Will Wine Survive New Twitter?

The ink has scarcely dried on the 44bn dollar cheque Elon Musk signed for purchasing social media giant Twitter, but the Musk man has already taken big steps to ring-in the changes. Besides firing Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and a few other senior executives, the on-line platform’s content offering is being chopped and changed, with wine conversation expected to take the brunt in the quest to streamline conversation towards a more dynamic and relevant offering.

“Twitter is honoured to be the leading platform for wine-related content, with thousands of users creating and distributing news and narrative pertaining to wine,” says Rex Visagie-James, a consultant Musk has brought into to visit the general offering within the Twitter-verse.

“But truly, Twitter handles aiming to discuss and promote the global wine space generally do not meet the expectations we have of being the platform from which vibrantly exciting stories and news-items are delivered. Unfortunately, the subject matter that seems to dominate the minds and voices of wine-people on Twitter make topics such as flower-arrangement, horse-carriage racing and vegan breast-feeding options positively dynamic and engaging.

“Currently the conversations on Twitter between wine-folk does not match our new vision of providing interesting and evocative engagement with enthusiasm and drive. The new Twitter will have no room for blandness that wastes valuable eyeball time. Subsequently we will slowly begin deleting the accounts of the swathe of self-promoting and anally retentive wine people who populate our space.”

Visagie-James, who attended computer classes with Musk in Pretoria during the 1980s says that as a fan of Ernest Hemingway, Twitter’s new owner wants to see wine conversation following Hemingway’s maxim stating that “good wine is the most civilised thing on earth”.

“If you look at the quality of the wine tweets, then these make wine look like a bowl of uncultured Pakistani yak milk,” he says. “So, it is a question of up your game, or opt out before Twitter does it for you.”

Pushed on details as to the kind of wine content the new Twittersphere apparently finds so staid and plain, Visagie-James says that one only has to go #wine for the evidence of this.

“The talk on wine is more outdated than a straight couple at a ball in San Francisco City Hall,” says Visagie-James. “How many more nonsensical discussions and vacuous reactions must we be subjected to on the topic of ‘To Decant or Not to Decant Wine’? This has been around for at least ten years, and if you don’t have an answer yet there is not likely to ever be one forthcoming.

“As is the case for orange wine…..wine Twitterati daily ask if orange wine is a good or bad thing, and quite frankly, who the hell cares? Well, perhaps if anyone can find orange wine they would care, but aimlessly throwing this question around underscores our belief that wine people have run out of things to say. Twitter is, thus, not the space for you. Join a knitting circle or pot-plant irrigating workshop, just not under the banner of our blue bird.

“And if we read one more tweeted-link purporting to explain the merits of wine scoring systems, Elon is going to stop wearing lipstick and start driving a diesel-powered Land Rover 1969.”

Visagie-James also questions Twitter-users love of posting a picture of a wine they are drinking. “How does that make me, as a co-Twitter-user, part of the conversation? This is just one-way, ego-driven traffic that excludes any other user who is not physically in the same space as the person drinking the wine. Even worse are the ladies posting selfies of themselves drinking glasses of cool Chardonnay next to the pool. If they included their cell-phone numbers we could get a two-way conversation going, otherwise it is just dead space. Even if you are a size 38.”

He says that wine-orientated Twitter-users have 10 days to “up their game”.

“Bring us emotion, bring us bright and quirky words, bring us engagement and subject matter that does justice to the admittedly fascinating subject you so wish to communicate about,” he says. “We know how to decant, and don’t care what the colour of the wine is. Get on, or get out.”