Greg Sherwood MW: What influence do wine journalists really have on consumers?

In pure business terms, wine is a complicated, multi-dimensional product that is marketed and sold with the use of complex and varied marketing methods. It is at the same time both a conservative, traditional and aspirational product that evolves and innovates very slowly but is also an international mass-market product with many unique and variable selling propositions. Within this culturally resonant marketing framework, journalists clearly can and do influence consumers’ buying habits.

However, the degree to which they are able to do so is determined by many factors including the product’s quality and positioning in the marketplace, the medium and speed of information transfer (newspaper, website or trade journal, etc.), and importantly, the target market audience the journalists are addressing. This influence can manifest itself in many ways, but supply and demand will be dictated by greater market forces.

But due to the diverse nature of the modern wine market, producers will continue to create new products or brands that can, with the correct timing, appropriate use of the 4 P’s of marketing (product, price, promotion & place), and journalistic support, create or influence trends followed by consumers over the medium and long term.

The fact that there are over 240 members of the Circle of Wine Writers and probably many more influencer-style writers plying their trade that are not members, indicates that writing about wine is clearly a popular pastime. What are all these journalists writing about and are they really influencing consumer buying habits?

Wine journalists primarily serve their readers by educating, explaining and entertaining. Some commentators, such as Burgundy specialist Jasper Morris MW choose to differentiate further between “wine writers” who are thought to be a source of information, explanation and inspiration, while “wine journalists” seek to advise people what to buy or sell and comment on topical events in the wine world. Alternatively, many other industry players, including many top trade buyers, complain that journalists don’t focus enough on actually SELLING wine. The way journalists are ultimately perceived and categorised will affect the degree to which their work influences consumers’ buying habits.

The different mediums available to journalists to exert this influence still includes broadsheet newspapers, à la Jancis Robinson OBE MW writing in the Financial Times or Victoria Moore writing in The Telegraph, both standing as last bastions of significant consumer influence. You also have writers like Winemag’s very own Dr Jamie Goode writing in tabloid newspaper formats like the Sunday Express and experienced commentators like Matthew Jukes writing for highly influential magazines like Money Week, where the captive ‘well-to-do’ subscriber audience is incredibly receptive to critical wine recommendations.

Then of course, you still have trade journals, newsletters, wine reports, a resurgent market in wine books, TV, radio and the internet hosting not only online publications like Winemag itself, but also a plethora of wine blogs and wine websites. We should not forget the multiple social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Facebook that host a never-ending array of wine influencers.

The wine trade is however highly segmented and there is no hard and fast rule dictating which media should be used for the wine trade buyers, the on-trade, the off-trade, fine wine consumers and the regular man in the street. But clearly, certain channels are more effective for communicating with a specific target audience than others. Assuming some kind of trickle-down effect, the top of the trade or the fine wine merchants and brokers, though often reluctantly, are definitely influenced by the likes of Antonio Galoni and Neal Martin and their 100-point scoring for En-primeur Bordeaux or Burgundy releases in Vinous.com, or by William Kelley’s pronouncements in Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate. Big scores will mean big (or bigger) prices, if not for the first tranche releases, then on subsequent secondary market offers. These are the wines consumers will seek out and buy.

High street consumers are perhaps more connected and influenced by daily broadsheet newspapers and tabloid journalists with their weekly UK recommendations from writers like Will Lyons in the Sunday Times. While stylistically the individual approaches will differ, there seems to be a mainstream style established, primarily in the UK, of ‘shopping list’ articles, satisfying the shelf stacking, deal-striking, brand-friendly supermarkets like Tesco, Aldi or Lidl at the expense of smaller, more individual grower / producer wines as championed by the independent wine merchants.

Newspapers, along with several mainstream magazines such as Decanter Magazine, go a long way in reinforcing the consumers’ daily buying habits towards more brand orientated wines through increased column inches dedicated to these wines. The most recent example of this in the UK is surely Whispering Angel rosé, once a popular go-to wine in the independent trade years ago, but now a popular 4 million plus bottle mass market mainstream brand owned by LVMH, which undoubtedly focuses on mainstream marketing and brand messaging rather than ‘quality contents’ messaging.

Ideally, journalists will use a combination of the above information media to influence consumer buying habits, and Jancis Robinson OBE MW certainly does a good job with both her FT broadsheet and weekend magazine content as well as with her popular consumer orientated subscription website JancisRobinson.com. The FT is undoubtedly more accessible and populist than her website, but both media are well used to inform, educate and recommend wines with a conscious effort not to ‘dumb down’ or simplify articles unnecessarily for the less knowledgeable readers. Consequently, her influence over the years has been considerable in the UK and indeed South Africa, because of this independent, inspirational and non-imitative approach to wine writing.

