wine, usually with all kinds of tropical fruits, honeysuckle and vanilla, and from Tangent you also get that stony, Edna Valley minerality and high acidity, which (I think, but don’t know for sure) really is natural, not added. I could be wrong.

You usually have to pay a pretty high price for a good Viognier (except for Tangent’s). I’ve found that most all Viogniers below, say, $20 are awful. And unless Viognier is from a cool place, it’s likely to be boring. The worst Viognier I ever had came from Lodi. I’ve had other bad ones from Clarksburg, Paso Robles, Temecula, Yuba County, Contra Costa County and with a “California” appellation, which I have to presume includes Central Valley fruit. If you don’t think they grow Viognier in the Central Valley, you’re wrong. There was more of it (in 2008) in San Joaquin County than in either Napa or Sonoma, almost as much in Madera County as in Monterey, and almost as much in Yolo County as in Santa Barbara. Where do you think all that Central Valley fruit goes?

Jon ended his essay with the question, “Did we really believe it [Viognier] would be the next Chardonnay?” Made me laugh. Yes, we did — “we” being the wine media around 1991. That was the same “we” as predicted that Sangiovese was the next superstar red, and that Super-Tuscans were taking over California. Just shows that you shouldn’t believe everything the wine writers say.

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I was not surprised to hear yesterday that someone is taking on the New World (Australia, Chile, California) for global wine dominance in the value tier. After all, we’re in a recessionary time when all the cards are being reshuffled and recut, and who knows who will emerge on top. Nor was it surprising to learn who the potential usurper is: France’s Languedoc-Roussillon! All the 2,700 winemakers in that huge district — which covers 35% of France’s vineyard acreage — will now be able “to label their wine for the first time with the grape variety, vintage and location.” That will enable them to compete in the New World, where consumers look for wines with varietal names, like Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. That’s why a top Languedoc official said, “It will help us a lot with the American market.”

That’s hundreds and hundreds of millions of bottles of wine, and a lot of it is going to cost under $10, giving stern competition to inexpensive California brands and New World imports.

Let’s back up and get philosophical. Since the recession began, we’ve assumed that the most expensive wines are in trouble. They are, but that doesn’t mean the bottom of the market is safe. You have only to look at Australia to see that. Nobody knows if and when the recession will lift and recovery return. But we know this: this announcement from the Languedoc-Roussillon is a shot across California’s bow, a warning signal that powerful interests in the European Union are moving in for their share of the loot.

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Announcing the first ever Wine Bloggers Conference on Wine Writing

The world already has a Wine Bloggers Conference and a Wine Writers Conference, but what we don’t have is a Wine Bloggers Conference on Wine Writing (or WBCoWW, pronounced “web-cow”). I’m not sure how this ended up falling between the cracks, but it did. Probably because everybody’s so darned busy blogging, tweeting and monetizing, not to mention going to conferences, that nobody noticed.

Why a Wine Bloggers Conference on Wine Writing? Why now? And why me? Answers:

1. Because it’s needed.
2. If not now, when?
3. It’s my karma, which was never all that great.

I doubt if we can get Meadowood again — too pricey, and besides, the proctologists have it booked the third week of July (I checked), which is the only time I can make it. Even if we could afford a little room, I wouldn’t want to be sharing that Meadowood campus at night on those dark, creepy paths with a bunch of probing ass doctors, especially if I’ve been drinking, which I will. There are several AAA-approved motels in the Vallejo/AmCan area we could probably afford. And speakers. We need speakers. 1WineDude, are you free the week of July 15? I know you’re crazy busy, and we’ll need to book you months in advance. Have your people get in touch with mine. Alder Yarrow, any chance you’ll chair the panel on “How to chair a panel”? There may be a syndication deal. I think I can get you Jancis Robinson, or, at least, a Jancis lookalike (I know one from San Francisco). Parker said nyah, nyah, but he didn’t say nyah, nyah, nyah your mother wears combat boots, so maybe he’ll come. (Memo to Morton Leslie: please prepare for me a draft of winery-media relations as they have developed from the late 18th century into the digital age.) There’s some hope the Coppolas will come. Every wine conference needs a little glamor, which is why God created Karen MacNeil.

