Jamie Goode: The role of wine influencers

The term ‘influencer’ is a trigger word for some people. It comes loaded with meaning, and for many in the wine industry it’s somewhat pejorative.

What is an ‘influencer’? It’s a term used to describe someone who has a significant presence on one of two social media platforms: TikTok or Instagram. More than this, it is someone who focuses almost exclusively on these platforms and uses their presence to market products.

In this case, we can separate out people who use social media effectively as part of their communication strategy from those who are dependent on one or both of these platforms. So I would say that while I have a bigger Instagram following than many of the wine influencers, I wouldn’t say I was an influencer, even though technically I do have significant influence through Instagram. This sounds a bit pedantic, but I think the distinction is important.

I’d also say that for someone to be an influencer, it is likely that they are trying to appeal directly to consumers, and more specifically to non-involved consumers, rather than the people I’m reaching, which is mainly trade, students of wine and highly involved consumers who have a bit of an obsession with wine.

This is one reason that the wine trade likes influencers so much. They are desperate to find a way to talk to regular folk who buy most of the wine. They realise that most wine publications – even those who think they have a broad appeal – only speak to a small subset of consumers. This may be an important subset, but it misses out on large segments of the wine buying public. Most people who drink wine would never do something as abstract as read about wine, but they do like to experience wine. It’s a bit like cars, or coffee: lots of people enjoy driving cars and drinking coffee, but they would never read a magazine on these subjects.

Influencers seem to offer a route to reach these people with their fun content and simple messaging [and sometimes there is no messaging: just a picture of someone drinking wine or holding a bottle]. This is one of the reasons why marketing money has been sent their way, even to influencers without a great deal of influence.

There are some properly influential influencers, and I have a lot of respect for them. They built up their following the right way, and they deliver good content that engages their sizeable audiences. I met one on a trip to Austria recently, and my nephew saw his picture on my Instagram feed and was really excited. ‘Do you know him?’ he asked. Although my nephew, who is in his early 20s, is not a wine person, he followed this individual avidly on TikTok. I met another important influencer on a trip to New York State last summer, and was quite taken with the quality of her educational wine content, presented in imaginative ways, and the immense size of her audience. She’s in her early 20s too. These sorts of influencers are to be celebrated.

Less so the engagement-pod grifters with relatively small audiences. Now audience size isn’t everything – engagement is just as important, and these micro-influencers with followings of 7,000-10,000 aren’t to be dismissed simply because of their modest following. But many of them have built up an audience because of their membership of engagement or comment pods. The idea here is that a large group of content creators get together on a third-party chat service like WhatsApp. Whenever someone publishes on Instagram, the others are supposed to like the post immediately and leave some comment, to boost the post by tricking Instagram’s algorithm into thinking this content is genuinely popular. It’s not as blatant as buying followers or likes or comments, but it’s still cheating. This sort of behaviour is fairly easy to spot: a post with an unusually large number of comments, all of which are rather brief and generic. My biggest problem with the grifter-type creators, though, is the fact that they like such bad wines. They will champion any wine they are sent by PR agencies, and rather than guiding their followers towards interesting wines, which would be useful, their raison d’etre seems to be to show the agencies that they will deliver content that will presumably make the clients really happy, even if a lot of the engagement that follows isn’t totally genuine.

Lately, many have been hiding their like counts, which is a rather obvious admission that their engagement is rather less than they’d hoped for: Instagram tweaks its algorithms frequently.

Of course, influencers are all different, and there are some really good ones as well as some tiresomely bad ones. The most benevolent approach to take is probably just to be glad that people are talking about wine on social media. Good luck to all influencers, because whether or not the content is good, and whether or not the motivations are genuine, it’s good to see wine being displayed and discussed. Even horrible bulk-shipped, soft brand techno wines at inflated prices.

Rather than the influencers, though, the social media accounts that I think are so useful to the wine world are from those who work directly in wine, for example in production, or in the vineyard, or in restaurants. Often these people share genuinely insightful content that has depth to it, from a place of real expertise. And let’s remember that influence like this may not convince end-consumers to buy a specific bottle, but can help the buyers and gatekeepers decide which wines to list. After all, people can only buy the wine that is in front of them, in a restaurant or a store. The real influence might be here: trusted communicators influencing buying decisions.

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.