The Age of the Wine Critic Is Over: Some Thoughts on the Future of Wine Writing

In a world where information about wine is more readily available than ever, the question is no longer who can write about it, but what is worth writing. On the changing role of the wine critic, and the search for a different kind of wine writing: not merely writing about wine, but thinking through wine

For much of the past half-century, wine criticism, and wine writing more generally, operated according to a fairly straightforward economic model. A number of established publications employed respected critics, with subscription revenues helping to safeguard editorial independence. An authoritative score could transform a producer’s fortunes. Critics travelled, tasted and judged; publications paid for expertise; and readers paid for guidance they trusted. We all enjoyed reading them.

That familiar order is now unravelling. Social media has reshaped how people discover wine. Consumers find bottles on Instagram and TikTok, compare prices on Wine-Searcher, scroll through thousands of user reviews on Vivino and CellarTracker, and watch tastings on YouTube. Increasingly, they also turn to AI assistants for recommendations on what to drink with barbecued lamb or why two vintages of the same Côte-Rôtie taste so different.

If the barriers to expressing an opinion have been lowered, perhaps even virtualised, and those opinions can be heard loud and clear, what, then, is the enduring value of the professional wine critic?

Recently, I read an excellent article in The Circular, the magazine of the Circle of Wine Writers, an international community of wine writers, journalists, photographers and other media professionals. Written by Janet Z. Wang, whose professional background spans investment banking, computer science and wine writing, the article explores the changing economics of wine writing and the opportunities that may emerge from this transformation. Having spent a decade in investment banking before turning to wine, and drawing on her computer science background as well as her experience writing for Chinese readers, Wang brings an unusually broad perspective to the subject. Her observations prompted me to put down some thoughts I have been carrying around for quite some time. What follows combines some of her central insights with my own reflections on the future of wine writing.

1. Information is cheap. Judgement is not

The first casualty of mass media and artificial intelligence is straightforward description. Winery histories, regional summaries, vintage reports and competent tasting notes have become abundant. Information that once required hours of patient research can now be assembled in seconds. AI is remarkably good at synthesising existing knowledge into coherent, authoritative-sounding prose.

Thankfully, synthesis is not the same as insight. A model can tell you that a particular grape variety tends to produce wines of perfume and finesse. What it cannot readily do is notice that a grower has subtly refined extraction techniques over the last six vintages, that a replanting programme has quietly altered a vineyard's character, or that a domaine's latest release represents a philosophical shift as much as a response to the growing season. Such observations emerge only through sustained, first-hand experience. Information has become cheap; judgement has not.

A 2023 Dartmouth study by Carlson, Kopalle and colleagues trained an AI model on hundreds of thousands of wine and beer reviews and conducted what amounted to a Turing test. Readers could not reliably distinguish human-written notes from machine-generated ones. Yet when informed in advance which texts had been produced by AI, a significant majority preferred the human versions. People still want tasting notes written by someone who has actually tasted the wine. As fellow biological beings, we instinctively value the authenticity of real experience over even the most fluent synthetic prose.

The deeper point is one we should already recognise: the best critics do something considerably more difficult than merely describe wine. They build context. Through decades of extensive tasting, they develop an intimate understanding of vintages, producers and regions across time. They identify stylistic shifts, challenge fashionable assumptions and earn trust through consistency.

2. The myth of the general reader

When readership declines or the field becomes more crowded, the instinct among many editors and publishers is to broaden their appeal: simplify the language, drop specialist terminology and pitch to the curious newcomer.

Jamie Goode, whose work I greatly enjoy and who has observed this reflex throughout his thirty years as a wine writer, believes this approach misses the point, particularly now that generic information is so freely available.

“A mistake a lot of people make is thinking the more general the appeal, the bigger the potential audience. You have to be pretty motivated to read about wine. It's a very abstract thing. So the only people who actually want to go and read a wine publication are high-involvement consumers, or the trade,” as he puts it. "Many people drive cars, but relatively few read car magazines. The same applies to wine. Drinking it does not necessarily mean wanting to read about it. The audience for serious wine writing is not the population of wine drinkers at large, but those sufficiently involved to want to understand it more deeply." WSET, for instance, reports more than 130,000 candidates annually across over seventy countries. This is a motivated, self-selecting audience that needs reliable information and has professional reasons to engage with it, and even to pay for it.

Writing for a broad, relatively uncommitted audience therefore means competing for the attention of people who may have little motivation to read about wine and who often cannot even find the wines being recommended. As information proliferates, genuine insight becomes more valuable.

