How I'm using different media, and where you can find me online

Ever since I started writing about wine, the media landscape has been changing all the time.

So, I’m new here on Substack. It’s a great place, and fills in a lot of the void left by the abandonment of Twitter by most of the wine community. But it’s different to how Twitter was.

For the benefit of those who’ve newly tuned in to what I do, and also for the benefit of those who’ve been following my work for a while, I thought I’d explain how I use (or plan to use) the various online communication platforms.

First, wineanorak.com. This is my primary online presence, and the domaine was registered in November 1999, although the site has articles back to 1996 on it, when it was a Geocities site. I publish there daily, and it’s often in-detail reports of trips, tastings and occasionally longer-form articles. It is well ranked by Google, and gets a lot of traffic across its many pages. I won’t be duplicating what I do on wineanorak on Substack.

Then Instagram. This is an important and fun communication tool. A lot of my content there is tasting wine on camera. First-take impressions of wines. Well, sometimes second take, if I forget an important name, or something like that.

Then we have Substack, where I plan on publishing different sorts of content to wineanorak. You’ll get a flavour of what’s coming from the articles I’ve already published here. I’m still quite fresh here. I like it.

Then another new medium: TikTok, where I recently started publishing. My focus there is on a Glossary of Wine, which are short, unscripted pieces to camera explaining wine words in simple terms.

And YouTube, where I’ve been for a while. I’ve just started cross-posting the Glossary of Wine videos here as shorts, and I’m going to be doing more long-form educational material here. I think YouTube is going to be more important going forward.

X, formerly Twitter, is somewhere I still exist, but I’m just using this to propagate content. Same goes for Blue Sky, which has never really taken off the way that we’d hoped.

LinkedIn is important. I mainly use it for propagating content, but there’s some good engagement there. After encouraging AI-generating content for so long, LinkedIn have now changed their mind: I think they realised that their platform was being drowned in slop. So there’s hope!

Facebook has its role, albeit a diminished one from the past. But there are some good people who like to engage there, so I’m not giving up on it. My instagram posts get cross-posted here.