Did wine PR invent the wine influencer?

No. But wine PR has been the cheerleader, the coach, and the ultimate benefactor. Unfortunately, wine businesses haven't benefited the same way.

If I was going to start a conspiracy theory it would be that it was wine PR people who invented wine influencers. I'm particularly enjoying coming up with a suitably mysterious venue where I'll claim they all got together to cook up the plan. Perhaps the basement of a craft pizzeria. The logic for my conspiracy theory is immaculate. It just has the problem of not being true. Although the idea does have the benefit of revealing a lot about how innovations and systems work in business far beyond wine.

In the olden days - when I first wrote a wine column - PR firms reported their success through press clippings and column inches. I wrote for The Herald in Scotland for fifteen years. And we'd occasionally get missed on the London clippings services. So you'd have PR's asking you to send a clipping yourself.

But then traditional media collapsed. And there weren't clippings and column inches to report. The cyberneticist Stafford Beer once claimed out "the purpose of a system is what it does". And it turned out the purpose of the PR system was to report its success to its clients. Looking back it couldn't have been anything else. What else could they report? PR is notoriously hard to measure. But clients - and clients' finance directors - love to measure things. So what do you do when the one thing you actually could measure just went out of the window?

Enter, the vinfluencer.

Now... it may be the case that vinfluencers are supercharging wine sales among their audiences. If they are, it's not shown up in the statistics yet. But if you work in wine PR, it turns out that doesn't matter. Because wine influencers give you something else much more useful.