Today at 3 pm BST / 10 pm SGT, I’m talking to Josh Dunning on Instagram Live about how to earn money from communicating about wine. Josh blogs as Word On the Grapevine, and puts out lots of engaging content on Instagram too. I’ve never met him in person, but he has done a great job of getting his name out there over the past year, and we agreed that it would be interesting to discuss how to make a career from wine communication.

In advance of our IG conversation, I wanted to gather my thoughts.

When I started in the wine industry, working for Majestic Wine (between 2001 and 2007), I always wanted to write about wine. Starting a blog never occurred to me (at the time, blogs were still quite a niche, and I didn’t know where to start), and while FaceBook existed, it wasn’t really used to publish content. My fantasy job would have been to get a column in a national newspaper.

I knew that was a ridiculously long shot, but at the time that seemed to be the only way of earning money through wine writing. If I was starting out today, however, the career paths are very different.

Newspaper columns still exist, although the opportunities to earn a proper salary have dwindled to a mere handful of positions. In the UK, most of these writers have been in their role for decades, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will replace them when the time comes. As communication has moved online, different opportunities have emerged: sponsored social media posts, self-publishing (both books and blogs) and video.

In little more than a decade, the ease with which anyone can produce and publish content has made a seismic difference to how wine is communicated online. In the same period, many writers have now become publishers: JancisRobinson.com, TimAtkin.com, Vinous.com and others have become direct competitors with the likes of Decanter and Wine Spectator.

Barriers to entry are low, but competition is now very high, and there is still a very limited amount of money out there to fund all these communicators. To earn money therefore still requires multiple sources of income - either a steady job outside the industry (Josh describes himself as a ‘full-time logistics engineer’), or other work within wine, such as teaching and hosting events.

This is where perceived conflicts of interest can arise - I’ve covered this elsewhere, so won’t repeat myself here. It has never been easy to make a career in wine communication, but it’s important that new generations continue to take advantage of whatever channels they can, to keep wine communication fresh and relevant.