Nothing Can Stop Julien Miquel: The ‘YouTube King of Wine Pronunciation’
Once upon a time — before social media algorithms and misinformation turned the internet sour — there was a bootstrapped era of wine bloggers, proto-influencers, and a surprisingly vibrant wine community on Twitter. It was a scrappy, transitional moment in wine media, brimming with experimentation and personality.
Gary Vaynerchuk was the original disruptor. With his low-budget but wildly entertaining “Thunder Show” on YouTube, the brash media personality shattered the mold of traditional wine experts in the late 2000s. His blend of real talk and goofball charm redefined how wine could be discussed, and kicked down the door for a new generation of digital wine voices.
With a rapidly expanding toolbox of social platforms, a new generation of wine media figures set out to develop this new online frontier — experimenting, adapting, and building audiences in real time.
Among them was Julien Miquel, a young winemaker from southwest France dipping his toe into the wine mediascape. While that era produced plenty of colorful personalities and forged many a path, perhaps no other journey — save that of Vaynerchuk — has been quite as oddly compelling as Miquel’s.
The Proto-Influencers of Wine
When Jon Thorsen of Minneapolis started his value-oriented blog, it was on a whim as a hobby. “I had no clue what I was doing,” the founder and owner of Reverse Wine Snob freely admits.
As a major figure in the original wave of bloggers-turned-proto-influencers, he was among those who carved a path through the early digital wilderness. “[It was] the good old days when the dumpster fire that Twitter has become was actually useful and filled with community,” he says. “Wine writers, bloggers, and wine lovers. It was also before all the restrictive algorithms kicked in that prioritize advertising.”
Meanwhile in California, Ryan Ornelas was building WineMaps.com, now a go-to resource for pinpointing all things winery related. “Back then, wine bloggers were a scrappy bunch,” Ornelas says. “There wasn’t a playbook for ‘wine blogging.’ We were all inventing it as we went along.”
He adds that the Twitter of old provided a social and professional hub centered around the #wine hashtag. “Short, sharp bursts of wine wisdom, tasting notes, and opinions could be shared instantly,” he says. “The beauty of that time was the immediacy of it all. I could see a tweet about a hail storm in a specific vineyard in real time and then locate it on our maps.”
But it wasn’t all data and cartography. Inspired by Vaynerchuk’s irreverent style, there was a craving for humor and down-to-earth commentary — a much-needed antidote to the usual wine-wonkiness and pretension.
Enter the Wine Wankers, a cheeky duo from the piss-take streets of Sydney, Australia. “The community was small and mostly dominated by old-guard critics and bloggers trying to sound like Jancis Robinson with a thesaurus,” says Drew Lambert, one half of the Wine Wankers alongside Conrad Grah. Lambert stumbled into wine social media stardom somewhat by accident. “I started my wine writing career with a weekly column in Australia’s leading gay newspaper,” he says. “Because it wasn’t a traditional audience, I was given a lot of creative freedom, and I used that to make wine feel fun and accessible without the usual snobbery. Think Carrie Bradshaw mixed with a lot of booze.”
“A few wine bloggers and more informal actors — that today we’d call influencers — were very active and followed, like myself and the Wine Wankers out of Australia.”
The core principle for all these young innovators was simple: reframe how wine was talked about and shared, all while leveraging new tech to connect with people. “Wine was this thing people loved but felt too dumb to talk about,” Lambert says. “So we became the translator.”
Then there was Julien Miquel. As an actual winemaker, his input inherently carried more credibility and gravitas. Throughout the aughts, Miquel studied winemaking, earned his WSET Diploma, and worked his craft across the winegrowing world, from France to Spain, Italy, Australia, California, and New Zealand. This diverse experience would prove essential to his journey through the new frontiers of the wine mediaverse.
He landed a top management gig in New Zealand with Wine-Searcher.com in 2009, helping to elevate the platform as a global online wine resource, all the while building his online persona and content on the side. “There was a very active wine community on Twitter in particular back then when Instagram wasn’t as prominent,” Miquel says. “A few wine bloggers and more informal actors — that today we’d call influencers — were very active and followed, like myself and the Wine Wankers out of Australia.”
Whether Miquel and co. realized it at the time, they were actively upending wine media.
“I had made it my informal mission to share everything I know about wine before I die,” he says.
Niche fame followed in 2015, as Miquel’s popular platform Social Vignerons was awarded ‘Best New Wine Blog’ by the Wine Bloggers Conference (now the Wine Media Conference), co-founded by veteran communications consultant Tom Wark.
