The Wine Show - what did Twitter think?
The wine trade is continuing to debate whether The Wine Show is a good thing. Inevitably, there's disagreement. But whatever you think, it's surely undeniable that we are not the target audience. This is entertainment television aimed at a mainstream audience. So what do they think?
I trawled through Twitter to try and gauge opinion. My methodology was to search Twitter for any mention of @wineshowtv and / or "the wine show" for a few hours around its broadcast time of 4:25pm on Saturday 16 May on ITV1.
About 50% of the tweet traffic came from wine professionals - writers, retailers, importers, bloggers and so on. I ignored these and classified the remaining non-professional tweets as either positive or negative.
The results were 51 positive tweets and seven negative. That's an impressive ratio for a forum so vociferous as Twitter. In July last year, BBC Radio 4 ran an edition of The Food Programme about wine, and the majority of Twitter reaction was very scathing. I'm not trying to prove anything beyond the fact that relatively few viewers seem to be finding it objectionable (and those that do tend to be somewhat unconstructive in their feedback - see below). But more to the point, a healthy proportion of The Wine Show's target audience are really enjoying it.
Regardless of what us professionals might think of it, surely that's a measure of success.
I've embedded a random selection of positive tweets below, followed by six of the seven negative ones.