Introduction

Adejoké Bakare is the first black female Michelin-starred chef in the UK. Her London restaurant, Chishuru, showcases modern West African cuisine and was one of several new one-star venues listed in Michelin’s Great Britain & Ireland Guide 2024.

Joké Bakare developed her love of food from an early age, and ran a fish & chip cart while studying in Nigeria. After moving to the UK with her family, she continued to pursue her passion for cooking alongside several jobs.

Things went to the next level with a pop-up restaurant in Brixton, which quickly proved a hit with diners and critics, and Chishuru became a permanent addition to London’s culinary landscape.

Business partner Matt Paice joined in 2021, running front-of-house operations and overseeing the wine list, and Chishuru relocated to Fitzrovia in 2023. Decor reflects its culinary roots, with soft furnishings by British-Nigerian designer Eva Sonaike.

Michelin inspectors praised Chishuru’s warm and friendly ambience. Of the food, they said, ‘Delicious, satisfying and full-flavoured dishes showcase cleverly judged spicing, with sauces proving a particular highlight – whether thick scotch bonnet with ekuru, or caramelised onion and lemon with guinea fowl yassa.’

How do you feel about winning your Michelin star?

I’m thrilled! The hospitality industry gives out lots of awards to itself, but the one that chefs care about more than any other is Michelin.

Where does your passion for food come from, and when did you first start cooking?

I learned from my paternal grandmother. As the oldest sibling, I was often tasked with cooking for the family. I became interested in learning about food, and experimented a great deal on my dad, the poor man!

When did you first start cooking professionally?

I ran a fish & chip cart while I was studying biological sciences at Kaduna in northern Nigeria. It was just something I did from time to time, but it was very popular, especially with American and Asian students. Then, years later, after I moved to the UK, I sold pies and akara and puffpuff from a van outside my church in southeast London on Sunday mornings. After that, I ran a couple of supper clubs.

Can you tell us more about how you made the leap into the hospitality sector in the UK?

When I came to the UK, I worked in a range of fields from care to health & safety facilities management. I was becoming more and more interested in food, and I had always dreamed of having my own restaurant. Then, I saw an advert in the local London paper, Metro, for a competition to get a three-month pop-up restaurant. To my amazement, I won. That was in early 2019, but it wasn’t until September 2020 that it opened.

How did you make the transition from pop-up to restaurant?

The pop-up was only supposed to last three months, but Jay Rayner – the famous food critic of the Observer newspaper – came in and gave us a rave review. Brixton Village then asked me to make the pop-up permanent.

Why did you make the move from Brixton to Fitzrovia?

After TimeOut named Chishuru the ‘best restaurant in London’ in April 2022, it became apparent that we had outgrown the space – we didn’t even have our own bathrooms! So my business partner Matt and I started looking for central London premises – we knew we needed to be central, because of the number of foreign visitors we were getting. We closed Brixton in October 2022 and I did a couple of pop-ups while we waited for the restaurant to open. We finally opened the Fitzrovia site in September 2023.

What has been your biggest obstacle, whether professionally or personally, and how have you overcome or managed it?

London landlords were not very interested in having a west African restaurant in their premises. We were flatly refused sites we wanted, and for a while with our current site it looked like the deal would fall through and we would lose everything. Summer 2023 was very challenging indeed. The answer was persistence, and self-belief. I just refused to give up.

Why do you describe your restaurant as ‘modern West African’?

I was born and raised in Nigeria but there’s no such thing as ‘Nigerian cuisine’ – it’s a huge country with many peoples and culinary traditions that go across borders. For example, you are more likely to find some northern Nigerian dishes in northern Ghana than southern Nigeria. My parents are Yoruba and Igbo respectively, and I grew up in a Hausa area, so at Chishuru you will see elements of all those culinary traditions on our menu.

I’m not setting out to create an authentic version of the food of my heritage; I’m just trying to present a version of the dish in a London context, with London presentation and professional cooking techniques. I describe myself as ‘a Londoner by way of Nigeria’ and I guess my food reflects that.

How hard is it to get your ingredients in London?

I’ve found it impossible to get good plantain from normal restaurant suppliers, so I have boxes and boxes driven up from Brixton Market twice-a-week. I head to Dagenham for specialist spices, and for yaji – a spice blend for grilled meats. I get this made for me by someone I know in Nigeria.

What’s your favourite dish on the menu?

One dish that I’ve been making since the beginning is ekuru. It’s a wild watermelon seed cake, topped with a pumpkin seed pesto and served with a Scotch bonnet sauce. Like a lot of my food, it’s a little London twist on a dish from my childhood.

What are the principles behind your wine list at the restaurant?

My food often has intense flavours, so we identified quite early on that wines with freshness and aromatic intensity would work best. High tannin & high acid wines don’t work, nor do wines with lots of evidence of oak or malolactic fermentation (MLF). Wines with age, with lots of tertiary characteristics, don’t stand up to the food, which is why you won’t see anything older than about six years on our list.

