WWC24 will go down in the annals of JancisRobinson.com as the best-ever in terms of quantity – we received a grand total of 214 entries, more than any of our many previous writing competitions has ever attracted.
The theme, ‘A wine moment I’ll never forget’, was suggested by a reader last year. It seemed superficially to be simple and attractive but was surprisingly difficult to execute with distinction. A high proportion of entries described a seminal wine that lit the flame and encouraged, often, a switch to some form of professional commitment to wine.
But many of the entries were utterly charming or devastatingly moving, so overall we also think WWC24 was the best-ever in terms of the quality of the entries. A full 60 of them were selected for publication after review by eight internal judges: Jancis, Tara, Julia, Tam, Sam, Andrew, Julian Leidy (who marshalled and very effectively anonymised the articles) and Hermione Ireland, managing director of Académie du Vin Library, our partners in the competition.
We judges then had the very difficult task of reducing these 60 to this shortlist of 20 and trying to pick our favourites among them.
We were helped enormously in coming up with our Judges’ awards by the casting votes of our hand-picked external judges, award-winning novelist and journalist John Lanchester and editorial director of Académie du Vin Library Susan Keevil.
Once we published the shortlist, we also, as last year, instituted a public poll to decide the Readers’ choice awards, asking also for suggestions for themes for future writing competitions.
As you can see below, as usual there was some overlap of our choices.
Winners
Judges’ choice: Philip K Liao.
Prize: six of the Original hand-made wine glasses designed by Jancis with Richard Brendon plus a selection of 20 books from the Académie’s extensive library.
Readers’ choice: Karen Magner.
Prize: two of the Original hand-made wine glasses designed by Jancis with Richard Brendon plus a selection of 20 books from the Académie’s extensive library.
Runners-up
Judges’ choice: Karen Magner (again).
Readers’ choice: Emily Grazier.
Prize: two recent publications from the Académie du Vin Library, Wine Confident by Kelli A White and Wines of the Loire Valley by Beverley Blanning MW.
Highly commended
Judges’ choice: the cumulative scores of all internal and external judges for the following three entrants were so close that we decided all three deserved to be highly commended – Erica Landis, Melanie Webber and Luke Haughton.
Readers’ choice: the person with the third-highest number of votes in the readers’ poll was Nina Lloyd.
Prize: On Tuscany, a recent compilation from the Académie du Vin Library.
In addition all winners, runners-up and highly commended entrants will receive a year’s complimentary membership of JancisRobinson.com. Should they already be Purple Pagers, we will extend their current membership by a year.
We hope you will be encouraged to read these wonderful entries again, or for the first time if you missed them before.
In the meantime we will be sifting through your suggestions for a theme for next year’s competition and plan to announce it in April or May next year.
Image by Constantine Johnny via Getty Images.