In the USA, the business and marketing of wine may appear fairly dynamic and culturally intertwined in states such as New York or California, and when looking at ranking world wine consumption, the USA always features at the top in recent years. But in reality, a very small percentage of the population drinks wine when compared to even Europe’s (now declining but still considerable) consumption figures. It is perhaps because the wine drinkers in the USA are a smaller and more focused group that journalists there are able to exert an even greater degree of influence than their colleagues do in Europe or Asia.

I was  very interested to read recently an admittedly slightly dated UK trade-based survey, that suggested that American wine journalists were seen to be noticeably more thorough and hardworking, with less reliance on ‘shopping list’ style wine articles that tend to dominate the UK media, but with more focus on in-depth lifestyle and winery story telling. But the American consumers’ fascination and pre-occupation with numerical ratings handed out by their wine critics like James Suckling and Antonio Galloni places these individuals and their publications in incredible positions of influence.

This can be seen daily with 95/100 point plus wines selling out at retailers, wholesalers and cellar door quicker than ever before. The demand is instant and consumer buying habits are influenced in a very short space of time, with much comfort being taken by consumers from this authoritative by simple style of wine journalism. This has undoubtedly also fueled a certain degree of score inflation globally, with the 95/100 point barrier becoming what the 90/100 score was back in the late 1990s and early noughties.

The influence of international wine journalists also manifests itself in other ways. During the course of educating, explaining and entertaining, the wine press has the ability to encourage consumers to experiment with new and exciting wine styles, from Walker Bay Albarinos to Weskus Assyrtikos. Indeed, the two biggest ‘alternative white wine’ trends in the mainstream supermarkets in the UK have probably been Grüner Veltliner a few years back, and now more recently,  Santorini Assyrtiko from Greece. The latter’s astronomical rise has, however, been starkly clipped short by the regions equally astronomically high price increases, with cheaper but slightly less accomplished examples from the mainland filling the gap.

Alternatively, for less adventurous consumers, the result of a journalist’s persuasion may merely be to encourage more regular food and wine ‘lifestyle consumption’ like in the USA, as consumers worldwide begin to mimic the wine drinking patterns of the ‘food and family’ orientated cultures of Mediterranean nations like Spain, Portugal and Italy. Or more simply, as journalists run out of more interesting, cutting-edge content to write about with the balance of power starting to shift to more uniform and less interesting brands, the tact may be to encourage consumers to trade up and to drink the ladder brands producers are actively introducing to increase wavering consumer spend while simultaneously strengthening brand loyalty.

But do purchase trends influence wine production trends or do producers supply products that they believe consumers want to buy? Clearly, consumer tastes have to a large degree developed from one generation to the next, hand in hand with wine producers’ ability to utilise the modern technology of better cellar hygiene, stainless steel fermentation vessels, together with new viticultural advancements to yield riper, healthier fruit to make more readily drinkable, fruit driven, and consistently appealing wine styles at more accessible prices for the entry level consumer. This has to a large degree, helped wine shed some of its snob value, as a product only drunk by the affluent classes, though the aspirational marketability of wine has in many cases, been retained and even nurtured by mainstream producers as another hook to influence purchase decisions.

Wine production trends are reactions to innovation, novelty and demand, and will influence consumers’ buying habits. Wine products not widely adopted in the marketplace will become marginalised and have a potentially limited life cycle. Journalists can and do influence consumers’ buying habits, as do more popular mainstream social media influencers, but it cannot be argued convincingly that these influences are greater than, or take precedence over the everyday marketing tools producers, wholesalers and retailers use on a daily basis such as variable pricing strategies for quality end products, made widely available, and backed up by focused and concerted promotional activity.

The synergy between journalists and producers should clearly be valued and nurtured as they can both contribute positively to a dynamic and successful wine marketing strategy within a environment where there are deep concerns about declining consumption and an unengaged next generation of consumers. Perhaps its time to pay the measly R50 rand per month and support online magazines like Winemag.co.za … as you will certainly miss them and the journalists who write for them when the platform is no longer there!

• Greg Sherwood was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and as the son of a career diplomat, spent his first 21 years traveling the globe with his parents. With a Business Management and Marketing degree from Webster University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Sherwood began his working career as a commodity trader. In 2000, he decided to make more of a long-held interest in wine taking a position at Handford Wines in South Kensington, London, working his way up to the position of Senior Wine Buyer over 22 years. Sherwood currently consults to a number of top fine wine merchants in London while always keeping one eye firmly on the South African wine industry. He qualified as the 303rd Master of Wine in 2007.