3. From the solitary critic to trusted specialists

In her article, Wang writes: “The age of the solitary, omniscient critic is over. What replaces it is not a flat democracy of equal voices but something more demanding and, ultimately, more rewarding: a lively market of trusted specialists, each authoritative in their own territory.”

It has never been easier to publish content, and rarely harder to earn trust. Amid an ocean of competent but unremarkable material, readers will gravitate towards communities with which they feel an affinity, and the strongest work will rise to the surface. Genuine connection does not come from trying to speak to everyone. It comes from speaking clearly and specifically to someone: from a perspective that nobody else quite occupies, and in a voice that is distinctly your own. That is how it works.

4. The polymath advantage: what cannot be replicated?

What, then, remains difficult to replace? What should form the foundations of modern wine writing?

The first quality is comparative experience accumulated over decades. Andrew Jefford, whose work I have been reading for many years, brings to wine writing an extraordinary breadth of experience, combining literary sensibility, an understanding of terroir and agriculture, and genuine expertise in the Languedoc. Knowledge of this kind cannot be accelerated or simulated by artificial intelligence.

The second is originality born of connecting wine with other disciplines. Jamie Goode was a science editor before turning to wine writing in the mid-1990s. His doctorate in plant biology equips him to write about oxidation, Brettanomyces or regenerative viticulture with an authority and critical edge that a generalist writer would struggle to reproduce.

Originality emerges at the intersection of different fields, while specialisation makes it possible to address a defined readership with a deep interest in the subject, sometimes with professional and commercial needs that depend on it. In an age when generic, plausible information can be generated within minutes, the scarce resource is a distinctive perspective originating elsewhere, one capable of producing genuinely original ideas.

Increasingly, originality lives at the intersections: wine and plant science, wine and finance, wine and technology, wine and law, wine and anthropology, wine and art, wine and cinema. You get the idea.

This approach also addresses the problem of audience. A writer working at these intersections is not competing for the attention of the average wine drinker. Instead, they become genuinely valuable to a defined group of deeply engaged readers, who may also have professional or commercial reasons to care about what they write.

5. Not just writing about wine, but thinking through wine

Wine writing in the international press remains largely preoccupied with wine itself: grape varieties, regions, wineries, production methods, tastings, scores and recommendations. All of these matter, of course. Yet I believe they leave a considerable journalistic and cultural opportunity unfulfilled.

I mean a different kind of writing. Not merely writing about wine, but thinking through wine.

Writing in which wine is not simply the subject, but a starting point for exploring culture, art, literature, cinema, history, creativity, business and society. Writing that goes beyond describing a wine or assessing its quality, using it instead to ask broader questions. What makes a person a creator with a distinctive voice? How does a winery or a wine region develop an identity, and why does that identity matter? What, fundamentally, distinguishes the marketing of a new wine from the launch of a product by a technology company? What happens when tradition encounters innovation? And how does individual taste become a cultural phenomenon?

This is not simply a more interesting way of writing about wine. It is a way of making wine part of a much broader cultural conversation: one that offers readers not merely new information, but new ideas that encourage them to think. It is something different from, and more ambitious than, what has traditionally been expected of wine writing. Rather than stopping at a recommendation about what to drink or which winery to visit, perfectly worthwhile activities in themselves, it stimulates curiosity, creates connections and invites readers into a different kind of conversation.

Wine criticism has never been at its best when it has confined itself to delivering verdicts. Its importance has always lain in helping readers understand why a wine deserves their attention: how it fits into a larger story, and what it reveals about a place, a vintage or a producer's vision. That role has lost none of its importance.

I explore these questions here, on Wine Thoughts, an independent writing project through which I try to examine the world through wine, rather than simply write about the world of wine. Those of you reading this will already be familiar with the approach. But the point here is not my own project. It is the belief that this represents a much broader journalistic and cultural opportunity, one that may be particularly well suited to today's readers who love wine, rather than only the relatively small audience that reads wine blogs and magazines.

Across the wine world, people are looking for ways to expand the boundaries of wine writing. We can see this in The New York Times, the Financial Times and The Guardian, as well as in magazines such as Decanter and Wine Enthusiast.

The question is not merely how to extend existing coverage, but how to offer readers a different kind of writing altogether. Everyone is looking for it. And this is where wine writing needs to go.  ■

The photograph above is Liquor Store at Night by the American photographer William Eggleston (born 1939). His exhibition, All That Goes Unnoticed, an exploration of a world that is disappearing, is currently on show at The Photographers' Gallery in London. Highly recommended.

For more thoughts and new posts by David Amzallag see winethoughts.blog