Episode #35 - Diane, aka Dalkia loves wine: wine and Instagram

For the 35th episode of the Wine Makers Show, we chose to take you to discover a world that’s still little explored: communication and social media in wine. In France alone, Instagram has more than 22 million users, and it’s one of the most used social networks in the world. So come and meet Diane, aka Dalkia loves Wine, and learn about her journey on the platform.

Hello Diane. Today, you’re the first influencer / content creator I’m hosting here. Can you start by introducing yourself?

My name is Diane, but most people know me as Dalkia, a nickname I inherited from my engineering school and that I used to have a presence on social media. I’m an influencer and content creator, mainly on Instagram, and I also have a blog called Dalkia loves wine, like the Instagram account, but which lets me share lots of things around wine tourism, wine, my discoveries, and the magnificent terroirs we have in France.

How did your passion for wine come about?

I’ve had a passion for wine for a long time, but I started working in wine fairly late. I did my studies in connection with wine, but always choosing programs that weren’t in wine: I did a BCPST preparatory class and an agricultural engineering school. Rather than taking the viti-oeno option, I went for a plant production option without touching the vine, telling myself each time, “I’m going to keep wine as an interest, as a passion, but I’m not going to make it my career.” I kept making my wine discoveries on the side. My first job was as a food buyer for large retail, until I got an opportunity to work in wine. Once you start to set foot in the professional world of wine, that’s when it really exploded, and I realized that the passion was truly deep-rooted in me.

On the passion itself, on the product, how did that happen? Why wine?

It didn’t come from my parents, because in my family I’m the only one who appreciates wine. My parents like to drink wine, but it doesn’t particularly interest them. My great-grandmother worked in wine, at a time when women working wasn’t necessarily common, and on top of that, working in alcohol when you were a woman back then was absolutely frowned upon. But it seems it skipped a few generations, because that’s the only family anchor we have in wines and spirits. When it reached me, it was more out of personal interest, when I started tasting wine, finding that it was a beverage that was a bit more complex, that had things to tell. I got interested in it on my own. It came from one tasting after another. On top of that, I went to school in Bordeaux, and to discover wine it’s super interesting to be able to take the car on weekends and go to the vineyards.

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Let’s get to Dalkia loves wine. You started on Instagram?

It was a fairly winding road. Originally, I wasn’t on Instagram at all, even personally. When I did my buyer job in large retail, as much as I loved the world, the methods used in large retail aren’t necessarily the ones that speak to me for a product of the land. Buying socks that way, no problem at all; buying wine, I had trouble finding my way. And negotiating, because that’s what a buyer’s job is in large retail, it’s negotiation, when you’re not convinced by your company’s values, it’s super complicated. In three months, I’d understood that this wasn’t where I’d flourish, but that I had to stay in wine. I had to find a way to express myself in wine right away. I looked at what was possible to do. I saw social media, I told myself “why not,” but my last Facebook post must have dated from 2008. I benchmarked the networks that existed, I saw Instagram, I told myself “oh, that looks nice.” I looked account by account at how people expressed themselves, what photos they posted, what content worked and what didn’t. I didn’t dive in at random, that’s also what’s important, it’s that I really saw it from the start as an end in itself. When I started building my account, I knew where I was going. I created Dalkia loves wine in May 2018, and at the time there was a real gap in digital communication in wine. I think that’s actually still a bit the case. Less so since lockdown, because digital has taken on a fairly important place. At the time I launched without knowing what it would become, but it was a real need. Little by little people latched on, subscribed, asked questions, I met other people, who let me meet other people, and the snowball got going fairly quickly.

What was the first photo of Dalkia loves wine?

I remember, it was a photo taken by a friend in Brussels, in front of a platter of oysters, with a wine, I don’t remember which, that wasn’t good at all. But I loved that photo because it was sharing a really nice moment, at the Brussels market, and it represented something for me. It was the guiding thread for quite a few photos I posted afterward. The idea is more to share an experience, a moment, than to say “this wine is good, buy it” or “this wine isn’t good, stay away from it.”

