Spot metering, EC

Hi,

There's a separate thread going on wrt Exposure Compensation, but a question occurred to me while reading that thread.

There are good points in that thread regarding using spot metering to make sure the subject is exposed correctly.  My question is, if you spot meter on a small area, and that area isn't 18% gray (I'd guess it rarely is), then won't you always have to compensate for that using EC?

Cheers,

-ira