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.