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Meet YouTube’s Master of Wine
With more than 126,000 subscribers, Konstantin Baum MW’s YouTube channel has become one of the platform’s biggest wine accounts. db asks him about his journey to internet stardom, and how social media has changed his perspective of the wine world.
Baum’s journey towards becoming a Master of Wine, and ending up on YouTube, was not a direct route.
“When I finished school, I wanted to become the manager of a hotel. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I already enjoyed food and cooking, and I always worked in restaurants to make some extra money. I did a three year apprenticeship at a very nice hotel in Baden-Baden, and that’s when I fell in love with wine.”
After the end of the apprenticeship, Baum decided not to become a hotel manager, but instead moved to Dublin to work at the two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud as a sommelier, where he was able to taste “lots of really expensive and interesting wines”. He also noted that U2’s Bono and The Edge were regulars.
During this time, he read about the Institute of Masters of Wine, and, with the thought of going through the programme himself germinating in his mind, he headed to Nelson, New Zealand to work during the harvest.
Returning to Germany, he studied oenology and business in Geisenheim, and then moved to London where he worked for Liv-ex, and only then did he enrol to become an MW. He would once again return to Germany, where he attained coveted MW status in 2015.
“I always thought there was a gap in the market for some video content with regards to wine,” Baum explained, though he cited friend and occasional collaborator ‘wineking’ (who has gained 481,000 since it began in 2017) as a wine channel that has also gained traction online.
At first, Baum made a few videos in his native German, which are no longer publicly viewable on YouTube. His interest in the platform was renewed during the Covid-19 pandemic: “I normally travelled quite a lot, but I couldn’t, so I just made a few videos instead and it took off from there.”
Among the biggest viral successes for Baum’s channel have been those where he tastes incredibly old wines sent in by viewers, such as 100-year-old First Growth Bordeaux, or 159-year-old Port, a video which has racked up an impressive three million hits.
Despite the popularity of these videos, Baum insisted that he’s not chasing a “huge audience”: “I really just want to have a great community on my channel…Getting people engaged, getting people interested.”
In terms of that community, Baum, based on a poll he sent out some time ago to his subscribers, discovered that approximately 30% of them said they know “nothing to a little bit about wine”, whereas 55% said that they had “above average knowledge” of wine, and the remainder claimed to know “a lot, or way more than Konstantin, about wine.”
“Quite a lot of younger people are probably not super interested in wine, and the audience on YouTube is generally younger,” Baum suggested. “But I’m still 100% sure that there are enough people interested in wine on YouTube so that there could be several wine channels with more than a million subscribers. I think it’s just something that needs to be developed.”
Though communicating something as sensory as wine over the internet has its challenges, YouTube has given Baum opportunities to experiment, and share his findings with his subscribers: “I do stuff that I wouldn’t normally do in terms of tastings. I can justify doing slightly insane experiments. All of a sudden, I have a budget for making these videos – I can open a bottle of Pétrus and spend €3,000 on it because I can generate income through the channel.”
A significant part of Baum’s online success has been due to his ability to capitalise on trends, such as with his recent taste-off against an Artificial Intelligence programme (an idea suggested to him by a viewer).
“More often than not, I think about new video ideas. I have some videos where I do tastings and talk about a region, but then are the more topical videos too. I probably wouldn’t have made a video on me using Chat GPT, but a subscriber of mine contacted me and told me had built this AI software application, and that piqued my interest. When it comes to those videos, you never really know what comes out in the end.”
But YouTube is not a full-time job for Baum. In fact, he estimates that it only constitutes between a fifth and a sixth of the work he does in a week. However, he has noticed an increased profile thanks to his videos: “When I walk through the halls at ProWein, people aren’t coming up to me to say ‘wow, it’s amazing what you do with your online shop’!”
To those outside of wine, it can seem to be a very static world, dominated by tradition and resistant to modernity. And yet, in reality, there are now numerous highly successful influencers, many of whom do not have backgrounds in the trade, using social media as a platform for wine communication.
db asked Baum, who considers himself a ‘content creator’ rather than an ‘influencer’, whether, despite him holding coveted MW status, and being the youngest German to ever pass the programme, he has ever experienced any snobbery from wine professionals over his use of YouTube:
“I don’t think so. I’ve always been that guy on trips that runs around with his camera, even before I made YouTube videos. People sometimes make fun of that, but I don’t really mind to be honest. I’m sure there are people who look down on people making videos on YouTube, but I don’t get that too often. I think the times have changed when it comes to that.”
“As an industry insider, you actually get to contribute much more on YouTube,” he suggested. “When it comes to Instagram and TikTok, it’s often about a good looking person holding a bottle, or making a funny meme work with wine. With YouTube, it’s centred around a story and information, so if you don’t know your stuff, you probably won’t be very successful.”
Of course, some things have changed since Baum set out on his online odyssey.
“I used to do everything myself,” he explained. “My videos come out on Sunday afternoons, so I would wake up on Sundays at 5am and edit the video until 12/1pm and then upload it. Now I have a guy [named Vincent] who edits it. I send him the video files and he cuts it into bits and puts the footage back together.”
While Baum still plays an active role in directing the edit, he said that outsourcing the chopping and changing involved in making videos has “freed up quite a lot of time”, enabling him to “produce more videos and be a little bit less stressed”.
As for future developments, Baum said that a new studio is in the works: “It’s going to have a similar look [to the current studio], but it will be much bigger and allow me to do different things, like inviting people, getting different shots. So that should make the videos more diverse, more interesting, more flexible.”
“I’m going to take the channel on the road more this year too. I’m planning on doing a few different videos in different regions on different wineries to talk about certain topics in more detail. Wine is very often about going there: you don’t really understand the region unless you’ve been there, and I’m trying to do that for my subscribers.”
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