We decided to focus solely on French wines, to be able to go deeper into its grapes and regions. We’re the only restaurant in London serving a Romorantin by the glass [for example]; we serve a Loin de l’Oeil on our wine flight; we have three Savagnins on the list and two Savennières. The list is entirely natural but you’d never know – there’s no funky stuff.

Do you have any personal favourites from your wine list?

Right now, Domaine Labet’s Savagnin ‘Élevage Long’, which is aged 36 months in large barrels. But, their wines are in short supply so it won’t be in the fridge for much longer. Perhaps our most popular wine – the one which customers ask over and over to take a photo of the label – is Domaine Chamonard’s Fleurie ‘La Madone’ which we serve as part of our wine flight.

You’re the first black female Michelin-starred chef in the UK. What do you think is the significance of this?

You can’t be what you can’t see – I hope my star gives inspiration to others to put themselves forward.

What advice would you give to other black female chefs?

Cook from your heart, and believe in yourself. And keep persisting!

Stuart Pigott is by his own admission a controversialist. Born and educated in Britain but living in Berlin since 1989, he has made it his business to be the chief inquisitor and critic of the German wine system. He was influenced by the “Gonzo” movement started by Hunter S Thompson in the 1960s (Pigott’s employer James Suckling [qv] is also a fan). In his many books in both English and German, starting with in Life Beyond Liebfraumilch (1988), he has been an outspoken critic of what he sees as the self-defeating complexity of German wine laws and of the poor output of many producers.

He has been attacked (both in print and physically) by winemakers, he has been sued and has been the subject of a criminal investigation ending in a settlement with his accuser ordered to pay 90 per cent of court costs. Of his first German-language book in 1994 he said, “I had told some painful truths, beginning with wine ratings and ending in the personal unpleasantness and craziness that I had experienced. A lot of winemakers got upset, and one aristocratic producer told Der Spiegel that I had run through the vineyards of Germany like a wild boar….It’s a long story and this is [an] abbreviated version. It is also far from being the last time I got into deep trouble. The last time the shit really hit the fan was back in January 2018, but that’s a completely different story…”

Pigott is considered one of the foremost experts on German wine. Despite (or because of?) his outspokenness he was recently awarded the Professor Muller-Thurgau prize for lifetime achievement by the famous Geisenheim Wine University in the Rheingau.

What would you consider was the most important decision of your career in wine?

 Moving to Germany at the beginning of 1989 was definitely the best decision I made. It took a long time for the process of integration to be completed, but 3 years ago I became a German citizen (I retained my British citizenship). The first thing I did was immerse myself in the Mosel wine industry and that forced me to improve my shaky German. It also introduced me to the nuts and bolts of grape growing and winemaking. Quite soon after that I met James Suckling for whom I now work as a senior editor.  

Do you consider your career progression to be conventional?

Absolutely not! For example, I never studied journalism and it wasn’t until the autumn of 2008 that I started studying wine as a part-time student at the famous Geisenheim Wine University. It was really important to dock that scientific basis onto the knowledge I had accumulated as an autodidact (some of which proved to be wrong!) Then, when I moved to New York in the autumn of 2016 I finally started learning storytelling by reading Story by Robert McKee and Into the Woods by John Yorke. I still wonder how much I’ve learned…

Do you consider yourself a disruptor?

I think it’s rather unimportant how I see myself in that connection. Ask other people and they’ll tell you that I frequently stirred the shit and might well do so again at any moment. I first got into serious trouble when my first German language book was published in 1994. Suddenly it felt like I had a pack of dogs after me, though they were actually winemakers furious that I’d told some painful truths. There was a kafkaesque interrogation at a Berlin police station, and a court case with TV cameras, etc., etc. It showed me that the writer’s job is to tell the truth and that he must be prepared to suffer for that. It was the real start of my development as a writer. 

Do you consider yourself to be agile?

Yes, very much so. During the 35 years since I graduated from the Royal College of Art (in cultural history) in July 1986 I haven’t had a proper job, only worked freelance and there were a handful of economic, media and personal crises during that time. I came through all of this and will come through this crisis because of a combination of hard work and the agility of JamesSuckling.com. But winemaking is much the same. Just when everything’s going swimmingly along comes the harvest from hell or the market flops.

What is the level of knowledge of your wine audience?

I will never forget the JamesSuckling.com Great Wines of the World event in Bejing in November 2018. 1,250 people paid to attend the event and the most remarkable thing about them was their knowledge. The guy from Domaine Drouhin in Oregon, expressed it better than anyone else when he said, “I don’t make styles of wine that are fashionable in China, but the many people who came to my table knew who we are and what they were going to taste. Some of them even knew all about me!”

You are entirely online…?

The experience of drinking wine, being excited about it and wanting to know more hasn’t changed fundamentally and the power of a good story does not diminish when it is told using electronic media. However, figuring out how a new medium functions is hard work and without knowing that it won’t work for wine stories or any other kind of stories. The real sign of success is people who read what you wrote or listened to what you said and remember it because it touched them.

What is your attitude to influencers? 

