Social wine media star Tom Gilbey releases book

"It was a total accident," says Tom Gilbey of his social media success.

Gilbey's roots are in wine, with his ancestors being one of the first English families to buy a French vineyard, Bordeaux's Château Loudenne, back in 1875.

However, although Gilbey's family connection to wine goes back 150 years, and he has worked in wine for his whole career on all sides of the trade, it is through social media that he has brought the drink to a new audience.

"My cameraman, producer, and the bane of my life, is my son Fred, who's 28 – in January last year he said to me 'we're not gonna sell any wine or do any wine events in January, so how about you get in that ice bath? It's cold tomorrow and I've put a bottle of Kumeu River in there, and you can tell me about what temperature to drink white wine at'," Gilbey explains to Gambero Rosso. "That was the first video to hit, and it just went mad. He then said 'we've got something here'."

That first video was then followed by an even more ambitious one – Gilbey would run the London Marathon and blind taste a wine at every mile.

"I was going to do the marathon anyway, but by January [2024] we had only raised £2,000 for Sobell House, the hospice that looked after my mum. My son said 'you're 52-years-old, you're not gonna win, so let's do something fun', so he lined up all his mates along the course with bottles of wine and got them all to do a video of me drinking, or rather blind tasting, the wine as I went round," he says.

Gilbey wasn't convinced that releasing the video was a good idea, but the response suggested otherwise.

"I did the marathon on the Saturday and the following day he showed me the video he had made, and I said 'you can't post that, it's too stupid', and he said 'the trouble is, I just have'. And from there it just went mad. On Monday morning I was making tea in my pants in the kitchen, and a friend of mine called and said 'you're on Greg James on BBC Radio 1', and that was it!"

The video gained the attention of news outlets all over the world, and made Gilbey a viral sensation – he now has 680,000 Instagram followers and more than 60,000 YouTube subscribers.

Presenting style

A large part of what has sustained his social media success since those first viral videos early last year is that Gilbey's approach to communicating about wine is not exactly typical: it's bold, humorous, and quite sweary.

One comparison that is often raised is that of Keith Floyd, the now-deceased British restaurateur and food show presenter who was famous for his interactions with the camera crew and having a "quick slurp" while he cooked on location. It's a parallel that Gilbey welcomes: "I will take that comparison every day – the guy is a legend, his food was disgusting, but I loved his presentation style. I don't copy him, but at the back of my mind I'm always thinking 'what would Keith do?'"

Much like how Floyd did know his stuff when it came to cooking (and drinking), Gilbey knows his Carignan from his Cinsault: "I looked myself up the other day and asked 'am I wine influencer?' and ChatGPT said 'no, you don't have the credentials' – even though I've done my WSET and half my Master of Wine, and I can clear out a shelf at Aldi."

It's rare for someone working in wine to resonate with an audience who might not otherwise drink it.

"I had the most extraordinary interaction about this time last year when a woman, she must have been 24, came up to me and said 'I just want to tell you, I'd never tried wine before, I'm now drinking it with lemonade, what shall I try?' I suggested a German Riesling, she came back a week later and that she loved it – it was amazing to hear," he says. "I couldn't be happier – I spent my whole life in traditional wine, but I think young people feel a bit alienated. If they look at me and think 'if that idiot can do it, I'll taste something', they will start to explore and have some fun."

For Gilbey, the key to communicating the mind-boggling concepts that come with wine, with its seemingly incomprehensible range of regions and styles, is to think about his younger self: "I target me aged 23, and I remember what I knew, or didn't know, at that age. I also ask Fred, and if he doesn't have a clue, we pare it right back. I doubt I appeal to 53-year-old blokes like me who know a lot about wine, there's already lots of great wine people out there for that. My Instagram audience is heavily, heavily weighted towards the under-30s. I'm very popular with males under 30 and women over 50."

What might partly explain his popularity with young men are Gilbey's videos with the comedian Fin Taylor, including an amusingly confrontational interview for the Fin vs The Internet series.

"I was just terrified," Gilbey shares, "but I thought of two things: there's only one guy there who's going to be funny, and it's not me, and all I've got to do is to try to not get cancelled."

Gilbey's audience is also, despite his very British sense of humour, quite international too.

"There's quite a heavy presence in the States and Australia, I think because all of the Australian wine I taste over here is the absolute hack that is made just for the UK market," he says. "Australians get terribly upset that I don't feature their wonderful wines, but it's just a little game I have with Australia, because they have got amazing wines. They never comment when we do a really delicious one!"

New book

Now Gilbey has turned his attention from Instagram reels to the printed page with the hardback release of his new book, Thirsty, in the UK tomorrow (6 November).

Subtitled 100 Great Stories and Bottles, the book is not a textbook on wine, as Gilbey explains: "After the marathon we were approached by a few publishers, and one of them was Penguin Vintage. They asked me for 6,000 words on wine, explaining what a corked wine tasted like, where the Mosel is etc. – they threw it back at me and said it was as dull as dishwater and that they wanted a book about me and wine, which was utterly terrifying. So this is the story of my life in wine, and it has been so much fun to recall stories, people, disasters (that I can now laugh about)."

Speaking with Gambero Rosso mid-way through a marathon book signing session, Gilbey's spirits are high, though when asked if he has plans to write another one, he quips: "Not in a million years, I've poured everything into this, there's nothing left! It's a completely different muscle to making videos, but really fun."

"It's a little bit like childbirth and I'm halfway through giving birth," he adds, "but I've absolutely loved it."

Although promoting the book is Gilbey's focus at the moment, once the dust has settled he has some major plans to bring wine to more audiences (quite literally).

"We're going to try and do more long form content on YouTube because we have some really good ideas," he says. "We're also putting together a live tour with a two hour show involving wine tasting and games, which is just mad, but we can't wait. The cities are decided, we just need to set the dates."