To borrow Ernest Hemingway’s observation on going bankrupt, wine writing on Substack started gradually and then happened all at once.
It’s no secret that classic wine media has been in a decline in terms of subscribers as well as losing a publication (or two) year upon year. This isn’t the case for Substack which, despite being founded way back in 2017, it seems most everyone writing about wine or, pretty much anything in the world, has arrived in the past year to try and hack through the madness and earn a few bucks, directly from readers.
This has quickly taken on a new dimension with Substack finally creating a subsection of the Rising and Top lists that breaks off Wine & Spirits from Food & Drink as that category is massive and few in the land of drinks ever cracked it. It seems we have some core Substack staff members who appreciate wine to thank for this as they saw the issue and set about to launch this sub category.
Additionally, there’s long-been a category for wine if you’d like to see articles and Notes pulled in via the algorithm, but it’s a bit hit and miss. In any case, this has changed things a great deal in terms of discovery given that search on the site has never been able to hack away at enough of the weeds to get a clear view of things.
In terms of a bit of my own discovery, I need to mention that while I run the full version of my wine site, Hudin.com with over 150 articles and tasting reports per year, I softly re-launched “The Hudin Letter” about three months ago which sees it now publishing about 60 articles per year. Everything on “The Hudin Letter” is available to Hudin.com subscribers, but the big difference is in the regularity and amount of content (about three times as much) as well as the price with Hudin.com at 75€ annually and The Hudin Letter at 45€.
For those looking to check out Hudin.com, right now there’s a 7th anniversary discount that makes it 60€ annually. Simply subscribe now and use the code ‘7thfor60’.
With that out of the way, let’s look at the evolution of wine writing on Substack, the tendencies, and where it seems things might go from here.
The List
For those who may not be aware of it, last year I started compiling the Wine Substack List (WineStack) as there were few other ways to find people writing about wine. I’ve recently updated it to take a new look, one year on given that there’s been so much movement. I won’t be doing the same for the traditional media list as it’s largely remained the same minus the untimely passing of Matthew Jukes last month.
With the first WineSstack List, I left it very open, only requiring that people make use of the paid subscriptions. This time around I set further limits in order to curate a list of people writing passionately and regularly.
- Fully using paid subscriptions – This seems rather self-explanatory as while there are several people who have their newsletters completely free, setting up the paid component creates a commitment to the reader and takes things from being a more casual Patreon model to being an actual publication. Given that appearing in the Rising or Top lists or being considered in algorithm items on the platform requires having paid subscriptions turned out, many people have enabled them, but aren’t actually using any of the functions, thus for this list, they need to be both turned on and in used. This is why Andy Neather’s excellent publication isn’t listed, but I do recommend subscribing to it.
- Regular publishing – Here was one of the big changes from the previous list in that many publications went from at least once-a-week publishing to suddenly one article per month or just stopping altogether. Again, requiring this regularity means that those in the list keep up regular writing for their readers. It’s for this that someone great like isn’t in the main list as I enjoy her newsletter a great deal, but it’s just once a month of so. That said, go subscribe as you won’t regret it.
- Only text & no AI – As we’ve all seen, Substack has been pivoting into other publishing aspects despite being writing centric at the beginning. For those wanting to follow podcasts or other forms of media, no problem, this just isn’t the list for it. Also, AI has become a tremendous issue in terms of content generation on the platform. Having a no-AI requirement for the list kicked out “Thirst Behavior” by Bodhi Landa as while I’d long-believed it was mainly AI-generated, the new built-in tools from Substack (thanks so much for this!) showed quite plainly that the majority of the text in articles is not human-generated. There’s another that’s also borderline and might be pulled in the future. I can only pray that Substack stays more or less free of AI as I don’t want to read it and am against it professionally.
So, given these qualifications, we arrive at a list that’s 44 newsletters in total, which would cost 2,822€ (I use a single base currency) if you wanted to subscribe to them all, with an average price of 64€ per year. These costs are about 8.5% higher than the 2025 figure. I suspect this will go up in the future given that it’s considerable work to put out regular, original content.
I continued to dig into the data however and did something I should have done last year but didn’t as it gives me night terrors–I fired up Excel to create a spreadsheet.
The raw, WineStack stats
Having a list is one thing and may or may not be useful to people now that there’s the Rising section for additional discovery. What is important is understanding how Substack is working for authors to earn money.