Sometimes I see an influencer on Instagram and think, “it’s just a boob shot!” or “how stupid is that?” but the nature of electronic media is democratic. People do things all kind of other ways than I do, and that they have all kind of other opinions than mine. That’s good! One who is doing a very good job, is already pretty successful but deserves to be more successful is historyandwine on Intsagram (Jacqueline Coleman in Miami/Florida).  

How will the disruption of the past 12 months shape the wine world?

In spite of all the problems – the collapse in sales of Alsace Gewurztraminer is a prominent example – for large parts of the wine industry the crisis has been positive. More people discovered that sharing a bottle of wine together in the evening is very helpful for communication in the widest sense of that word. The bicycle, hiking and gardening have also grown in popularity, to give other examples. I am convinced these are lasting changes and part of a major socio-culturtal reorientation. The crisis isn’t over yet by a mile and these effects will deepen as it continues. 

What is best if you’re starting out, generalist or specialist?

I have to say that I’d actively discourage a young person from trying to make a living writing about wine. Also, wine is not a good subject for a writer, because there’s not much love and death, the things that make stories compelling for normal people. Most wine stories fall flat as a result and even the good ones have limited appeal. I am currently writing a movie script and for these reasons it has nothing to do with wine.

James Suckling, former Wine Spectator European bureau chief, cigar expert and (in his own words) “internationally acclaimed wine critic and journalist” set up his own website in 2010 and made an immediate impact with professionally produced videos from famous vineyards, at a time when that sort of multimedia wasn’t so widespread.

His tasting reports are clearly presented and authoritative, with good cross-referencing and clear notes. His listings are eminently clickable: “7 Great Riojas under $45 (95 points and up)”; “Top 100 Wines of the USA 2019”. He shows off his pulling power by tasting the 1982 Bordeaux icons over lunch with the likes of Jay McInerney and Mike D of the Beastie Boys, or an impromptu tasting of 2017 “Guado al Tasso, Masseto, Ornellaia and Sassicaia before dinner”.

jamessuckling.com is a straightforward site. It comprises feature reports, tasting notes and videos. There is no lifestyle content, nor restaurants or gastronomy. Suckling is a prolific taster (his backing team doesn’t have a high profile) and this is reflected in a wealth of notes. Italy (Suckling’s great strength) has 28,450 notes, Bordeaux 16,214, Spain 7,649. Burgundy is not a strong point. The search engine looks good but can be clunky and difficult to use.

Suckling was one of the first to see the Asian middle class as an information-hungry market. Brand extensions come naturally: based now in Hong Kong, in 2018 he opened his wine bar, the James Suckling Wine Central – where he tastes all his wines. There is also a joint venture with Lalique, the “100 points by James Suckling Stemware Collection”, which comes with a leather case by Salvatore Ferragamo. There is also a series of Italian tours throughout the US and Asia whereby producers showcase their (top-scoring) wines to paying guests.

Since leaving Wine Spectator a decade ago, Suckling has been accused of being one of the prime culprits of “score inflation” – the trend that sees many consumers disregarding anything below 95 points. But he’s a very good businessman, he knows his market, and his scores are quoted by any merchant with an eye on the Asian consumer. He is credited with quickly recognising the rising taste for South American wines in Asia; his naming of Chile’s Almaviva 2017 as his wine of the decade last year was duly reported around the world. Almaviva is a joint venture between Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Concha y Toro Winery. Philippe Dhalluin of Mouton (and Almaviva) was named winemaker of the decade at the same time.

See also: https://cluboenologique.com/story/wine-websites-behind-the-paywall-jamessuckling-com/

What would you consider was the most important decision of your career in wine?

The biggest decision in my career was joining The Wine Spectator in December 1981. I was a daily newspaper journalist but decided to join the fledgling American wine magazine for a few months until I could find a job on a newspaper on the West Coast. I stayed covering wine ever since. It’s more than 40 years now.

Do you consider your career progression to be conventional?

My career progression was conventional because I worked for the same publication for 29 years. But then it became unconventional when I left and started my own company JamesSuckling.com in 2010. It was easier to be innovative with the use of the internet and social media.

Do you consider yourself a disruptor – how?

I guess I am somewhat of a disruptor. Probably my use of video at JamesSuckling.com at the beginning was disruptive and the video style was not liked by some. But what I do now is fairly normal in the context of today in wine rating and reporting and using the various channels on-line and in social media.

Do you consider yourself and the site to be agile? ie would you be able to cope with an existential threat such as the pandemic meant for the hospitality industry?

You need to be nimble and not be tied down by expensive and heavy infrastructures such as expensive offices or layers of employees. We have pivoted to Zoom tastings –  I love to walk the vineyards and I know some people hated it [when he first launched jamessuckling.com, Suckling became notorious for his slow-paced video walks through famous vineyards] but I don’t know if I’ll go back to the frenzied flying routine. We can communicate all that, with everything from podcasts to videos, and Zoom is a whole new way of doing it. It’s much easier to share it with all the different channels.