It was a brief but bright moment in the evolution of upstart wine media, but one that would be swept aside by blistering technological innovation and social media transformation. Faced with another media mountain to climb, some of the early guard threw in the towel. Others pivoted or adapted.
But Miquel’s trajectory — whether through wily grit, dumb luck, or a little of both — took an outright strange detour.
Pronunciation Royalty
No doubt the wine world is full of jargon — in multiple languages to boot. It’s yet another wall confronting the wine-curious, adding to the mystique and complexity that make wine both so intellectually delicious and infuriatingly inaccessible.
In a bid to ease the burden for neophytes and aficionados alike, Miquel turned to YouTube.
“I initially started making pronunciation videos about wine … education videos, explaining what wine is, how it’s made, etc.,” he says. “But [I] realized that in fact what the largest number of people are interested in when it comes to wine — the broadest audience — is how to pronounce names such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.”
“He went from a winemaker and blogger to the YouTube king of wine pronunciation.”
Miquel started with simple videos. Nothing fancy or complex, just single words or small phrases pertaining to things like appellations and grapes. While a seemingly obvious oversight in retrospect, it opened up surprisingly fertile and underexploited terrain. “From there, I initially expanded to foods and fashion brands, especially from France and Italy,” he says. The channel kept growing as he tackled one topic and language after another — all centered on clear, accurate pronunciation.
“It seems like a fascinating evolution,” Ornelas says. “He leveraged his wine expertise and online presence to tap into a much larger need: clear and accurate pronunciation in a globalized world.”
Lambert agrees that it was a savvy reinvention. “I admire the way he embraced the algorithm and ran with it.” he says. The instinct was simple: Spot an unfulfilled need, fill the void. Yet that very simplicity so often causes people to second guess themselves. “He went from a winemaker and blogger to the YouTube king of wine pronunciation,” Lambert says. “He carved a space no one else thought of … and absolutely owned it.”
It’s worth pausing here to appreciate the sheer extent to which Miquel — pronounced “mee-KELL” for the record — owns this niche. While he launched his YouTube channel in 2015, he didn’t start posting pronunciation videos until January 2019. In the six years since, he’s grown his audience to 1.83 million subscribers and racked up a staggering 907 million views.
That reach is matched — and no doubt fueled — by Miquel’s prolific output. At the time of writing, his channel features 57,000 videos, though that number will almost certainly be outdated by the time you read this. Miquel typically uploads over 50 videos per week, each running between one and one-and-a-half minutes, with topics now spanning everything from the names of famous athletes to medical conditions — and sometimes, the intersection of the two.
Ever Forward for Drinks Media
Never one to sit still, Miquel was busy on yet another new endeavor when tracked down for an interview for this piece: intensive training to become a volunteer first responder and firefighter in France.
Apparently, there’s nothing this guy fears tackling.
On the digital earning front, his wine education videos still generate traffic. And while AI-driven pronunciation tools are likely around the corner, Miquel continues to churn out wildly popular content while the getting’s good. On the wine industry side, he’s signed on as consultant for Bonner Private Wines, a U.S. wine club import operation specializing in global small producers, particularly from the high elevations of Salta in northwestern Argentina.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew remains busy and productive in their own evolving ways.
The days of the blog and the social wine website aren’t exactly dead, but according to Lambert, they’re nowhere near the draw they once were. “Ah, yes, our lovely digital ghost town. It’s still there, collecting dust and the occasional SEO-driven traffic spike,” he says of the Wine Wankers site. “Honestly, the action moved to socials ages ago. We kept it up for legacy reasons. … It’s like that ex you don’t delete from Facebook, because you never know.”
Ornelas’s WineMaps has continued to grow and adapt, helping wine lovers track down tasting rooms and vineyards all over the world. Likewise, Thorsen’s Reverse Wine Snob has shifted monetization toward an email-based “Insider Deals” program featuring limited offerings from smaller producers.
As for Miquel’s pronunciation videos, only time will tell how long they’ll stay relevant with AI looming on the horizon. But for now, he’s still YouTube short form royalty.
“Julien is great. I always enjoyed interacting with him,” Thorsen says. “My wife and I have a running joke, because whenever we have to look up how to pronounce something, we say, ‘Let’s ask Julien.’ Nine times out of 10, his pronunciation video is what pops up first.”
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