I wouldn’t say that something uses a wire-level protocol or doesn’t – I’d talk about which wire-level protocol it uses.
Basically, if something’s communicating with a remote machine (even conceptually) then there’s some data going across the network connection (the wire). The description of that data is the “wire-level protocol”. Even within that, you would often stop short of describing individual network packets – so the wire protocol for a TCP-based protocol would usually be defined in terms of opening a connection, the data streams between the two computers, and probably details of when each side would be expected to close the connection.