What is the level of knowledge of your wine audience: what % are collectors, investors, keen amateurs

I would say 90% of our followers are keen amateurs. We reach about 10 million people annually with our media and social media channels. We have almost 265,000 followers on Instagram alone. The wine trade and wineries use our ratings and information and are also important followers

How many staff do you have?

We are around 12 – we had 20 before the pandemic

Then we have editors and I just hired a content manager to make sure things are posted on time then we have 2 editors in China

What’s your succession plan – do you worry that the entire site rests on your shoulders – who will take over?

I don’t worry that I’m a single person identified with the site. It happens – they always call Wine Advocate “Parker” even though he hasn’t been there for years. I’m more like jancisrobinson.com: I have the brand tied to a person but we have people who work for us. Look at Chanel and Calvin Klein, or many restaurants: they are based on individuals but it’s widely known they are organisations. We’ll see who has the better model. 

How do attract a younger audience?

68% of followers on Instagram are 24-48 years old; around 20% are in their 20s. What do they want from a 63-year-old man? Well, they are savvy: they want authenticity. 80% of my Instagram feed [Suckling manages his own feed] is about me and [my wife] Marie and our lives. I see it as story telling – who we are and what we do. They see an old guy with a fantastic Asian wife and for them it’s like living the dream – I get so many emails asking how do I get to do what you do?

Which social media channels are you excited about?

I’m excited about Club House, which is setting a new standard. It’s like live talk radio, or like a virtual meeting talking about wine. We’re working out how we can monetize (we all get speaking gigs). Then there is TikTok which is easier because it’s basically video – we need to watch how they all develop – Twitter for example does more video; every platform is doing add-ons and all do more or less the same thing so you have to stay on top of it. We’re ready to embrace it.

We have about 50,000 followers in China on WeChat and Weibo – it’s still a small market – we have a full-time editor there – they are also interested in video so we’re working on that.

It’s not a battle to stay on top. I really enjoy it – we hire new and younger people to keep up with all developments. It’s fun to have younger employees – you can learn a lot from them and vice versa

How important are “lifestyle” articles on the website – ie restaurant reviews, gastronomy, even music reviews?

I remember on Wine Spectator that 98% of searches were for tasting notes, not restaurant reviews. We used to have cigar reviews but in the end decided to focus on wine, and providing tasting notes. On social media we can be much broader: what you had for breakfast for example – it’s the total lifestyle, who I am and how I interact with team etc. It brings people into the whole James Suckling life.

What is your attitude toward influencers? Are there any that you particularly rate?

Influencers add to the diversity of the wine world. I think that Wine Folly for example is a wonderful influencer with lots of solid and well-presented information. Then there are the many influencers who you see on video, smiling in the barrel room. I really like that – it’s fun.You can be academic, which is great too, but if you’re making people drink and enjoy wine, what’s wrong with that? We are all story tellers and we have to embrace new ways of telling the story. It’s now all about the experience – you don’t have to be a great writer any more: you can use other media, and your voice. I like to hear about them – to me it’s really interesting

Doesn’t it hold you back, not being about to write proper sentences?

Yes of course it does, but what a great age this is, where we all have a voice and we can all have an audience. This is the new thing, the real grass-roots movement of people on their wine journey, and it’s just as valid as an old expert like me who can talk about what’s happened in the past

As a journalist can you remain objective and sceptical if you’re having fun?

[My generation] came from the age of new journalism – it was about being embedded, being part of the story. That’s what’s kept me going; you make friends with producers, you visit the wineries, but you have to call it like it is when you’re rating their wines

But some modern influencers aren’t journalists – they’re simply embedded and have no objectivity

I don’t know. Maybe people look at it differently – I look at it and think, “That’s cool”. I wouldn’t want to judge. Most people understand when something is serious or not – and young people on social media are pretty savvy

What are your views on the wine landscape and how you feel the disruption of the last 12 months will shape it in the future? I’m not looking for trade secrets here but I’m interested in how industry leaders are thinking.

I think that the last 12 months have reinforced the importance of social media in communicating about wine and that online information is useful to the consumer and wine trade and they are willing to pay for it. The wine world needs to embrace this and execute proper strategies to provide information about wine through every channel available. It might seem overwhelming at times but the world changes so quickly in communication and it’s important to stay part of it and not get left behind.

Which is best if you’re starting out, generalist or specialist?

It’s better to be a generalist and learn as much as you can about wine. Specialising is difficult because you miss part of the wine world – you should keep your hand in with everything. You might think that there is crossover between regions: ie as a Bordeaux specialist you will have a natural affinity with Napa, as another Cabernet Sauvignon region, or as a Champagne specialist you will understand Pinot Noir. But actually knowing about Bordeaux doesn’t add value when you’re talking to producers in Napa – it annoys them – you need to take the time to see people in Napa and get your own ideas of the region.

The success of Burghound.com is due to the fact that Allen Meadows hit on a formula two decades ago and has never diverted from it: if he can save you from buying one bad bottle of Burgundy Grand Cru, then you’ve repaid the (relatively high) annual subscription.