While it’s difficult to know exact figures on Substack, most people list their total subscribers publicly. In terms of paid subscribers, these are visible up to about 200, so one can do a number of calculations given that most people don’t arrive to this amount, which is why the spreadsheet was finally necessary.
Unfortunately, the paid subscribers are for the individual writers, not the individual publication. Thankfully, this was only an issue in two cases and, based upon a look at the followers, they’re almost completely, if not entirely coming from the wine publication.
Firstly, of the 44 publications listed, there are 10, or 23% that have more than 200 subscribers which means that they’re earning a minimum of 10,000€ a year and many are earning a great deal more as there’s one that, according to his badge color, has more than 1,000 paid subscribers and charges 43€ annually.
Unfortunately, I had to remove these publications from the computations as a) it’s impossible to concretely know their true paid subscriber numbers and b) they’re the outliers. I ran some test calculations using these publications and assuming very conservative numbers it more than doubled earnings and paid subscribers, showing numbers that were clearly not applying to the vast majority of authors.
Within the 77% of publications remaining, things get a wee bit tighter. Of these publications with known statistics, there’s an average paid subscriber rate of 44 per publication. Taking that against the average annual cost of a subscription of 64€, you arrive to the annual payout for these publications of 5,100€. And of course this is gross, not net. There’s also 13.5% that Substack and Stripe deduct for their services. If that seems steep, let me tell you as someone who runs and maintains his own website that I still have to pay the Stripe fees and deal with all the technical issues. So, what you pay for Substack handling everything is a steal and a weight off your shoulders even if it means you can’t have a tasting note database which honestly, personal wine recommendations with no score seem to have become the WineStack ‘style’ and readers seem like they’re happier with this than weekly dumps of thousands of scores.
Any way you slice it, this 5,100€ isn’t a nothing amount and those at the upper end of this average are making a decent amount of money from the publication. A friend of mind recently stated in an interview that he, “Makes about enough from Substack to pay his mortgage.” If only everyone were at that or more, then it would be quite something. Unfortunately, there are also 10 publications on the list with 10 or fewer paid subscribers which very much offsets the 10 with very high subscription numbers and there were a few others that had stopped publishing regularly which I had to remove from the list. I assume the lack of much monetary conversion wasn’t much of a motivator to keep publishing and it’s tough to convert as the average is about 3% of total subscribers that convert to pay.
This may seem miniscule, but it’s actually quite decent given that the average on the platform at large is 1-5% depending upon the category. If you’ve started from zero and are feeling a bit of “conversion envy”, don’t let it get you down as there’s one publication with over 28,000 subscribers and 104 paid subscribers, making for a 0.4% conversion rate. And people with high conversion rates are usually arriving from an established background such as the highest amongst known subscribers on WineStack at 8% who was a major newspaper columnist for many years.
Is Substack revolutionary for wine writers? By running the cold, hard numbers, it shows that in no way is it a negative and it gives writers an outlet in what is a growing wasteland of traditional media.
Will people be able to make a living on the platform? It appears that some most definitely are and for everyone else there may be potential if used in the right way. There have been no end of articles about “Peak Substack” although I think that’s just some people getting a bit bitchy as they’re not making as much given that there are more people using the platform. I honestly want to think that it’s more of a lull, than subscription fatigue, but that might be overly optimistic says the pessimist in me.
A lingering finish for the future?
I have no magic solution in how to succeed here on Substack in terms of writing about wine and/or drinks. If I did, I’d be advertising my Substack Success Classes on Instagram. All I can tell you is what I’ve casually noticed or seen writ large in the data analysis of the publications.
Wine is a niche and it may seem like the best direction to take is to be more of a generalist. Indeed, there is something to be said for this as three of the 10 top-sellers for wine write about a larger array of topics and others who have respectable amounts of paid subscribers are also more general.
That said, I’d argue that going even more niche is perhaps the better direction given a more crowded ‘Stackian landscape. Seven of the top 10 have a direct specialty. One is about food and wine. Another focusses on wines from the Pacific Northwest of the US. But, the bulk of the others focus on natural wine (basically the tops of the top earners) and themes around the marketing of wine.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to pursue either of these breadwinning topics directly as I feel they’re well-covered. Indeed, there have been some recent natural wine publications that don’t reach anywhere near the numbers of those who are established. But, looking at some specific aspect makes for a great deal more sanity than trying to do ‘everything.’
