The Wine Bloggers Conference is slated to be held Oct. 24-26 in Sonoma, and I’ll be going. It’s my first participation in group blogdom since I launched this site last May and I value the experience.

Ever since I started paying attention to the wine blogosphere, I’ve noticed a current of feeling that blogging is somehow different in essence from traditional print — purer, more honest, less driven by concerns for advertising, profit and similar nasty pecuniary obsessions. This feeling is best expressed, of course, by bloggers themselves, as you’d expect from revolutionaries who operate outside the MSM box.

As one who straddles both worlds, I think that the similarities between blogging and print are more apparent than this view permits. Check out this “Feedback Forum” on the Wine Bloggers Conference website. It polled participants as to which among a list of possible breakout session topics they wanted most to attend.

Their choices reveal, not anything outstandingly radical or different about the wine blogosphere, but how its concerns are precisely those of print journalism. As of this date, here are the readers’ top 2 choices, with my commentary in italics.

- Increasing visitors to your blog. This is the same thing wine magazines want. Just substitute the word “subscribers” for “visitors” and “magazine” for “blog.”

- Making money from your blog. Duh.

I point these things out not to disparage blogging, although I do wonder if the Conference will address the topic of the ethics and practices of blogging, which I have recently called into question. I happen to believe blogging represents a wave of the future (although it’s unclear where that wave is taking us). But I don’t think blogging’s essence is fundamentally different from print journalism’s. It’s just a new medium, and if blogging is indeed something new, bloggers need to develop a set of ethics not only as stringent, but more so, than those under which print journalism operates.

I found myself in a bit of a flap this morning. Yesterday, I made a comment on Mike Duffy’s blog, The Winery Web Site Report. He’d written about Rodney Strong sending preview samples of their debut 2005 Rockaway Cabernet Sauvignon ($75) to “a select group bloggers” in advance of sending it the usual way to paper-based wine reviewers like me (although obviously I’m a blogger too!). I didn’t know about the program, not having been contacted, although I did know about the impending Rockaway launch because Rodney Strong has been aggressively touting it through press releases for quite a while. Over the past week or so, during my routine web cruising, I’d seen a spate of glowing tributes to Rockaway on various wine blogs. These were almost universally positive and had phrases like “Making History” and “bold and prescient” and “cool and revolutionary.” As I saw more and more of these postings, I thought, WTF? But I let it go until I came across Duffy’s blog. That’s when I wrote this comment:

“Maybe the early release to bloggers will prove to be a good move on Rodney Strong’s part. But when I started seeing all these online reviews of Rockaway I really had to wonder. Why did all those bloggers give it free publicity? Don’t they get free wine every day? So why write about Rockaway? I haven’t had the wine (plan to review it tonight) and I have no idea if it’s any good, but it shows how easily some parts of the blogosphere can be manipulated into providing free publicity to wineries.”

That comment stirred up something of a s**tstorm. One person said it “smacks of some old media arrogance…” Another asked, “How exactly is this any different from WE or any other glossy getting samples and writing about them? Isn’t that ‘free’ publicity for the winery?” 1WineDude, who participated in the launch, wrote: “I did ask RS why they decided to do this, and my take on their response was that their PR / Marketing dept. was the driver behind it…” while Jeff, at Good Grape blog, said my comment was “misguided” and “made in something of a vacuum.”

Whew!

So let me spell out my discomfort with Rodney Strong’s approach, even while I concede it was clever marketing. Rodney Strong for years has been trying to get the High Scores and the resulting attention for their wines. Nothing wrong with that. My impression has been that, while their reviews (at least, from me) have been quite good, it’s never been enough for owner Tom Klein. I figure the order must have gone out to the marketing and PR people (just as 1WineDude surmised) to figure out a way around the mainstream wine media and garner some attention in a new way. And guess what? It worked! The problem from my perspective is that those who participated were manipulated, and happily embraced their manipulators. I don’t blame any of the bloggers for reporting on Rodney Strong’s unique marketing strategy, but the glowing, gushing and self-referential “Aren’t we special?” quality is, for me, a turnoff. As for WE getting samples, yes, I do all the time, but I don’t write headlines or columns or special blogs about them, I just review them along with everything else. And I note that quite a number of well-known bloggers, who must have been approached by Rodney Strong, evidently declined to participate. I think they saw the potential for themselves to be used and decided, wisely, not to allow it.

Update (Aug. 27) Apparently, the participating bloggers agreed in advance to write about the wine. If a winery told me they’d send me a wine only if I agreed to write about it, I’d strongly refuse.

Premier Pacific Vineyards, the big vineyard development company whose leaders include former Napa vintner William Hill, finds itself embroiled in a heated tussle with local environmentalists, including the Sierra Club and Friends of the Gualala River, over PPV’s plan to develop 1,800 acres of vineyards in the high coastal hills near Annapolis, on the Sonoma Coast. According to a report published in th Santa Rosa Press Democrat, PPV purchased the land in 2004 for $28.5 million. Despite the company’s promise to plant 1 million new trees, critics of the project worry that development will invariably harm the mountainous region’s ecosystem and diversity.

