On a relatively recently- but dramatically-changed landscape, Janet Z. Wang ponders the role and opportunities of our occupation going forward. She discovers some substantial silver linings, based on originality and sensory experience, which cannot be machine generated, in a somewhat otherwise cloudy forecast. While information may have become cheap, judgment has not, she observes.
For much of the past half-century, wine criticism followed a straightforward economic model. A number of established publications employed respected critics, with subscriptions supporting editorial independence. An authoritative score could transform a producer’s fortunes. Critics travelled, tasted, and judged; publications paid for expertise; and readers paid for trusted guidance.
That familiar order is now unravelling. Social media, eager to democratise everything, 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 or CellarTracker, and watch YouTube tastings from an ever-broader array of voices. Most curiously of all, AI assistants — which have never tasted a thing — are now routinely asked for wine recommendations to pair with barbecued lamb.
If the barrier to offering opinions has been lowered or even virtualised, what is the enduring value of the professional wine critic?
What has become cheap
The first casualty of mass media and artificial intelligence is straightforward description. Producer 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 strikingly good at synthesising existing knowledge into coherent, authoritative-sounding prose.
Thankfully, synthesis is not the same as insight. A model can comfortably tell you that a certain grape variety often yields wines of perfume and finesse. What it cannot 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 2025 release represents a philosophical shift in addition to the growing season.
Those observations emerge only from sustained, first-hand experience. Information has become cheap, judgment has not.
A Dartmouth study (Carlson, Kopalle et al., 2023) trained a model on hundreds of thousands of wine and beer reviews and ran what amounted to a Turing test. Readers could not reliably distinguish human-written notes from machine-generated ones. But when informed in advance which were AI-produced, 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 the most fluent synthetic prose.
The deeper point is one we should already recognise: the best critics do something considerably harder than mere description. They build context. Through decades of wide tasting, they develop an intimate feel for vintages, producers, and regions across time. They spot stylistic drifts, challenge fashionable assumptions, and earn trust through consistency.
The myth of the general reader
When audiences contract or the field grows crowded, the instinct among many editors and publishers is to broaden appeal: simplify the language, drop the jargon, and pitch to the curious newcomer. Jamie Goode, who has observed this reflex over 30 years as a wine writer, thinks it misses the mark — especially now, when 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,” he says. “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.”
He draws a parallel: many people drive cars, but few read car magazines. The same holds for wine. The set of people who drink wine differs from those who will read 800 words on it. The latter group is defined by deep involvement, not casual consumption. As information proliferates, their appetite for genuine insight only grows.
Two structural realities sharpen the challenge. Wine’s vast fragmentation means that even a passionately recommended bottle may be difficult for readers to source. People buy what is in front of them. Meanwhile, global consumption continues to decline: the OIV (International Organisation of Vine and Wine) projects 208 million hectolitres for 2025, down 2.7 percent on the year and about 14 percent below 2018 levels — the lowest since 1957.
Writing for a broad, casual audience therefore means competing for the attention of people who are drinking less, lack strong motivation to read, and often cannot act on specific suggestions. More voices are being published; fewer words are being read. The counterintuitive truth is that real value sits at the deep end.
Goode sees strong demand among wine students and trade professionals. WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) reports over 130,000 candidates annually across 70+ countries — a motivated, self-selecting audience that needs reliable information and has professional reasons to pay for it.
Writing as a platform, not a product
The economics of wine writing have always been tough and are growing more so. Outside a small circle of established publications, freelance rates have struggled to keep up with inflation. In today’s English-language market, NUJ (National Union of Journalists) guidelines suggest £400–£700 per thousand words for national newspaper features and £300–£500 for consumer magazines. Few writers now make a living from commissions alone. What sustains many is speaking, judging, teaching, hosting, and consulting. In this context, articles serve as the qualification and visibility that keep opportunities flowing. Understood as brand-building that happens to pay, the modest rates for writing feel less discouraging.