One item that seems to be a non-starter is ‘followers’ as unlike “Peak Substack”, I very much agree that this function is of uses unknown currently. It’s similar to how Twitter added Likes and it essentially neutered the platform as a Retweet actually made a statement given that a Like is akin to answering Maybe on a Facebook Event invitation. It’s similar on Substack as, to coin a Catalan phrase, a follower is neither meat nor fish. People don’t use the platform as a full social media platform (yet) and it’s still based upon people subscribing to your publication. Anything short of that is noise.
I tried to use the follow function, following everyone I could think of. The result in my feed was negligible and I honestly can’t see what the purpose of following is other than someone to say, “Yeah, fine, I don’t really want to read your newsletter when you publish articles so I’ll just give you a follow.”
Needless to say, I wouldn’t pay it much heed currently. Also, don’t worry if you’re not in the Rising list the minute you publish something. It’s quite volatile at the moment (which is a great thing for discovery) but as a friend of mine with a good paid subscriber base said when it first came out, “It’s paid subscribers that matter” and he’s very much right.
As for Notes, I haven’t a clue there either, but they do seem to figure in to your personal algo-worth. That and there’s a good deal more interaction than other platforms. I did a test recently, posting a link to an archived article I took out from behind the paywall. A story on Instagram had zero clicks, Bluesky had a couple, and a Substack Note had the most. Read into that what you will, but it does allude to the social side being more active on Substack as much as I’d prefer it to stay a publishing platform.
Joining up, Voltron style?
Back in the middle July, Tom Wark replied to a Note I’d posted about the total cost of subscribing to all the wine publications on Substack:
Miquel, it has been suggested to me on more than one occasion that I and 5 or 6 sub stackers combine to crest a single Substack…addressing a small portion of the issue you identify. I haven’t figured out how to accomplish this and preserve my economics.
His hesitation is not unfounded as in compiling all the subscriber stats required going through everything manually. Substack blocks all ‘good’ AI (which is a good thing) but it means you can’t use AI for the one thing I think it has a purpose for which is automating tasks. The positive side of this is that I had to look at subscribers manually and had an observation that I wouldn’t have had if a machine had totaled them up for me which is, there’s a great deal of repetition in subscribers. This is of course why people would like a singular grouping of them with a single price. We used to call this a ‘magazine’, but I digress.
What became readily true is that for several wine writers, pooling their writings would largely benefit the writer with the least amount of subscribers. Given that Substack (currently) doesn’t offer a way to pool publications, people would essentially need to shift everything into a new, group publication and somehow share payments out that.
If Substack were to create this system, what would actually be beneficial would be for people to pair up with those writing in the same arena, but playing a different sport. So, say you’re someone writing about wine marketing, it would be in your best interest to join forces with someone writing about maybe, social media marketing, or brand marketing in general. Or, maybe you’re writing about natural wines. It would make sense to connect with others writing about wellness or yoga or other lifestyle aspects.
These groups would allow people to not cannibalize their followers and would in fact create a larger whole which would make each person earn more and potentially grow their reach. Substack would have to build tools to make this happen and create a manner to share in the subscription earnings, potentially basing it upon frequency of writing and/or traffic an author receives from the larger group as simply dividing it into equal shares would quickly run into problems.
This is just an idea because short of that, the only successful collaborations I’ve seen have been people writing a guest post or joining an already-established, larger newsletter as is the case in two of those in the list. There’s room to grow on this front for people who want a softer landing into this crazy world and want to build up their portfolio of writing. This used to be called ‘freelancing’ which is a many of writing for others that once existed… in the time of Egyptian pharaohs.
The potential of potential
Compiling a new version of this list and analyzing these facts and figures has produced some excellent raw numbers. I hope the results I’ve found provide useful information for people using or planning to use the platform.
I’ve been using Substack for over three years now and am fully convinced that it still has a great deal of potential for people. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have launched the The Hudin Letter version of Hudin.com on it. That said, it’s clearly not a silver bullet for everyone to solve the last quarter century of upheaval that’s plagued the writing and journalism community. It is however a nice add-on and an additional tool in what is a truly zany world.
Drink well, be well, keep on reading!