What were the conclusions of your benchmark of the different platforms? What was your vision on that? Did you have the prospect of having a small business?

I didn’t have that prospect at all, I discovered it gradually. I’m very bad at anticipating. Being able to make Instagram a profession, being able to monetize blogs, those are things I learned to do over the course of the discussions I had with people who were much more advanced than me in that sector. When I launched my account, it let me combine several passions: the one for wine, the one for photography, the one for writing, and my account is in English, because at the time I wanted to pick up English again. I put it all in a shaker, and the Instagram account is what came out. That’s really what I’d advise: given the time it takes, social media, you really have to find what’s in it for you, that it has a point and that it goes beyond “cool, I gained 100 followers.”

Can you tell us about the early days? What moments do you photograph?

You have to manage to have photos that are nice photos. Telling yourself “I’m going to have a nice aperitif and take a photo with my phone between two slices of sausage” can work, but I did dedicated photo shoots. When I tasted a wine I liked, I kept the bottle and then I’d go around Paris, to spots I liked, and I took the time to take the photo.

Did you have an idea of how often you were going to post, of the way it was done?

When I started, I must have posted once every three or four days. I was in a phase of adjusting my feed to find a style, so I didn’t have too much pressure on posting frequency. Instagram is a network where consistency matters a lot. You hear all sorts of things: that you have to post every day, that posting once a week is enough if you do stories… I think I’ve done all the techniques. In particular in summer 2018, I had much more time, I posted every day, and that worked rather well. But it takes an enormous amount of time. You have to manage to organize yourself according to your calendar. At the time, building up my photography skills was something that interested me. Taking dedicated time, even if it was to photograph bottles, interested me, and I gave myself the means to do these photo shoots. If you want to develop your Instagram account for yourself as a personality and be an influencer, versus for a brand, those aren’t the same types of strategy at all. I think that from the standpoint of visual quality, we’ll be much more demanding of a brand than of a person sharing their personal tastings.

So you took that time regularly. What did you do, one shoot a week at the start?

It was generally on the weekend. I started in May, so I didn’t have to struggle to find a spot or light, Paris in summer is still pretty easy for taking fairly nice photos. The hardest part is that there’s a portion of the photos on my feed in which I appear. You either have to learn to photograph yourself, or ask friends or an Instagram boyfriend.

And today, how does it go for you at shoot time, to take photos? Has it evolved a bit?

Not that much. I’ve got equipment, I have tripods, remotes, but I think a professional who sees me at work takes me for an amateur. The particularity of a network like Instagram, and all the more since I developed the blog, is that you have to be super versatile. You have to know how to do photography, video, I bought a drone that I’m going to have to learn to master, I have to do photo edits, with the blog I also have to do articles, writing, optimizing my ranking… It demands so many hats that I allow myself not to be professional in the sense of service delivery on all of them. I see myself more as a Swiss army knife that’s capable of doing everything well, but I’ll never be a professional photographer, just as I’ll never be a master of SEO.

You spoke of pressure. Is that something that has evolved since the start, when you had 100 followers, and today, when you have 16,000?

What you have to keep in mind are the measures in wine: wine, as we said at the start, is a sector that’s rather behind in digital communication. When I got into it in May 2018, there were no influencers in wine. That’s also why, even getting into it late, I managed to carve out my place. Today, if you take for example the biggest wine influencer, Nicolas, he’s approaching 30,000 followers. So in France, the biggest is at 30,000. So even with a reasonable account, like mine at 16,000, you’re among the influencers who carry weight in wine influence. Whereas for example with mascara, below 200,000, it’s not worth it. With wine, you’re addressing such a specific target audience that it’s better to have a smaller audience but one that’s attuned to wine. I think I put more pressure on myself when I was starting, because I really wanted to do well, there were lots of things I didn’t understand, it took me hours to understand. Today, I know the platform very well. The challenge for me is to manage to juggle the demands of the platform, which adds features, changes things, shifts its algorithm… But today, I’ve managed to detach myself from “vanity metrics,” telling myself “OK, today I’m going to make a post because I want to share about a certain wine. If my community likes it, great. If they don’t like it, well, I wanted to talk about it.” So I find it’s important to talk about it, it’s not just a question of likes behind it. Sometimes you deliver the same quality of work, the same quality of photos, and you realize that your engagement is doubled, or halved. Quite a few things are random, but that’s what means a lot of people stop along the way. You have to be capable of consistency, even when you don’t feel like it, when it’s not your moment, you have to keep posting something nice and giving people the desire to keep following you.