The former CFO of a listed insurance company retired from finance in 1999, intending to write a book on Burgundy, his great passion and a region he had visited dozens of times. This idea morphed into a newsletter which his Burgundy-obsessed friends told him was a great idea – but warned he would never make any money from it. From that came Burghound.com, launched in 2001 as the first online-only information source on a single region. From the start he aimed to be comprehensive, reasoning that the top domaines were well-covered already by people like Clive Coates and Steven Tanzer and it was the lesser-known properties that were going unnoticed. Also in his favour was the fact that Robert Parker had more or less ceased to cover Burgundy (he was much disliked by Burgundians). Burghound.com now has subscribers in over 64 countries and nearly all 50 states. Meadows is entirely self-financed and spends over five months a year in Burgundy, visiting more than 300 domaines. The site is run by his business partner Erica Meadows; their son Chris Meadows joined as a partner in 2011.

Burghound.com can be clunky and difficult to navigate – Meadows himself says “it’s not the easiest site to use” – but it has a devoted audience of Burgundy aficionados. Coverage is 90% Burgundy with a nod to other Oregon, Champagne and other regions where Pinot Noir predominates. Meadows focusses on the old-fashioned values of honesty, integrity and a clear, unadorned writing style. There is almost no lifestyle content. “I believe my readers pay me for information that they can’t get elsewhere,” he says, “not for music and lifestyle articles.”

What would you consider was the most important decision of your career in wine?

The most fundamental decision of all was just to go into the business, to say “I’m a critic.” I was looking for something to do when I retired so I thought of a Burgundy- centric newsletter. My Burgundy-obsessed drinking buddies loved the idea but said I’d starve. I’d been going to Burgundy for many years as an enthusiast so it was a shock to many of the French, they said “How on earth can you change metier?” and they were incredulous – “You can earn a living doing that?” Also in France there is a disconnect between being a journalist and an author – the latter are respected, even idolised, and the former not so much.

What was the competition like at the time?

As a consumer of critical information about Burgundy I was not getting what I wanted. There were very competent critics like Clive Coates, Steve Tanzer and Robert Parker but because they had other responsibilities than Burgundy they could only do so much. All the A-producers were being covered but the Bs weren’t. That’s  the sweet spot for a collector. You could only read about the Grand Crus but they were rapidly becoming unaffordable – and the brilliance of Burgundy is its diversity not only of wines but of producers.

How did you finance your startup?

At that time [2000] it was $50k to start the business, which is  initial financing and  then spending 3-4 months in Burgundy – that’s now expanded to 6 months a year. I am completely independent, I pay everything myself, which takes an investment, and then there are the back office and computer systems, a searchable database and the paywall costs. My first visit as a professional was autumn of 2000, and first issue January 2001

Was anyone else doing this sort of thing online at the time?

No, and that was what made it so risky as a business model. Burghound was the first to be majority online with no print edition, and the first to be dedicated to one region. That wasn’t the model at the time – Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, Decanter covered the whole world. But that model, and its implied compliment, seduced many producers. Six months after I came out there was the Riesling Report – it lasted a few months, partially because they only charged $15 for it – if you’re going to fund it yourself it’s never going to be economically feasible unless you have a boatload of subscribers

What is Burghound’s USP?

The USP is if I can save you from buying one bad bottle of Grand Cru Burgundy then you have paid for a year’s subscription. Even ordinary Burgundy starts at $30. Known communes like Vosne or Chambolle or Volnay, you’re at $50 to $75 – in Vosne you’re over $100 very quickly, and four figures is not that unusual. 

This is the reason this model only works for Burgundy – the cost of a buying mistake is so high. One reader said going to a wine store without Burghound is like going to a gunfight with a knife.

What’s the median age of your subscribers?

The Pandemic has been good for us –  we have more subs than when we started. Burgundy usually attracts people who have attained a certain level of affluence and that comes with age. I would guess they start in their mid-30s and go up to people in their 70s and 80s (sometimes they say they are at an age where they don’t buy new wine – the goal is just to drink what they have). Between 40-45% are professionals, and then there are the seriously geeked-out, which is 50%.

In Asia they tend to be a little younger – we do many events, some very expensive, which pull in one kind of crowd, and educational events designed to pull in a younger crowd who eventually may become my subscribers. 

Do you put any value on lifestyle articles?

I was in a rock band – mostly country music, I play a little guitar. I’m a huge music fan but I feel no need to make musical analogies. What Neal Martin does [the critic posts regular music reviews on Vinous] seems to work for him, but I believe my readers pay me for information that they can’t get elsewhere, not for music and lifestyle articles. I do a guide to visiting the Côte d’Or and I’ve done a few educational videos – I’ve toyed with doing more but I’m so damn busy…

What’s your view of your competitors?

My view is that we’re all in the same lake together. Everyone does Burgundy to a certain extent but I’ve enjoyed enough success not to feel threatened: the wine world is big enough. My readers may read six other guys but in the end they pay me for my point of view. A guy who helped me get started told me I’d find out the wine trough is small, and politics can get vicious, but I never thought that was the case

What are the key attributes of a critic?

