On this day in 1975 I arrived in the tiny office of the trade magazine Wine & Spirit just off Carnaby Street in London as assistant editor, to fill the shoes of Tony Lord who had left to be editor of Decanter, then in its infancy. Colin Parnell stayed on as editor of Wine & Spirit but was hardly ever there; he was too busy publishing Decanter. You can read about my 50 years as a wine writer in this long version of my bio and/or listen to Richard’s amazing seven-part(!) podcast, The Jancis Robinson Story.
This site was born 25 years ago, on 1 December 2000. As I spell out in the story of JancisRobinson.com, it was all a bit of an accident. I’d had a succession of businessmen coming to my front door to propose a joint venture in which they’d provide the framework and I’d provide the content. The guy I decided to go with proved not quite as reliable as I’d hoped so I backed out, but not before asking the publishers of my next book to mention jancisrobinson.com (all lower case then) on its jacket.
So jancisrobinson.com had to exist. Bob Brooks, who used to advise us on which computers to buy, stepped into the breach and designed a rudimentary website with a very strange orange and green colour scheme, devised at my request by a book designer. We called the bit of the site behind the paywall ‘Purple Pages’ as it had a completely different colour scheme, based on various shades of purple.
Although I told Julia Harding MW when she initially suggested she should work for me that I would never hire any editorial help as I was a control freak, the demands of the expanding wine world have required a much-augmented team. For example, take a look at the increasing number of wine reviews added annually over the last 20 years:
- 2005: 5,639
- 2010: 11,304
- 2015: 16,506
- 2019: 17,734
- 2020: 14,114 (pandemic shutdown)
- 2024: 18,171
First on board the good ship JancisRobinson.com, unpaid, was my husband Nick Lander, who somehow managed to get the gig as restaurant reviewer. We published his reviews for the Financial Times on the site until his retirement from the FT in 2022 and continue to publish his popular reviews exclusively on JancisRobinson.com every Sunday.
Membership supremo and chartered accountant Rachel Shaughnessy was the first to be officially recruited to join the JR ship, in 2004. She converted membership records held in a ring binder to a rather more sophisticated digital system and has been quite exceptionally helpful and efficient when dealing with membership queries, forgotten passwords and much else. More recently we have also been able to benefit from the skills of her husband Lee Shaughnessy.
The first person to join the editorial team was Julia Harding MW at the end of 2005. She came with a brilliant Master of Wine pass and finely honed copy-editing skills. She’s now the lead editor on The Oxford Companion to Wine as well as the maps editor of The World Atlas of Wine, in addition to being a brilliant writer – earlier this year she took home the award for Best Long-Form Wine Communicator in the 67 Pall Mall Awards.
Next, in 2007, came Tamlyn Currin, hired initially for her word-processing skills. Poor thing spent her first few years trying to make sense of my tasting notes before we realised what a brilliant writer and taster she was. We now harness the full range of her abilities, including being the most conscientious book reviewer on the planet, and one of the wine writers most interested in food and cooking.
Richard Hemming joined us in 2008, not as a full-blown member of the team but documenting his experiences as a cellar rat in South Australia and in southern England. He then documented his six-year journey to become a Master of Wine, including bravely viewing his exam results live online. His output today proves just how multi-talented he is, not least in the light of the seven-part podcast he recently created for us, The Jancis Robinson Story.
The next signing, in 2010, was Alder Yarrow as our correspondent on America’s west coast. He is bright as a button and, uniquely, supremely, straddles the worlds of wine and tech. He files an erudite monthly column which usually tackles an apposite American, often California, topic.
Our first regional specialist was Walter Speller. Dutch-born and Italy-based and with sommelier experience in both London and Germany, he has been flying the flag for the best that Italy can offer, and goading those wine producers who fail to meet his high standards, on this website since 2011.
Two years later we added an Australian columnist, the hugely respected Max Allen, who has just been voted Australia’s leading wine communicator, the first time anyone has won this accolade twice.
Covering Spain we had Luis Gutiérrez initially but when he jumped ship to join The Wine Advocate in 2014 we were lucky enough to persuade Ferran Centelles, Ferran Adrià of El Bulli’s wine man, to take over. To judge from the difficulty with which he moves through any wine gathering, ‘Fredi’, as he is known there, is one of Spain’s most popular wine professionals.
Andy Howard MW wrote his first article for us back in 2016 and is just one of many Masters of Wine who have been kind enough to share their expertise with us. They include Tim Jackson MW, a full-time employee of British Airways, and Tom Parker MW of Farr Vintners, both of whom still find time occasionally to write for us.
The first of two revolutionary appointments came in 2018 when Andrew Morris joined us. His deputy editor title hardly does justice to his role ensuring that what we publish makes sense. He was a WSET Diploma graduate with a career editing medical journals and was therefore ideally qualified to keep us on track. He ensures that tasting notes are uploaded in time and correctly, proofs our contributions minutely and masterminds the schedule.