For our breakout session I suggest a rousing game of Truth or Dare, libations to be provided by whichever winery underwrites web-cow with the most funding. In this game, players ask embarrassing questions of each other, and challenge each other to do embarrassing things. For example, Heather John might dare Charlie Olken to lapdance in a bikini with Eric Asimov while blind tasting without spilling a drop onto Eric’s khakis, and The Hosemaster (should he attend the festivities, which is not at all clear) might raise the ante by daring all the bloggers to rate CO’s performance on a 100-point scale, or else risk having Charlie lapdance on them. (Try not to visualize.) It’s great fun, and could give new meaning to the word “Gewurztraminer.” By this time we should all be relaxed and harmonized enough to attend our second panel, which Jim Laube has graciously agreed to come out of hiding and chair. (Memo to self: Does he still look like his old WS picture? Find out.) It is entitled, “What would happen to the 100-point system if all the 100-point critics in the world suddenly disappeared, the way all the women did in Philip Wylie’s 1951 novel, ‘The Disappearance’”? When Jim proposed this topic, I thought it was a little un-P.C., but it does win the award for the world’s longest panel title, and should garner lots of media coverage, especially in Cigar Aficienado. It also raises the issue of: If Tish were armed with weapons of mass destruction, would he use them and, if so, upon whom? My personal opinion is that the 100 point system will not die with the death of its critics, but will long outlive them; and, in fact, numerically rate their demises. As long as I’m still here to participate in the debate, I’m content.

It comes as no news to me that “lighting can influence both how wine tastes and how much consumers are willing to pay for it.”

Everything influences how wine tastes: temperature, setting, time of day or night, what you previously ate, how you feel, if you got enough sleep, the glasses you taste from, the flight in which the wine is included, what you see outside the window (if there is a window), whom you are with — I could go on.

Under these circumstances, the curious reader will wonder, “Well, then what’s the value of a wine review?” This is a fair question, and one that can’t be analyzed enough.

I know a fellow — Rod Smith, whom many of you also know — a fine writer. We once were at a tasting that Andy Beckstoffer held in his Rutherford offices of Cabernet Sauvignons from his portion of the To Kalon Vineyard (Robert Mondavi’s portion is spelled “Tokalon”). There was a small group of us scribes sitting around a table, tasting and scribbling. Rod had been fairly silent, so I asked him what he thought of the wines.

I remember Rod giving me a less than charitable glance and then saying, in fairly withering terms, “I don’t review wines. I write about them.” Well, sure; I took his point. Rod had reached the conclusion (I’m doing a lot of inferring here, but I think it’s true) that wine criticism is so inherently subjective, there’s no point in doing it. His approach is to write beautifully and elegantly and factually on all aspects of wine’s history and production.

I do that, too, both in my articles for Wine Enthusiast and in my books for University of California Press. (In my Russian River book, there are only one or two critical remarks made about specific wines, and none at all in my Conversations book.) But I also am paid to be a critic, and so a critic I must be. That means I have got occasionally to defend our practice, in spite of the many instabilities that afflict it.

Along these lines, 1WineDude wrote yesterday of his experience at the pre-Premier Napa Valley tasting, where our hosts had graciously set up big flights of Cabernet and Chardonnay. The Dude described his aversion to tasting his way through such massive events (and gently prodded Vinography for doing so). I didn’t make it into print in that posting, but I was there at the Culinary Institute of America, and ran into Dude at one point. When he asked me what wines I liked, I had to tell him, “None,” because the fact is that I wasn’t there to drink or taste. It makes no sense at all to me to try and review wines seriously under the circumstances of a mob scene, in a fairly alien environment of fuss and confused commotion. Instead, I took advantage of the scene to study it, rather like an anthropologist in the field (Margaret Mead among the Samoans?), witnessing the sometimes odd, sometimes amusing, sometimes baffling behavior of the populace. You can learn a lot from just watching people, especially when so many of them are bloggers.

When I taste wine formally, it has to be under precise circumstances in my home. Same time of day, same glasses, same table, same computer, same pattern of opening bottles in the kitchen and bagging them, same corkscrew (a standard somm’s), same view outside my window of a terraceful of geraniums and cacti, same lighting, even with the same TV turned on (with the sound off), which comforts me. Only then can I be assured that all the influences I described above can be minimized in their impact.

Does that make my winetasting less subject to distortion? Yes. Does it make it perfect? No. People who are deadset against individual wine reviewing will always find plenty of reasons to criticize it, and their reasons have some validity. All I can do is do my job, as carefully as I know how, and hope it has some value.