We pushed out more great wine content than ever on all of the JamesSuckling.com media channels over the past year and continued to expand our social media presence, hitting 345,000 followers on Instagram as 2023 and an epic tasting year came to a close. Now that we’re rating more than 40,000 wines per year, there is a lot to share on Instagram as our wine-tasting team travels to the farthest reaches of the wine world, visits with top international producers and finds out what goes into the making of some of the planet’s greatest bottles.
Of course, some of our Instagram posts and reels were more popular than others, but we like to think that each of them gave some insight to our followers about our daily adventures in covering the best the wine world has to offer. Tops among these was our No. 1 Instagram hit from 2023, below left, which received 2,298,284 views, 73.400 likes and 958 comments. It’s a carousel of two videos, both from when James was in Bordeaux, France, in early April last year, when temperatures reached below 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) in many of Bordeaux’s wine districts. You can click through the post to watch the two videos.
“Vine growers in lower areas most susceptible to frost were using wind machines and smudge pots to heat the air around their vines,” James said about the photo. “These were near where I was staying in St Emilion, near vineyards owned by Clos Dubreuil.”
Our No. 2 most popular Instagram post, with 503,000 views, was a plug for our most-viewed story on JamesSuckling,com last year: Top 100 World Wines 2023, which we just posted in November. There are so many great wines to enjoy from this list, as James mentioned in the Instagram post, but that’s to be expected after rating 41,000-plus wines during the year!
As always, we chose our Top 100 based on their ratings by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team, their price, availability and what we call the “Oh, wow!” factor. Check out the article, if you haven’t already – the Top 100 is a great centerpiece for your own wine list in 2024.
No. 3 among our Top 10 Instagram posts, below left, spotlighted the Marchesi Antinori Toscana Tignanello 2020, which embodies the trend toward more drinkable wines emerging from Tuscany. “This medium-bodied wine showcases finesse, a sophisticated nose and a fine tannin structure, exemplifying this shift toward drinkability,” James said about it. You can read more James’ tasting of the Tignanello in this Weekly Tasting Report.
And James attended a rare tasting of wines from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s famed vineyards last fall in Los Angeles, which we plugged in our No. 4 top Instagram post, below right, which, like the No. 3 post, also received 119,000 views (we’ll call it a tie). You can read his insights on the experience as he rated what many consider to be some of the world’s top examples of pinot noir over multiple vintages.
Our fifth-most-viewed Instagram post, below left, gave props to JamesSuckling.com’s own Anne Krueger, our head of events and marketing, who was married in Tuscany this past summer. James’ wife, Marie Kim-Suckling, pulled out – what else? – a bottle of the same Tignanello 2020 to celebrate the occasion. It’s a wine so nice we Instagrammed it twice.
And one of the world’s up-and-coming wine countries, China, was the subject of our No. 6 top Instagram post. From Ningxia and Shangri-La to Shandong and Xinjiang, a new generation of passionate winemakers is emerging with innovative styles and terroir-driven wines in China, and our Top 100 Wines of China 2023 list covers it all.
No. 7 in our Instagram hit parade, below right, was a post featuring winemaker Alejandro Vigil of El Enemigo Wines in Mendoza, Argentina. Vigil is posing with some of El Enemigo’s austere and mineral cabernet francs, which Senior Editor Zekun Shuai called “linear, transparent and uncompromising,” adding that “the cool El Cepillo and Gualtallary are especially attractive, showing the ability of great terroirs with crazy energy and tension.”
Our No. 8 Instagram post, below left, with 98,600 views, was a repost from Senior Editor Stuart Pigott, who was in the Rhone valley of France for a tasting trip. He stumbled across a vineyard worker for the Paul Jaboulet Aine winery using a winch-pulled plough in Le Meal vineyard of the Hermigtage – where the core of Paul Jaboulet Aine’s La Chapelle syrah comes from. Tough work, but someone’s gotta do it!
And a humongous rabbit featured in our No. 9 top Instagram post, below center, with 98,000 views. “Happy belated Year of the Rabbit from New Zealand today,” James wrote. “This fine one is my friend’s sister’s pet.” An incredible hare-raising experience, he might have added.
Finally, we returned to El Enemigo Wines for our No. 10 post, above right, which received 91,500 views. This one, however, was focused solely on El Enemigo Cabernet Franc Gualtallary Gran Enemigo Single Vineyard 2019 – the first cabernet franc from South America to receive a perfect 100-point score from us. “It’s impressive how it delivers nervy freshness and mineral tension from the vineyard’s complex, calcium-carbonate-rich soils,” Senior Editor Zekun Shuai wrote about it in our Argentina annual report, adding that winemaker Alejandro Vigil “didn’t want to mess with nature in making the wine,” following the Burgundian ideal.
And there’s plenty more to come this year on our Instagram page, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, so be sure to give us a follow and enjoy the same great wines James and the JamesSuckling.com tasting team taste, rate and write about each week!
– Vince Morkri, Managing Editor
