Wine Influencer: @wine.gini - Georgia Panagopoulou

XChateau is a podcast about all things wine, from vine to your glass. We tackle the business of wine and keep you up to date with new and exciting developments in the wine industry.

In this episode, Robert Vernick and Peter Yeung interview Georgia Panagopoulou (Instagram: @wine.gini) about creating digital content on social media and supporting wineries in the digital marketing space. Robert and Peter discuss Georgia’s experience with the OIV Masters of Wine Management, how she built her brand and @wine.gini, and working with wineries to tell their stories as both a wine ambassador and digital marketer. 

Other topics covered in this episode include:

• Falling in love with wine in Spain - through a university exchange with the Erasmus program
• Getting a Masters in Chemical Engineering and how she approaches communication with an engineering mindset
• Moving to Santorini, the center of wine in Greece
• OIV Master of Wine Management - traveling to 30 wine-producing countries, based in France, mostly for wine entrepreneurs and executives
• Moving to New Zealand - to blend the old world and new world perspectives
• Engaging with wineries
  • Smaller wineries want her to travel to the property and work as a wine ambassador telling the story
  • Bigger brands mostly want wine placement and building brand awareness
  • Brainstorms with brands on how to bring more value than just executing what they want
• Zonin Project - annually invite sommeliers to the property, engaged Georgia to work as a social media ambassador for the event
• Greek wineries - mostly use traditional marketing techniques currently
• Measures of success
  • Mostly brand awareness - people reached / impressions
  • Don’t really ask her to sell wine
• Wine.gini audience (100k+ followers)
  • Both wine lovers and wine professionals
  • Top markets: US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Canada, & Brazil
  • 25-50 years old
  • 50/50 split male/female
• Ways to grow a social following
  • Much easier in 2017 (when she started) - could get 100 followers/day easily, if you posted a lot, IG would promote you, started posting pics of herself to do more storytelling and created a personal style and brand
  • Hit 40,000 followers in 1 year
  • Today - more difficult to build a following - do advertising, be super niche and special, or post bikini or ab photos
• Ways to not grow a following today
  • Follow and unfollow people
  • Interact with accounts that aren’t relevant 
  • Don’t fall into the trap of always doing what works well, vs expressing your unique style
• Wineries want help building the story and better communicate with consumers to get the right message out

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