It’s always hard in a case like this to know who’s right. I know from experience that some of the more extreme environmentalists in western Sonoma are basically against any development of the land at all, which seems to me to be an unrealistic attitude. Some years ago, Marimar Torres told me how eco-terrorists repeatedly struck in the middle of the night, vandalizing her property and spraypainting roadsigns, because she wanted to develop a beautiful, organic, highly progressive vineyard in the Green Valley.

But I also know that a big corporate entity can be insensitive and ride roughshod over the concerns of locals. PPV owns many thousands of acres of vineyard from Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino, on up to Oregon and Washington and down into the Santa Rita Hills. When PPV first began development down in Santa Barbara, some vintners there privately expressed their concern that the area’s personality and natural infrastructure might be harmed. Yesterday I asked a friend of mine, who is a player in the Santa Rita Hills, what has been the local reaction to PPV, and he replied, “It is with no hesitation that I say that they have not been favorable shepherds of the land down here.  I fear that a lot of their development has been irresponsible (and dangerous for crews down the road) and they are unscrupulous about taking crews away from other farming companies.”

As I said, it’s hard to know who’s right. In the case of the Sonoma project, it’s on hiatus until an EIR has been completed. And even that might not satisfy some of those involved.

P.S. Please check my final word on the Spectator issue at Wine Enthusiast’s unreserved.

It was disingenuous for Tom Matthews to deny, as the Los Angeles Times reports he did in a phone interview, that the magazine’s award of excellence program was designed to generate revenue for the magazine. “This is a program that recognizes the efforts restaurants put into their wine lists,” the paper quoted Matthews as saying. But also this morning, Jon Bonné, the Wine Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, weighed in with an estimate that, at a charge of $250 per application, “the 4,128 restaurants in the [Wine Spectator’s] list would have grossed more than $1 million total.” (The New York Times reported the same thing.) I can personally assure you that $1 million is a lot of cash for a wine magazine, even one of Wine Spectator’s deep pockets.

I Googled “Wine Spectator” and was still finding links to the scam on page 23 when I gave up trying to count. The reaction has been fast, furious and worldwide, with the weight of opinion running heavily against Wine Spectator. Which raises the question, Why? Yesterday, I rose to the magazine’s defense, arguing that anyone with enough time and ingenuity on their hands (and Robin Goldstein apparently had both) can scam anyone about anything. I still hold to that position. But the gleeful anger so many people feel makes me wonder what’s going on to fuel the fire. Have people reacted so strongly because they detest Wine Spectator specifically? Is it because they dislike the notion of wine and food awards in general? Perhaps just a natural reaction against authority? The collective impulse of the Gotcha!sphere? A group grope into Schadenfreude?

I have to admit I’m stumped. The one thing I can come up with, at least from my California point of view, is that there’s a body of opinion in this State that Wine Spectator is arrogant. This isn’t to say that the magazine’s personalities in California aren’t nice people. It’s just a perception that Wine Spectator has been a little too elitist, too hilfalutin for its own good. Maybe that explains it.

Lord knows I’ve criticized Wine Spectator when they deserved it. But fair is fair; this piling on because of that dumb mistake they made over giving an award to a fake restaurant is all hat and no cattle.

Yes, Spectator is the magazine everyone loves to hate. I’ve gotten a ton of emails today from California friends, and they all have a certain gleefully malicious, rubbing of hands quality to them — a kind of “hehehe, it’s about time.” And, yes, I admit to feeling a certain initial giggle myself, along the lines of “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

But let’s step back and be objective. Every wine magazine and every food magazine I know of gives awards. As with anything, the process of giving awards is open to abuse, especially in this day and age of the Internet. No magazine has the time or staff to thoroughly vet every contestant in a big event. You do the best you can, and ultimately, you trust people not to be liars.

I think Wine Spectator has presented a plausible explanation of what happened in their formal response on their website. Most of the blogs I read that talked about the issue said or implied that all or most of the wines on the fictional restaurant’s list had earned low scores. If that were the case, Wine Spectator’s restaurant awards would indeed be suspect. But as Spectator’s executive editor, Tom Matthews, pointed out, “[Robin] Goldstein posted reviews for 15 wines. But the submitted list contained a total of 256 wines. Only 15 wines scored below 80 points.” That wasn’t made clear in the blogs that I read. I’m in agreement with one of the posters on Wine Spectator’s website who said, “All [Robin Goldstein] has proven is that, with enough effort, you can create the basis of a fraud.”

In a way, Goldstein’s exposé reminded me of the movie “Mondovino.” I hated it because it could have represented objective reporting. Instead, it was a sneak attack in the same sensationalist way as Goldstein’s.

Nonetheless, this episode will damage Wine Spectator. I even saw it reported on MSNBC, the mainstream media, in a way that was humiliating to the magazine. Wine Spectator has made (fairly or not) enemies over the years, and some people see this as payback. It’s not fair, but then, neither is life.

P.S. Please visit my other blog at Wine Enthusiast’s Unreserved.