A critic must have knowledge of the area and be competent; be able to communicate in order to resonate with the readership; act as the go-between for consumers and producers.

Some of these are easier than others. For the first you need language skills. You cannot ask someone for inside info in a second language; if you’re going to be serious, you have to have the language skills for getting info and getting credibility, and paying your host the compliment that you’re serious about understanding their region.

The second is obvious – if you can’t communicate, you lose the reader’s attention.

The third is the most difficult and the most important. You have to be sceptical and cynical, but there’s no point in doing a gratuitous hatchet job. If you are honest you gain the trust of the producer and the reader – as soon as they feel you’re not being honest, then you’re finished. If a producer is irate, I have to stand by what I wrote but I always offer to re-taste. I say to people starting out, if you’re welcomed everywhere then you’re not doing your job. There are places I can’t go now. If the producer doesn’t like what you’ve written, then it’s a sign you’re doing your job.

What’s your view of influencers?

If there is someone who can influence someone else to pick up a bottle of basic Burgundy, then that’s great. How they arrive on Burgundy’s doorstep is immaterial – the important thing is that they arrive.

When it comes to serious criticism, bloggers face the classic problem – in order to get in the door you need to have a body of work behind you, but to get that body of work you need to get in the door. When a producer gets a request for samples from someone they haven’t heard of, the default assumption is that someone wants free wine. The irony is that it might have been possible 30 years ago but today, if you’re not a professional, they won’t be interested. That’s the brutal reality – Burgundy is not easy to access, even for keen amateurs who have been going for decades.

Generalist or specialist – which is best for someone starting out?

There are two arguments here. First, it’s difficult to be young and be a specialist – how much experience can you have? Unless you come from a Burgundy background, the perspective you get from being a generalist is very useful when you decide to specialise. But then again, it’s hard to get paid writing about Albanian whites.

Tim Atkin MW is a UK wine journalist. He writes for Harpers and Decanter and has his own website, timatkin.com. He is a keen photographer whose photos have been published in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the World of Fine Wine and exhibited in London, Mendoza, Provence, Poland and Lebanon.

Atkin has won multiple awards including the Glenfiddich Wine Writer Award five times since 1988. Other awards include Lanson Wine Writer of the Year, Wines of Portugal Award,  IWSC Communicator of the Year, Best Drink Journalist in the World Food Media Awards, Louis Roederer International Wine Columnist of the Year and International Wine Website of the Year, Online Drink Writer at the Fortnum & Mason Awards, among many others. In 2016, he was given the Premio Memorial Víctor de la Serna by the Real Academia de Gastronomía for his services to Spanish wine.

He has contributed to a number of books on wine, including the New World of Wine and On Burgundy, as well as writing two of his own – Chardonnay and Vins de Pays d’Oc. He is also the chairman of the Wines from Spain Awards and the Languedoc-Roussillon Top 100. In 2010 he was the international judge at the Melbourne Show and the Hong Kong International Wine & Spirit Competition. He is also a member of the panel that judges the Cellars in the Sky Awards, assessing the wines listed by airlines in First and Business Classes.

He is much in demand as a speaker: over the years he has lectured to banks, firms of solicitors, singles’ evenings and numerous wine associations and clubs, specialising in the wines of France, Spain, Italy and the New World. He is also one of the Three Wine Men (with Olly Smith and Oz Clarke), co-hosting half a dozen consumers weekends each year in the UK. Tim enjoys collecting and taking photos, golf, running, singing, reading and cooking and speaks fluent French and Spanish. He holds a BA from Durham University in Modern Languages and a Masters (with distinction) from the London School of Economics in European Studies. He is a Caballero del Vino, a Chevalier du Tastevin and a member of the Ordre du Bontemps in Bordeaux and the Cofradía de Rioja. He became an MW in 2001

Do you think there’s one decision in your wine career you consider the most important you’ve taken?

In many ways the decision was taken for me, in that my column in the Observer newspaper was severely reduced in 2010, forcing me to make the most of timatkin.com. So that was a very important decision, born of necessity. Although I didn’t know at the time, that was the most important decision I made.

Do you think your career up to that point had been pretty conventional progression-wise? 

I suppose that depends on what you mean by conventional. I was lucky. I got a job at a national newspaper as a columnist when I was in my mid- to late-20s.

In those days the conventional route for a wine journalist was to start out working for magazines. And then, if you were lucky, get a national newspaper column but there weren’t that many of them around. I was conventional, but it was an accelerated progress, thanks to somebody who thought I had potential. But I think things were much more conventional then, in a sense. It was all about written media. There was a bit on television, obviously, with people like Oz [Clarke] and Gilly [Goolden]. But the internet was only just starting – the media landscape has been transformed in that sense. 