Do you have a story behind a post that was out of the ordinary, or a slightly funny anecdote?

When I post photos, they mean something to me. Either because it was a moment I shared that was unique, or because the wine itself was unique. So there are lots of photos behind which there are anecdotes. What’s funniest are the photos I don’t post. There’s one in particular I’m thinking of, where there was a magnificent overhead view at Gigondas, so I sit down on a stump and a friend takes a photo of me at that moment. The stump had just been cut, so it was full of sap and I still haven’t managed to save my shorts! But it was funny at the time.

Collaboration with brands, I suppose that’s something you lend yourself to in order to discover wines, to highlight them? How does it work and how does it function behind all that?

I have an analogy that’s quite telling. You have to see influencers as media, in the sense of a newspaper. Let’s take a panel of influencers. I was talking about Nicolas earlier, so we’ll take him as an example, his account is @sipmygrape, which is the biggest, and me. Let’s say you’re in a newsstand where there are two types of newspapers. You’ll choose the type of newspaper that interests you, you’ll subscribe or not to the newspaper; once you’ve opened the newspaper you’ll find articles and you’ll also see advertorials. The two are alternated and that’s also what makes the newspaper credible. If it’s only ad pages it would interest no one. It juggles between the two, just as there are lots of other newspapers on different segments, maybe they won’t interest you at all, but the fact is they exist. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that they don’t suit you. If there’s ever an account that, for example, only talks about English wines, it doesn’t mean it’s a worthless account, it means you’re not in that one’s target. If we’re talking about advertorials, there are several types of partnerships with brands you can do. Either, what we call in influencer jargon, product placement, where you receive a wine and you talk about it. But in wine, I find that’s complicated. A mascara you can test, it’ll do mascara. A wine, you can’t know beforehand whether you’ll like it or not. It exists, but personally it’s not something I have much affinity with. On the other hand, you can also do broader collaborations. For example, an appellation that wants you to talk about it, but that will leave you free rein on the angle you’ll choose. You agree on what the main lines of communication will be, what you’ll talk about, but then you’re free to create the content you want. These are real partnerships, you’re used as media.

Your work is both to propose the content you’d like, create it, and then go publish it on your account?

That’s it. There’s some content for which you don’t need to go to the vineyard. For example the Hospices de Beaune cuvées, the labels are so distinctive that you don’t need to be in Beaune to talk about them. It also depends on what the brand wants. Since they’re beginners in digital, they don’t know either to what degree of precision they can go in the brief. There are some: “free hand! Do what you want, I just want you to talk about me, from whatever angle you want. Anyway I chose you, I roughly know what to expect and I know I’ll like it. Figure it out.” There are some who’ll have ultra-precise briefs: you have to put this, use a certain word and not another. Generally that’s when you go through agencies that are used to handling influencer relations with brands much bigger than wine brands.

If I’m a brand, what should I do to do things in the best way in my relationship with an influencer like you?

I think there are two ways to approach the influencer. Either, you really see them as media and you want to be seen on their account, in which case you’ll ask them for a service. It’ll be a relationship between collaborators. Or, you just find that the tone is nice, you learn things, and even as a brand, you can get along well with an influencer, without necessarily seeking to do a product placement. The two approaches are different in the sense that when you have a brief or a precise expectation, well, you have to put the budget with it. That’s why I quite often get winemakers who send me messages “hello, can I send you a bottle,” I systematically tell them: “if you send me a bottle for me to discover, with great pleasure,” among wine lovers, you always want to discover new things, “on the other hand, if you send me a bottle for me to photograph in my feed, I won’t commit to that, because maybe I won’t even like your wine, maybe I have lots of other bottles I want to talk about first.” There are some I take five months before tasting, so people had better not expect things in return. If the objective is clear for the brand there has to be a budget attached. Or else it’s just “I want you to have a good time with my wine, if you like it you post, if you don’t like it you don’t post.”

