Poor Eric Asimov and his reluctance to taste wines

I noticed with interest, how Eric Asimov blogged on his frightfully boring NY Times blog, The Pour, that he gets really annoyed with wine industry people that continually ask him to taste their wines. The poor guy, you’d think he was a food and wine journalist or something? Wait! Hold onto your glass of Malbec – he is!! So what the hell is he doing moaning about the constant beckoning by wineries and importers? His job is to taste wines and put forth his opinions on them. He gets paid to it for the world’s most respected newspaper. Surely he should be ‘out there’ daily to taste as many wines as he can, communicate with as many wineries and importers as possible and stay totally ‘connected’ to the world of wine? He should seek the most exciting new releases, taste new vintages of old favorites and attend seminars on things like Biodynamics. If the thought of that disturbs him, then perhaps he should transfer across to the Style section so he can comment on the length of men’s swim trunks or the latest wedding cake trend and leave the wine stuff to serious wine journos?
Seriously though, maybe they should split the Dining & Wine section into Food journo’s and Wine journo’s? And Mr. Asimov should perhaps stay on the food side…