I use a Seconic l-358 Incident meter for my readings, this does several things for me.
First it improves my exposure accuracy and consistency, this eliminates many exposure errors and that generally improves color balance for all the important subject matter.
Second, as it happens the meter is gray, with a white dome, and a black ring surrounds the dome. Either just before or just after a shot/set of shots in one lighting situation I take a picture of the meter.
Regardless of the next step, scanner or enlarger, this gives you your shot data and provides a gray card reference, a white point reference, and a black point reference.
With scanned images, in levels/curves the B, W, & G eyedroppers can be used can be used even without a calibrated monitor this will give you very respectable color and contrast correction. Your results at this point can be proofed on the printer you plan to use.
On an uncorrected monitor the image may still appear “off” (look green, magenta, yellow, blue…) but that is a separate issue. The image should be very close to right.
What calibrating your monitor does is to let you see a pretty good resemblance of what the image will look like on paper, what it cannot tell you is what it will look like on anyone else’s monitor unless theirs is calibrated too.