Diversification brings opportunities and tensions. The firewall between editorial independence and commercial ties has weakened amid declining advertising revenue and subscriptions. Readers are generally less concerned by commercial relationships than by whether they are disclosed.
Scores still matter, but differently
Numerical scores remain embedded in the fine-wine trade for its quick, cross-linguistic clarity. Merchants, auction houses, producers, and en-primeur campaigns still rely on them. Consumers, however, now use scores more shrewdly. Rather than depending on a single critic, they compare professional opinions alongside thousands of community reviews. Research suggests these two sources are complementary — professional criticism provides context and sparks conversation even as user-generated ratings proliferate in online forums.
Future paths
Two qualities remain hard to replicate at scale. The first is sustained comparative experience over decades. Jasper Morris MW spent more than 40 years buying, tasting, and working in Burgundy, before launching Inside Burgundy. Subscribers are not simply paying for information about Vosne-Romanée or Chambolle-Musigny — that is widely available. They are paying for the nuanced insight of someone who remembers how the wines tasted before key technical changes, who has followed growers across generations, and can contextualise vintages against dozens tasted under similar conditions. This depth cannot be fast-tracked or AI-simulated.
“Our subscription numbers continue to rise,” says Morris, “with the biggest uptick always following the new Burgundy vintage release each January. This suggests people are still most excited by real-world activities, and perhaps we have tapped relatively deep into our market. When we give an opinion, it comes from genuine knowledge and is independent. The difficulty with AI is that you don’t know how deep or shallow or how good the sources are, so you can’t rely on it without delving further.”
The second is lateral originality. 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 no generalist can easily replicate.
Not everyone can claim 40 years of immersion, which highlights one of the most promising adaptations available: the polymath advantage. When I began writing for Chinese readers, I made no apology for my decade-long investment banking career — I leaned into it. That early audience, many from finance themselves, was as fascinated by price charts as by tasting notes. More recently, my long-dormant computer science degree has given me some confidence and legitimacy when discussing AI’s impact on the wine world. In an age when generic, plausible information can be produced in minutes, the scarce resource is the distinctive perspective that comes from elsewhere and generates original ideas.
Originality increasingly lives at the intersections: wine and plant science, wine and finance, wine and technology, wine and law, wine and anthropology, wine and a particular language or diaspora… This approach addresses the audience problem too: a writer operating at such crossroads does not compete for the general drinker; they become indispensable to a specific group of high-involvement readers who have both professional and commercial reasons to engage.
All this is not to diminish the value of accessible entry-level content. We were all beginners once, often inspired by someone who took the time to explain terroir or poured a glass that created an unforgettable first impression. Many younger communicators are successfully building large followings on digital platforms by specialising — sparkling wines, volcanic soils, natural wines — and cultivating authentic voices. Digital media rewards that focus more readily than print ever did. A writer no longer needs an editor’s permission to reach readers across the world. Nowadays, algorithms reward consistency, audiences reward genuine connection.
Artificial intelligence will continue to commoditise routine description and basic information. In many ways, we should welcome the change; it frees human writers from work that never truly required a palate or decades of comparative memory. Our enduring strengths lie in original thinking, real-world sensory encounters, historical perspective spanning actual decades, and the ability to place wines within richer social and cultural contexts. AI can summarise what is known. It cannot stand in a remote vineyard at harvest or recognise a stylistic shift that only becomes apparent across ten vintages tasted side by side.
Wine criticism was never at its best when it simply delivered verdicts. It mattered because it helped readers understand why a wine deserved attention — how it fitted into a larger story and what it revealed about a place, a vintage, or a producer’s vision. That role has not diminished.
The trusted expert
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.
The barriers to publishing have never been lower; the barriers to earning trust have rarely been higher. In a vast sea of adequate content, readers will find their own tribes, and the strongest work will rise to the top. True connection does not come from trying to speak to everyone. It comes from speaking clearly and specifically to someone — from a place that no one else quite occupies, but you.
