We are living in a "golden age" of wine and we need to make the most of it before it is taken over by bureaucracy and censorship was the personal plea of Jancis Robinson MW at this weekend's Digital Wine Communications Conference in Montreux, Switzerland.
Robinson called on everyone in the wine trade, whatever area they are in, to make the most of this "golden age" before some "tragedy" comes along and we have to abide by the kind of anti-drinking legislation in place in France which severely limits how people can talk or communicate about wine.
Never before has wine been so "appreciated" or been of such "good quality" anywhere in the world, claimed Robinson.
But it was no longer just enough to simply write about wine, to stand out you have to be offering something genuinely different. "We all have the same challenge in how to stay relevant," said Robinson.
She advised anyone starting out in wine communications to "have a speciality" be it in your wine knowledge about a certain region, or in how you actually communicate. You have to become the "go to" person for that specific skill. "Find a niche and target it," she added.
She believed there were "still massive opportunities" to do that across the wine world. "But you have got to work hard, and get your head down."
Robinson explained how she had tried to forge her own particular route with her own website, JancisRobinson.com, through which she has been able to build up such a large, engaging and interesting community of users who she is lucky to be able to interact with every day. But she was also very aware of the need to be constantly looking at different ways of communicating and not resting on your laurels.
She conceded she was one of the so called traditional wine critics that were supposedly in danger of dying out in this new age of where everyone is potentially their own critic or editor. But she warned those predicting her demise that, tongue firmly in her cheek, there were "at least two or three years left in her yet".
It was the first time in the seven years of the DWCC that Robinson had attended the event and she said she was particularly pleased to see it was not just bloggers there, but attracted people from right across the wine industry including wine producers and brand owners.
"There really is no event like this anywhere else in the world," she claimed.