Context
The fracturing of the wine review market is bringing to light three major issues in for the product.
Reviewers that largely made their name in 1 or 2 regions (Galloni - Italy, Jeb - Rhone/Napa?, Josh - Rhone, Lisa - Napa, Neil - Bordeaux) are now all at different publications, each of which require a separate subscription. To get everyone, you would need to spend $100 or more a month.
Each of those subscriptions include many other regions, some of which you may find valuable (William Kelley for Burgundy for me at least), and some you likely don’t find valuable at all or are at least duplicative with other publications. Whether you want the rest of the content or not, you are paying for it.
Quality of content is going down because reviewers are being asked to take on more regions and more production of other content. For example, most of Galloni’s latest Napa reviews don’t have any producer commentary, something I often find more valuable than the notes themselves.
The New Model
Someone needs to apply the Substack or Amazon Prime video model to wine reviewers. Hypothetically, I would love to get my Napa reviews from Jeb, Burgundy from William, Italy from Galloni and Bordeaux from Neil, especially if they each only (or largely) focused on their region of expertise instead of taking on many more regions as their respective publications require. They should get together as a co-op and/or some enterprising enthusiast could build an app. I would pay $5 per month to each reviewer, with a small spiff going to the app that organizes and standardizes the review, much in the same way I can get Britbox, SommTV, PGA Tour Live etc through my Amazon Prime Video account (with Amazon no doubt getting some of the revenue).
My strong suspicion is that the quality of the reviews would go way up since the reviewers are stretched less thin, the revenue would go to the reviewers rather than investors who are trying to make wine reviews into a big business (Vinous), and noise would go down as each publication wouldn’t need to do it all. This model doesn’t necessarily require the reviewers to be exclusive to the platform - I can download the Britbox app or get it through my Prime account.
I’m in the web app business but don’t have relationships with any of the reviewers, so I’m putting this free idea out there with the hopes that couple of the strongest reviewers (William Kelley) will get together and do this, which would encourage everyone else to get on board.
P.S. Another benefit of this model is each reviewer is incentivized to create great social content (William Kelly is the ONLY person currently doing this), because it raises their profile, resulting in more subscription dollars. Currently, the majority of the social style content is exclusive to each publication, which makes it basically useless because it’s behind a paywall, which eliminates the benefits of the reach of the social platforms.
Your last point 1st - WK is the only reviewer doing social content? I think AG was the 1st to start Zoom events/talks when the pandemic hit and is not behind a paywall. Jasper Morris has more social content than any other reviewer as far as I know via his site, instagram or via 67 Pallmall & Pallmall TV and you can access all of it freely.
Otherwise, I’m not sure there’s near enough market for a $5 monthly fee to pay anyone a living.
Not being argumentative, but then by your logic Burghound should be $60/ year?
Those would be tight margins unless you don’t expect them to travel/ have much in expenses.
Don’t get hung up on the details. Maybe an established reviewer charges $10/month and a new one charges $1/month. The point is you can access your favorite reviewers in one place without paying for a bunch of content and overhead that you don’t find valuable, and the majority of the revenue goes back to reviewers, not to the for profit companies that employ them.
Also, your Burghound example is perfect. The website is terrible and there is no app because that’s not Allen’s specialty - reviewing wine is. This way, he would get to focus on reviewing wine, not maintaining a website.
I agree with the premise - fragmentation of the reviewers is creating an issue with consumers.
How I consider my subscriptions are based on the volume of spend I have per region and determine the publication that aligns with it. If the volume for that region isn’t high enough to justify a subscription, I go without. The biggest challenge imho is for new collectors whom the subscription is a significant percentage of their spend. My suggestion for those type of consumers is to target them based upon monthly review hits. If I’m vinous, I could have an entry level of $50 for X tasting note and article views per month, then have additional tiers. It would allow consumers to use my model (%of spend by region) and attract larger quantities of subscribers.
If I am understanding this correctly I personally have major concerns with centralizing this in anyway. You cannot try every wine, and you cannot read every publication. That is the beauty of diversity and localization. Your opinions and thoughts will be shaped by that which is accessible to you, but the whole world doesn’t have those same influences. If we tie them into 1 channel in anyway, any biases or flaws of that channel will have a global effect, leading to things like Parkerization and the information silos we have on platforms like facebook.
You aren’t understanding correctly. This accomplishes the opposite… You subscribe to only the individual reviewers you want to follow. Imagine that every reviewer is on this platform and you can pick and choose the individuals to which you want to subscribe. It’s basically the democratization of wine reviews.
I agree, although I think it would need a dedicated section in the app. They also have the standardized database off all the wines already, which is a big headstart.
Bingo - paid CT account with the option to subscribe at a cheaper price per month to get all the content in CT. When I did a paid CT sign up recently I saw I could link my already paid subscriptions and I thought - wouldn’t it be nice to get them all bundled/debundled in 1 place at a discount. Yes the consumer sees the discount but the reviewer gets a new audience they likely would not have reached prior. And the reviewers can focus on the reviews and let CT handle the content/UI/distribution.
Hopefully my disagreement is not offending, as that is not at all my intention.
If they are all on 1 platform, we will have the issue of the organic results within that platform, assuming there is never a means to pay for placement. What you are likely to click on FB or google are the the things that pop up first. So the algorithm that determines results becomes the centralized influence. The person or people who create it end up with disproportionate power, even though the reviewers are on a “even” playing field, and the users now have access to seemingly everything, yet the number of things they see doesn’t really change because it is based on their own limited capacity. But because that algorithm is now nearly the sole factor of how many clicks you will get, there is even more incentive to find ways to manipulate it.
This sounds like what someone must have said when the dreamed up SABRE a lifetime ago, which has transmogrified itself over the decades and acquisitions to be Expedia
No offence taken, but you aren’t understanding the concept. Each user only pays for wine reviews from the reviewers they want to subscribe to. So there is no algorithm or anything other concept of organic results. Your reviews are 100% dependent on which reviewers you subscribe to. For example, I would pay $5 per month each to William Kelley, Jeb Dunnuck and Antonia Galloni, and I would see only reviews and other content from those three. You might pay $5 per month each to William Kelley, Jasper Morris, Neal Martin and Josh Raynolds, whose reviews and content you would see. On other words, the platform is reviewer agnostic.
Thanks for the mention, Marc. I realized about 18 months ago that there were other worthwhile niches to explore. Even with the main magazine at $50/$100 a year, I spun off two new digital publications at opposite ends of the spectrum ($25 and $99).