PR 101: Finding the Right People in Your Career isn’t always an easy path to be on, and this is being stated after 30 years in wine, with another 10 in broadcast radio. Radio was definitely easier, although I did have some challenges, too. That was all described in Public Relations: You’ve Either Got It Or You Don’t.
A focused wine writer
Wine Writers’ Focus ~ Wine
Everyone in wine wants to talk about people, places, and things, like the winemaker’s hands, or the fog rolling off the ridge at dawn. The barrel room that smells like vanilla and time. I understand the pull, because I’ve written that copy myself, more times than I can count. But, almost nobody talks about PR itself, like the actual mechanics of it, the part that makes all that beautiful description matter to anyone beyond the person who wrote it. After thirty years in this business, I think it’s time I did.
So here is PR 101, the version nobody teaches you in school, because most of what matters in this work isn’t a skill. It’s a filter.
Having a mouth filter.
The Thirty Year Bridge
When I moved to California in December of 1992, there was one person I set my sights on. I won’t say who. I spent years trying to warm that person up, to earn some kind of foothold, to be seen as worth the time. Nothing worked. The person stayed cold. Non-responsive. Closed. It took me over thirty years to understand what I was actually looking at. That bridge was never going to carry weight in my direction, so I’ve crossed it, in the other sense of the phrase, and I let it go.
It’s, honestly, a relief, not a small one either. A real one, the kind that frees up energy you didn’t realize you’d been working so hard at. And, here’s the thing nobody says out loud in PR: you will not win everyone over. Some people are simply not on your side of the river, and no amount of persistence changes that. The skill isn’t in the winning. The skill is in recognizing, eventually, who was never going to cross with you, and redirecting that energy toward the people who will.
PR is all about crossing bridges, although not all bridges are crossable.
A Truthful Media Trip
I once took a wine writer on a media trip, which was a train tour with stops along the way with Petite Sirah producers. We were in Portland, Oregon having lunch, and at some point a wine writer leaned over to my daughter, who was my assistant. He whispered to her, “Do you realize how easy it would be to ruin your mother’s reputation?” I still don’t fully know what he meant by it or what his intent was. But I understood his heart perfectly well, and I never needed the rest of the explanation. I avoided him until he passed.
That’s the other half of PR 101. You don’t need to understand everyone’s motives to know who they are. Sometimes a single sentence tells you everything, and the right response isn’t confrontation. It’s simply removing yourself from the room, permanently and without ceremony.
A media tour is a great way to get to know and care about people deeply, or not at all. As it turned out, the Concannons became dear friends.
Why This Matters
I rub some people the wrong way, it happens to all of us. So do you, probably, at some point, and it isn’t always a matter of substance. Sometimes it’s just energy that doesn’t fit, two people who were never going to be a match no matter how much goodwill either side brought to it. The instinct in PR, especially early on, is to treat every relationship as winnable. Enough charm, enough follow up, enough patience, and surely the cold ones warm eventually. I believed that for a long time. Three decades, in one case.
But real PR isn’t about converting the unconvertible. It’s about finding the right people and having the right conversations, and knowing early, or at least knowing eventually, which conversations are worth having at all. Some people are your people. Some never will be. The work is telling the difference, and having the grace to walk away from the ones who aren’t, whether that takes a season or thirty years.
The wine will always have a story. The place will always have its fog and its light. But none of that reaches anyone without the right person carrying it, and choosing the right people to carry it to. That’s the part of the job that doesn’t show up in the tasting notes. It’s the part I actually do all of the time.
Some partnerships work, and some just don’t.
© Jo Diaz, July 8, 2026, All rights reserved.
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Written by Jo Diaz, a partner of Diaz Communications, who is helping to make stars realize their dreams.
Edited by partner Jose Diaz.
To reprint, please contact Jo Diaz: jo@diaz-communications.com
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