In the summer of 2020 when we were all locked down, the hugely experienced James Lawther MW was persuaded to be our man in Bordeaux (where he lives). The next year, we recruited Dijon resident Matthew Hayes to be our man in Burgundy. We value their input immensely and will soon be publishing Matthew’s reports on the Côte d’Or 2024s he has tasted recently.
Also in 2021 Paula Redes Sidore took over from our German specialist Michael Schmidt, who wished to retire and nominated her as his successor. She, too, lives in the country about which she writes, which is a huge asset, as you will see when reading her articles and wine reviews.
The second revolutionary appointment took place in late 2022 once Tara Q Thomas had finished working her magic on the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine.
In late August 2021, realising that I needed to ensure a long-term future for JancisRobinson.com now that I was in my seventies, I sold it to Recurrent, a US publisher which had many online titles. Not taking ads, and not being American, we were a bit of an anomaly in their portfolio so it was not a perfect partnership. Fast-forward three years and the ex CEO of Recurrent, big wine lover Lance Johnson, acquired us as his only publication and is currently lavishing care on us, backed by an extremely skilled team busy complementing our editorial efforts. He’s currently based in Boulder, Colorado, but has worked in London, Germany and Japan so has a world view.
The first thing Recurrent did was hire the ex editor of Wine Enthusiast to assess our organisation. She found that far too much was my responsibility and that it was high time we had a managing editor. Enter Tara with her 25 years’ experience running the highly respected Wine & Spirits magazine in the US. She has revolutionised my life, leaving me free to concentrate on writing, tasting and travelling – although my hand is still very much on the tiller.
In 2023 we managed to reduce the average age of our full-time editorial team by formally adding Oregon-based Sam Cole-Johnson to the mix, although she had been writing for JancisRobinson.com since 2019 when she entered our 2019 wine writing competition with an article on Portland for wine lovers. She then continued filing revealing reports from her various stints as a cellar rat in Oregon, South Australia and Napa Valley before settling down as our senior editor US, taking over from Elaine Chukan Brown, and creating the much-admired weekly Wine news in 5.
Tara, bless her, is now in charge of commissioning. One of her first moves was to recruit the estimable Dave Broom, one of the world’s foremost authorities on whisky and whiskey, to write regularly on his specialist subject. She has also brought the Eastern European expertise of Caroline Gilby MW to the site as well as that of South America specialist Amanda Barnes MW. Alistair Cooper MW also writes for us; see, for instance, his extensive coverage of the 2024 vintage in the Rhône. Other more recent recruits include veteran American wine writer Patrick Comiskey, English wine specialist Henry Jeffreys (a past winner of a JancisRobinson.com writing competition), and Julian Leidy, who occasionally takes time off his Oxford doctorate in medieval history to write for us and, importantly and skilfully, oversees our annual wine writing competition.
Oliver Coleman and Ben Colvill used to labour strictly behind the scenes, making sense of and then uploading our tasting notes, but each has proved an excellent writer, too, notably on their respective special subjects of Eastern Europe and cheese. (We seem to hire only the highly literate.) Ben doubles as our unusually highly informed social media manager.
More recent additions from the world of wine include Joshua Greene, our US trade manager, who became a firm favourite with the American wine trade when he founded and ran Wine & Spirits magazine, and Stage 2 MW candidate (like Sam Cole-Johnson) Florencia Gomez, who is our digital brand-strategy manager and has played a significant part in our recent redesign.
There was a time when the tag line for JancisRobinson.com was ‘Fine writing on fine wines’ and we have always tried to maintain high standards in how we write as much as on what we write. We hope very much this is appreciated. It is one of the things we like to think sets us apart – as well as our defiant 20-point scale of scoring! For us 18/20 is a very high score and, as wine quality continues to increase, we have ample headroom for even more wines at 19/20 and 20/20. Just 214 wines out of a grand total of nearly 285,000 wine reviews have achieved this perfect score so far. Please note, we write tasting notes for consumers, not producers or retailers. An important distinction.
We have never had an office. Everyone worked from home long before any pandemic mandated this. For many years the only time we got together was at the annual Christmas dinner hosted by Nick and me. At these feasts Ferran always brought or sent a special gift for everyone. One year it was the most magnificent and magnificently obscure magnum of wine found in a hidden corner of a Cariñena cellar. This year, at the dinner on the night preceding our recent celebratory tasting, he brought us all what he called ‘the DRC of Spanish sausages’, the delicious Cal Rovira Catalan fuet that’s apparently sold on allocation. I’m holding one, along with the booklet for the next night’s tasting, in the image at the top of this article.
I should add that nowadays, in our new American-owned era, we communicate much more often – weekly even – and almost always online since we are scattered around the globe and in time zones that span a full 15 hours.
Please don’t hesitate to suggest topics or improvements, or just send your comments. Members can also do this via the forum. And if you are not yet a member, why on earth not?!
Text images courtesy of Will Wong @fino_vino_malts.
