27 April 2023 A reminder that we are now accepting submissions for our annual wine writing competition. We’re very much looking forward to hearing about your favourite wine person. Note that, in light of the rise of AI, we have added a rule that the article must be your own work, without AI aid.
28 March 2023 It’s time for our annual wine writing competition (WWC)!
This year we thought we would have fun with the theme of our 2023 wine writing competition, after three years in which entrants had to undertake considerable research for our themes of sustainability (2020), old vines (2021) and regeneration (2022). It was amazing to us that we received a total of nearly 300 entries for these last three extremely challenging subjects but we thought it was time for a more free-flow topic. So here it is:
My favourite wine person
This could be a wine merchant, producer, sommelier, educator, media person, drinking buddy, parent or anyone with whom you have a wine connection.
Then we came up with the idea of allowing you to submit your own portrait of that person, whether a photograph or a digital version of a drawing or even a painting or collage.
The writing and images will be judged separately, so we’ll have two main prizes: one for the winning article and one for the winning portrait.
This year’s competition is being run in conjunction with publishers Académie du Vin Library, founded by the late Steven Spurrier and responsible for many of the books Tam has reviewed most favourably. The winner of the top prize for writing will receive a copy of every one of the 20 books so far published by them, and their managing director Hermione Ireland and talented editorial director Susan Keevil will join our judging panel.
Chief judge of the portraits will be photographer Jon Wyand, who has photographed about 500 wine producers in his time and has so kindly provided JancisRobinson.com with many of these portraits, especially those taken in Burgundy, his specialist region. The winner of the top prize for an image in this year’s competition will receive a signed copy of his sumptuous book 4 Seasons in the Côte Chalonnaise (Bamboo Édition, 2019), reviewed so enthusiastically by Tam here, as well as a tutorial (possibly online) from Jon if desired.
In addition to the winners decided upon by our judging panels, as usual you the reader will have a chance to vote on your favourites from our two shortlists, one for the articles and one for the portraits.
We will decide on prizes for runners-up when we see how many there are, but all winners and runners-up will be presented with a year’s free membership of JancisRobinson.com for themselves or for them to give as a gift.
Timing this year is a little in advance of previous years. Deadline is midnight GMT on Wednesday 31 May 2023 to give us time to decide which of these entries we would like to publish and to get them ready for publication in July and August. We will also decide on a shortlist to be published at the end of August so that you can vote in early September before we finally announce the winners later in September.
Long-standing visitors to JancisRobinson.com may remember that we made an e-book called My First Crush out of our favourites in the 2018 competition dedicated to ‘the seminal wine or wine experience that lit the wine flame for you’ (reflected in a lively current thread on our Members’ forum entitled ‘Your first “wow” wine’). The Académie du Vin Library is particularly keen to discover new wine writers and it’s possible that they will be so inspired by some of the entries in this year’s competition that they will publish them on their blog Vinosity or even assemble them into an e-book. So your entry may end up having a longer life than simply this July and August on JancisRobinson.com. And it could even signal the start of a career as a wine writer as it has done for some of our previous winners.
Rules of the competition
- Your article can be anything between 500 and 2,000 words long and should not have been published previously, nor submitted for publication anywhere other than JancisRobinson.com.
- It must be your own work, written without the aid of AI.
- It should be accompanied by ONE copyright-free image of the subject of your article in JPG, JPEG, GIF or PNG format that we may publish.
- Any image must be created by you and be the same landscape format we use for the main image in all our articles – aspect ratio 7:4 with a minimum width of 1,275 pixels. It must be captioned and it must be your own work.
- If you prefer not to submit an image, we reserve the right to illustrate your article with an image of our choosing.
- We will not accept entries of images only; this is first and foremost a writing competition.
- Your entry should be sent in a Word document attached to an email, along with your image. Please note that no other formats can be accepted.
- Include a brief bio/description of yourself at the top of your entry, in the Word document itself.
- Send your entry to WWC@jancisrobinson.com with 'WWC23' followed by your name and then that of your favourite wine person in the Subject line.
- The deadline for entries is midnight GMT Wednesday 31 May 2023.
- By submitting your entry you grant publication rights to both JancisRobinson.com and Académie du Vin Library.
- Académie du Vin Library would like to send you their newsletter. Please indicate at the top of your entry if you would rather this didn’t happen.
- The entry can be about someone involved with something in which you have a commercial interest, but you must declare this.
We will not accept entries after 31 May 2023 and we intend to publish the best entries in July and August, announcing the winner(s) in September.
We very much look forward to reading what you have to say about whom, and discovering what they look like.
Image: Vectorig via Getty Images.
