The rules and regs of this summer's opportunity to show off your writing skills.
As promised last week when we published the result of our poll about another writing competition, we hereby give details of our idea for 2019. We know that visitors to JancisRobinson.com are based all over the world, and all of you have a keen interest in wine. We know from our Members' travel forum that there is a wealth of local knowledge that could usefully be shared with other wine lovers. So we thought it would be interesting to ask competitors to submit a guide for wine lovers to a particular place, a bit like a condensed version of our popular London for wine lovers.
The extent of the area covered can vary from a country or city right down to a village or even a single establishment if you really run out of alternative options – but I think the single establishment will probably have to be pretty special for the entry to be useful enough to be shortlisted.
Mindful of how long our London guide is, we are asking that all entries for this competition are no longer than 1,500 words, and entries can be as short as 500 words. You are welcome to present the information as you see fit. Bullet points may be helpful in some cases if there is a lot of information to get across. But some or all of the entry should be prose as we'd like to have an idea of how well you express yourself. The key is to provide fellow wine enthusiasts with useful and entertaining information.
The closing date for entries is 31 July 2019 and we ask that entries are accompanied by at least one landscape-shaped, copyright-free image that is relevant to the words. Do be sure to let us know your name and the place you are describing.
We ask that you spell out any connections you may have with what you write about. You don’t need to mention the fact that you are friends with the owner of your favourite wine bar, for instance, but we don't want anyone to write about a place in which they have a commercial interest.
We will publish those entries we think will interest visitors to JancisRobinson.com but in accordance with the wishes of the majority of those who responded to our poll, we will not feature them on our home page. Instead we will publish a continually updated guide to them so that you can find them easily.
We reserve the right to publish shortlisted entries on the home page eventually, however, and will try to choose and announce the winner some time before the end of September. And in the long term we will try to present the most useful information in a logical, accessible format so that it adds to the richness of helpful insider information that wine lovers can find here. If you object to this, then it's probably best not to enter.
I was updating The story of JancisRobinson.com recently and it reminded me that the winner of our first competition, in which we asked for restaurant reviews, has since become a professional drinks writer. See Tam's review of Henry Jeffreys' 2017 book Empire of Booze. Stardom (and/or penury) may await...
The winner will receive a handsome box of six Jancis Robinson wine glasses worth £200, a special glass-polishing cloth (with instructions) plus a young-wine decanter, also in a smart box of course, worth £100. Up to you what you put in them...
So, in summary:
- a 500- to 1,500-word guide for wine lovers to a particular place
- to be submitted as a Word document attached to an email sent to editorial@jancisrobinson.com by 31 July (please do not send the text within the email)
- make sure you include your full name and the subject in both the email and the Word document
- send at least one relevant landscape-shaped, copyright-free image at least 600 pixels wide in JPG or PNG format, also attached to the email.