Indeed, I think quite a few people don’t imagine that you’d have to allocate a budget for this kind of operation, precisely because they have neither the media analogy nor the vision of the work it represents.

There’s a bias too. The media image isn’t innocent. Wine brands are also used to working with wine journalists, and for wine journalists, you receive a bottle, a press release, and you do your articles accordingly, because they’re paid by the newspaper, or because they’re freelance and paid per article, but in any case they monetize at some point. For us, if we ever receive a bottle, there’s no difference. We can perfectly well buy wine ourselves and discover what we want to discover. Since journalists have this mode of operation, they generally tell themselves that influencers will be the same thing, and that from the moment they send a bottle, there will be an associated article that comes out. What’s funny is that there are quite a few brands that go through communication agencies. There are communication agencies, like Pain Vin et Compagnie, for example, that are dedicated to wine and are essential players in the world, and they’ve understood the importance of digital in their clients’ communication, they manage to get the message across to them. And often, that’s what I find funny, the clients are able to pay for a digital service from the agency, but it doesn’t trickle down to the influencer, even though the influencer is part of the media communication package that was sold. So there’s still this little bias of “from the moment they have a bottle, they should be happy.”

The big difference is the time you’ll spend on it. This person, let’s call them Jacques, if they want to become an influencer, it’s an enormous amount of time you’ll give to the platform and time the platform will give back to you. When I created my account, one of the things I committed to was not staying in digital and making sure that the people I met on the network, I’d meet them in real life. That’s what also helped build the network, and means that today among my friends and family there aren’t many people who like wine, but on the other hand in my Instagram network we’re able to have tasting evenings. And it’s thanks to that network that I met them. It’s basic, if you spend eight hours a day on Instagram, people are going to see you. If they see you, they’re going to interact with you, reply to you, talk about you, and that’s the snowball that’s going to get going. If Jacques is ever just an enthusiast and just wants to share what makes him happy, he stays at an amateur level and he’ll do what he likes. But if he has more ambitious goals, you have to give yourself the means to meet your goals. I have a lot of people who say “it’s easy, you just have to post.” Yes, but you have to post regularly, you have to post quality content, be receptive to your audience, reply to everyone. Everyone would be an influencer if it were that easy. The good news is that if I can do it, anyone can do it. I didn’t have a personal Instagram account before. I really discovered the platform for this. You have to be rigorous.

You said you’d met a lot of followers. Did they simply send you a DM “let’s meet”? How did it go?

It’s more gradual than that. It goes through interactions, first on the posts. You comment on a first wine “ah, what were you eating when you drank it?”, etc. And then there are people with whom you have affinities, similar tastes, you learn things, so you start moving to the private messages part where you chat. The first one I met was Laurent, @les_vins_du_capitaine, who’s a specialist in Chablis. We chatted a lot, but wine is meant to be tasted, you have to drink it. We met in a restaurant, we hit it off really well, and one thing led to another, we met Olivier of @ermitage78, Andee of @andee_a_table, and now there are a lot of us who know each other, we make up a little network of wine lovers who are always available for a friendly tasting.

What are your ambitions for @dalkia_loves_wine or the other projects you’re nurturing at the moment?