Which year? There were a few blogs around –  I think Jamie [Goode – with wineanorak.com] was doing a blog by then. The year after I started doing my website I won an award called the Born Digital Award, so I thought, ‘hey you know I can do this’. And to be honest I thought it’s not that different from being a print journalist and if you’re a good writer – and I hope I am – then good writing is exactly the same in a magazine as it is online. It’s harder to get people to pay for it online, but certainly, people will read it, and I think they’re even more likely to read it if it’s free than if they have to go out and physically buy a newspaper or a magazine. So I think in a way it opened up a whole new audience to me.

Do you think the way that you operate is fairly agile in terms of considering the changing media landscape, social media, etc?

Well, it’s not for me to say, it sounds a bit self-important, doesn’t it? But yes, I think I have been. I’m not saying I’m particularly good with technology or stuff like that, but I’ve done podcasts and all that was sort of born out of the lockdown. I like taking photographs, I’m a good photographer, so I think, visually, Instagram has worked for me. I’m not frightened to share my opinions about politics and books and all sorts of other things online, so that’s been good. 

But the main thing for me has been my reports, and you know, I didn’t realise that that would be a way to earn a better living than I was earning as a print journalist and, you know, those were in the days when you earned good money for writing a national newspaper column. 

So, yes, I think I’ve been reasonably agile and the thing is the things I started out doing then are not necessarily what I’m doing now, so I think you need to be agile in that sense. Money is not my primary motivation, but you need to earn a living. And so I started out doing quite a bit of French stuff like Bordeaux and Burgundy and I realised that there’s not really any money in that. So I’ve kind of pivoted towards other things that really interest me more anyway, because I can have more of an impact. And I think that that’s the other big change for me has been to move from being a generalist to being a specialist. So now I specialise in sort of half a dozen places and you hope that people will pay to read your opinion on those things.

Do you consider yourself a disruptor?

I suppose in a couple of respects I do consider myself a disruptor. One is that I firmly believe that those places make fine wines that are just as good as the best Burgundies and Bordeaux. So that’s been disruptive in the sense that I’ve said, ‘We should have a broader view of what constitutes good wine and fine wine’. Also, no one was doing reports on those countries. There were plenty of Burgundy and Bordeaux reports, but nobody was doing in-depth reports on the countries and regions I’ve written about. A few people have tried to copy them, but it’s unbelievably hard work. I think people start out thinking, ‘I could do that’. And then they realise that actually, it involves spending three weeks or a month in these places and another month or so writing it up. So it’s two months out of your life each year. 

In terms of the disruption, I think of myself as a journalist before I’m a wine writer and I try to write the truth. I’m not just a fan with a laptop. I think that some journalism has become a bit toothless and I’ve always tried my best to to speak my truth, you know, to be respectful to the people whose wines I’m reviewing, but hopefully to write about things as a journalist would do. Certain regions don’t necessarily appreciate my version of honesty, but that’s life, isn’t it? 

How widespread is your audience?

It’s very broad. I started doing a lot of X [formerly Twitter] but because of the Elon Musk takeover I’ve morphed away from that. I like Instagram as a space because it’s visual and I like taking pictures. I’ve now got 80,000-plus followers and they are spread all over the world, particularly in the places I write about. So I’m big in Argentina as it were, Chile, Spain, the US, UK, and then South Africa, and then a smattering of people all over the place. So there two main audiences. One is your social media audience which is comparatively engaged. I do a free weekly newsletter on a Friday – that has 13,500 subscribers, and it has a very high open rate of 45%. I get a lot of engagement from that. My podcast [Cork Talk https://timatkin.com/category/podcasts-and-videos/] is very successful. But the way I make money really is with reports. They are bought by the wine trade, obviously, but they also sell to consumers. I wanted to make money while I was asleep and that’s what’s happened with the reports. I wake up most days and somebody’s bought two or three of them and all that nicely mounts up really. So it’s a reasonably good business model that I sort of stumbled across.

Things like reports are comparatively old-fashioned. You’ve got to go and do all your research, you’ve got to go and write it up and then you’ve got this large thing that, obviously, takes time to read through. Yet, clearly, as you say it’s something that people have responded to nonetheless. 

The reports are a snapshot of what’s going on in those places each year. I’d be kidding myself if a thought most wineries don’t just buy the report to look at their own scores and their own tasting notes. If you sat down and read through 1,400 South African tasting notes you’d die of boredom. And they’ve mushroomed. The first South African report [in 2013] was about 80 pages and now it’s more like 320 pages. Producers want to show me more wines and as I learn more, I want to put more into the report. 

So it’s old-fashioned in some senses, but nobody was doing that before except in books, but the problem with books is that they can be out of date by the time they’re published. But I can write the last word of a report at 6pm and publish it at five past six. It’s as up-to-date as I can make it so it’s very journalistic in that sense. But it’s not a book, and it’s not a newspaper column which can be superficial by reason of length, it’s an in-depth look at a wine region. And it’s modern: I’m selling downloads. But your point is fair in that it is sort of old-fashioned journalism or wine writing where you actually spend time learning about something and writing about it. 

And I think a lot of wine communication these days, sadly, is a bit superficial, where it’s just somebody showing a bottle and smiling and saying it tastes great. And the person communicating is doing it in partnership with the producer – they are not exactly independent. I find that questionable.

