Julian Leidy writes Phew! It has been a wild couple weeks at JancisRobinson.com. By the deadline on 31 May, we received a whopping 134 entries to this year’s wine writing competition, WWC23. That is more than twice the number of submissions we received for our 2022 writing competition on regeneration, and it almost takes the record for most submissions (currently held by the 2021 competition, on old vines, with 136 entries). Entrants living in 21 countries, as diverse as Malaysia, Slovakia, New Zealand and Lebanon, have sent in profiles of their favourite wine people.
We are tremendously grateful to everyone who took the time to enter the competition. It never ceases to amaze us that there are so many talented wine writers out there. Indeed, one of the exceptional things about this year’s competition is that so many of the entrants come from outside the wine industry. We have heard from winemakers, wine educators, wine writers, importers, sommeliers and wine scientists. However, this year’s entrants also include a vicar, an archaeologist, a wedding planner, a mechanical engineer, an anaesthetist and many others from varied fields.
One of our hopes for this year’s competition was that its theme, an account entitled ‘My favourite wine person’, would allow flexibility and creativity, and that has certainly been the case. We have received entries written in verse as well as prose, written as dialogues and as letters from the future. There are entries about parents, spouses, friends, winemakers, vineyard workers, famous wine personalities, Enlightenment philosophers and more. We have received entries that will make you laugh out loud and others that will almost move you to tears; stories of loss, love, friendship, admiration, learning and struggle.
The submissions to the visual element of the competition have been no less innovative. Many of the entries are accompanied by masterful photographs, whimsical collages, handmade drawings and original paintings. Our visual judge, wine specialist photographer Jon Wyand, is going to have his work cut out.
As the judging process of carefully anonymised entries gets underway with representatives from the Académie du Vin Library, who are kindly donating a prize of every book they have published to the overall winner, we have no doubt that we will find many superb entries to publish throughout July and August, and we are confident that this will be one of our best WWCs yet! So thank you to all those who submitted entries and made this competition possible. You are our favourite wine people!
As for everyone else, look out for this year’s best entries and get ready to vote for your favourite once they are all published.
Image: Vectorig via Getty Images.