The particularity of Instagram is that it’s a platform you don’t own. If Instagram closes tomorrow, you find yourself with nothing. That’s one of the things that motivated the creation of the blog. What’s more, on the blog I write in French, so I can go much further in my reflections, I’m no longer limited by the language, and I can tackle subjects that are much more in-depth. The blog is something I care about a lot. I have much more fun on the writing part of the blog than on Instagram, which is a lot about the image. I’d really like to develop that part, the blog. Except that having both in parallel, Instagram and the blog, demands a lot. I have projects on Pinterest too. It’s hard to be on all fronts. I think this year, the thing I’m really going to have to think about is trying to structure myself, to organize myself, so I can delegate and keep growing. Typically, I don’t do commercial prospecting, I don’t write to châteaux, but that could be done eventually, it’s just that I don’t have time at the moment to do that kind of thing. I think that in 2021 I’m going to start organizing myself, maybe have an intern. But it’s super hard to delegate content creation. Especially when you’re an influencer, it’s your touch, it’s your photo style, your way of writing, so it’s not easy. I haven’t yet found a way to organize myself, but I think I’m going to be forced to go through with it if I want to keep growing. I was also telling you about trying to expand on Pinterest. Typically, I have no affinity with that network, I don’t understand it. But I managed to find someone who understands the network a bit better, and there I have no problem delegating, because anyway I don’t understand anything she does. There’s really a complementarity.

Why do you want to launch on that network?

Because my goal in the long run is to focus more on the blog. What makes a blog monetize is its traffic and visits. Pinterest is one of the sources of visits that can feed the blog.

Do you have a slightly funny experience from this whole journey on Instagram to tell? A slightly funny anecdote or something a bit crazy you were asked?

Since people are fairly cautious in communication about wine, generally I don’t have completely crazy briefs. Either I have briefs where they let me do what I want, or I have briefs written down to the comma. I’m thinking more of situational comedy. For example, I was commissioned by an appellation to go see a winemaker, to talk about his wine. Lovely, he welcomes me, he shows me his facilities, he tells me about his wines, and at one point he asks me the question “but so, what’s your digital thing? Because I don’t really understand the link between the computer and the finger,” because he was still stuck on “digital” as in fingerprint. So I had to explain it to him: I learned things, he learned things.

It’s going to be three years that you’ve been on Instagram. Is there a moment when you told yourself “now I’m starting to carry weight, I’m starting to enter into something very professional”?

I had it right from the start in fact, because I wanted to do something professional and tidy. I wasn’t aware that it was a profession and that it generated money. But from the start I wanted to do something that was professional. As it happens, when it started to talk about potential monetization, I already had the structure and the organization to be able to say “I know where I’m going, I know my feed’s organization and where I can build my services.” Besides, it’s not my first company. After engineering school I’d loved working the land, but I still needed a bit of marketing / commercial reinforcement, so I did a year at business school. Right after, I had to start looking for a job for six months, and since I’m very impatient by nature, I didn’t manage to wait six months for something to fall on me, so I’d already created a structure back then. Nothing to do with wine, but it had let me get my hands on the administrative side. On Instagram, I was lucky to find fairly quickly people ready to pay for services, when I didn’t yet know that you could pay for those services. But that’s also where I understood that it was a real profession.

Over these three years, if you’d had the chance to do something differently, what would it be?

As much as I managed to structure my way of approaching the account fairly quickly, I didn’t manage to structure my time management from the start. That is, I spent a lot of time on the social network, but sometimes at the expense of the time I spent with my friends or my partner. It demands a certain organization to be able to tell yourself “if I want to be able to enjoy this weekend with my friends, I have to have already prepared my stories in advance, to take three minutes to post them at a certain time, but the rest of the time I enjoy the people I’m with.” That’s the thing I found the hardest to do. On top of that the network responded very well, you’re quick to let yourself get carried away by Instagram. That’s actually what makes the network distinctive.

Do you have Instagram notifications turned on on your phone, or did you turn off notifications?

So I think that if I had notifications on, my phone would be flashing all the time. We’re talking about Instagram, but in terms of social networks there’s another one that’s pretty strong for me, it’s LinkedIn. If you add up LinkedIn + Instagram + WhatsApp + emails, it was a phone garland. My phone spends the day on silent, otherwise it vibrates all the time.

We don’t realize how much work it is to do this, it takes time, it’s demanding, it’s always activity.