Social media influencers can be superficial but they can also be very knowledgeable and effective – do you agree?

Some people are very good at presenting, and presenting is a skill. Lots of them are much better at it than I am, frankly. They look great, they sound good, they’ve got energy. That’s the good side of influencing. As long as it’s not paid-for, in partnership with the producer, if people can make a living doing that, I think it’s brought another dimension to wine communication. 

Most of these influencers are younger than me, and they appeal to people who are not necessarily going to be my audience: the question of how we engage the drinkers of tomorrow is important. Do we engage them by selling books and copies of magazines and copies of my report? They’re much more likely to watch a 30-second video clip or something with somebody in a nice vineyard telling them two vital facts about a region. So I think there’s a place for all those things. I would never be snobby or ageist about influencers and I hope they’re not about me. I just sometimes find some of the influencing a bit too superficial, that it’s basically just somebody who looks quite good, male or female, waving a bottle in front of the camera. I think wine communication can aspire to a bit more than that.

On that note, and this is an extremely broad topic, what’s your view on the current wine landscape and its direction?

The biggest worry is obviously climate change, which is having a massive impact is going to get bigger and bigger. The wine business is not really dealing with it – wine producers should be acting: this thing is happening now.

People are drinking less, with the result that a lot of wine regions are going to have to pull out vineyards or distill wines. This is an opportunity in a sense: we can produce less but better wine. And maybe that’s the way the wine industry should go.

In terms of equity and diversity, we’re still not very good at talking to certain types of consumer. Wine can still be very off-putting to people of colour and even a lot of women.

Having said that, there’s more good wine made today, in more places, than ever before. It’s no longer a case of ‘the best wines come from…’; you can get great wine from anywhere. Fine wine is no longer just the classics: Burgundy, Bordeaux, Barolo, Napa, Champagne or the Rhône. It frustrates me when I go to wine trade dinners and they serve the same wines they would have served 50 years ago. The wine world is so much more diverse than that. At home I drink Greek wines, wines from Rias Baixas, Portuguese wines, South African wines… 

It’s time we took advantage of that diversity and that increasing quality. A lot of wine merchants have failed to notice what’s gone on in the wider wine world. I write about Chile, Argentina, Spain or South Africa, but very few wine merchants are getting out there and putting in the hard yards and doing what I do which is taste stuff. Merchants used to travel more – go out and find new producers. We’ve slightly lost that. It’s partly Brexit-related and partly how the world has changed. For a long time we the UK was the centre of the wine universe but that is no longer the case. I don’t know where that centre is now: maybe New York, maybe it was Hong Kong for a while. Maybe there’s no one place, which is a good thing. It’s not so good for the UK industry but it’s a positive thing for the world of wine that it’s no longer dominated by a very traditional British view of what’s ‘jolly good’. 

If you’re starting out, do you think you should be a generalist or a specialist?

It’s tricky. I had 25 years as a generalist. So I know a little bit about a lot of places and I know a lot about a probably a dozen places

If I was starting out now, I would say specialise. Matt Walls was doing a column for me and he said, ‘I’d really like to write about the Rhône’, and I said, ‘Go for it’. So he made himself a Rhône specialist, he went and lived there, and he’s now one of the leading Rhône experts in the world. 

I think now it’s very hard to make a living as a generalist. There are very few newspaper columns any more (in the UK it’s just the Telegraph and the Financial Times). The problem with being a generalist is that no one really cares about your opinion in the same way as they do if you’re a specialist. Whereas, if you’re one of the half a dozen people in the world who really knows something about somewhere, there’s always a market for your opinion and you’re asked to host tastings and, in my case, sell reports.

I would advise you to specialise in a few regions rather than one. Make yourself somebody who knows about a few different places rather than trying to cover the whole world. Oz Clarke did that in his day but it’s much harder.

How important is it to include ‘liefestyle’ elements in a wine article? 

Personally I think it’s very important. I don’t do it in tasting notes. I don’t say, ‘goes well with lasagne’ etc, nor do I match wine to food. But in my newsletter every week I have a photo – taken by me – I have a piece of music that I recommend each week.

And the opening essay – which makes it sound a bit grand – is connected to wine but often tangentially, an emotion or a book I’ve read. I’ve always believed in opening wine up and I think the reason that the newsletter has grown and become popular is it’s not just somebody recommending bottles of wine.

Even with the podcast I’m trying to open it out a bit. I recently I talked with someone who’s a menu engineer, who designs menus. It was interesting speaking with someone about what you see in restaurants and how they influence you to buy certain things.

And I think, in a way, the more we can unpack wine and open it up the more people are going to be interested in it. You can say, ‘Here are 10 recommendations under £10’ but I don’t think it’s that interesting or that engaging.

We’ve talked about influencers, but ‘communicators’ is a better term. I think that we’re all communicators now. If you’re just a person who writes and publishes a weekly column, I don’t think you’re relevant anymore. You need to be across social media and doing podcasts and getting your name out there.