All the more so since the whole private messages part isn’t visible. I’ve put a lot of effort into it, you don’t see the time it takes. But it’s time I give gladly because they’re exchanges that are super interesting every time.

The Evin law is a law that frames the regulation on wines and spirits, that limits advertising on wine. For example, I’m not allowed to display “buy this wine” in the metro. On the other hand, it seems to me there’s a subtlety, and I’m allowed to talk about, for example, Bordeaux or Loire wine, or a particular appellation, talking about the know-how and the product itself, but without encouraging consumption or purchase. How do you manage to position yourself in relation to that?

It’s the Touraine amendment that allows you to talk about the product but according to its intrinsic characteristics, but you’re not going to make a value judgment, you’re not going to say “it’s good / it’s not good,” you’re going to say “it’s made a certain way, it has certain aromas, the terroir is like this.” You’re not going to encourage consumption, you’re just going to describe a state of fact. That’s allowed. If anything, that’s not the most complicated, because those are text details. The most complicated is respecting the Evin law on photos. For example, if you photograph a bottle, it has to be closed. If you show a person, they mustn’t look happy. They have to pull a face, because wine doesn’t make you happy. They have to have visible markers of professional status affiliated with wine. So you have your little sommelier badge, you pull a face and your bottle is closed in front of you. There, you can have a photo. It’s very restrictive. In my case, I have a community that isn’t mostly French, because I write in English, I’m not addressing France, so it’s true that it helps me quite a bit with the Evin law. But for brands that want to launch and that on top of that have brand status, they’re obliged to go through that.

So concretely I can’t photograph myself with a bottle of wine?

It’s going to depend on your audience. Also, it’s a law that’s evolving. I haven’t finished reading the ten pages of legal text, but it would seem that in December there was a contest that was organized. Giving away alcohol is completely against the Evin law, because it’s complete incentive. But it would seem that it went through in that context. You see, there are a lot of possible interpretations of the Evin law, it’s not completely rigid. It’s funny, I asked myself the question this week. We’re recording this podcast in January. To say January these days is to say “dry January,” which is therefore a month we devote to abstinence, at least from alcohol. It raises the question of alcohol consumption. When you look at the talk, people say “I’d like to consume less during dry January.” It’s always “less” relative to current consumption. It’s not reasoned around “I know myself, I know my limits, I know what I can drink, what I can’t drink.” We have a global norm of two glasses a day I think, which I already find pretty good, but there are people who, after half a glass, will already feel the effects of alcohol, whereas there are some for whom a bottle later feels like a shot of Coke. The main thing is to know yourself, to know your limits and know how to treat yourself.

On wine, most of my knowledge I don’t get from books, but from the internet and social networks. You can find the information that interests you sometimes in a super precise way, provided you sort out the accurate from the approximate. So for me the best bedside book is a computer, even on wine.

Generally I don’t settle for a single source. As I was telling you, the reliability of information on the internet isn’t guaranteed, so I always check from several sources.

Do you have a recent favorite tasting?

A month and a half ago I tasted a cuvée from a somewhat iconic Burgundy estate, the kind we all dream of. So yes, clearly. What’s funny is that it was a blind tasting, so I didn’t know what it was. I’d never tasted DRC before, and when I drank it that’s what immediately came to mind. I also knew that the friend who’d offered it to me has a few, so that may have influenced the choice, but given the wine cellar he has, it could have been an enormous number of things. But it’s just an incredible experience, there’s something that happens both in the nose and on the palate, wow! It clearly deserves its reputation.

Who should I interview in the next episodes of this podcast?

I think what would be interesting would be to bring in two houses. The first that’s sitting on a treasure and that knows how to showcase it in a fair and precise way. That’s Maison Guigal. With Eve, Philippe, or Jacques, I think you’ll have super fascinating exchanges. And on the other side, to go to the exact opposite, a house that’s super young, super dynamic and that does nothing like everyone else, the Winerie Parisienne. With one of the managers, Julien or Adrien, likewise I think you’ll have a podcast like you haven’t had before.