Jancis Robinson
Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as ‘the greatest living wine writer’, Jancis Robinson has also been voted the world’s most influential wine critic in various polls in the US, France and internationally – although she describes herself as a wine writer rather than a wine critic. She founded JancisRobinson.com in 2000. The award-winning, subscription-only wine website, of which she is editor in chief and main contributor, is now owned by Eisenhower Flagstaff. She has been wine correspondent for the Financial Times since 1989 and writes for this global publication and ft.com every Saturday.
She is founder-editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine, co-author since 2001 with Hugh Johnson of The World Atlas of Wine (five million copies sold in 16 languages) and co-author of Wine Grapes, each of these books recognised as a standard reference worldwide. The 24-Hour Wine Expert (2017) is a slim paperback guide to the practical essentials of wine.
Winner of the top award in the Wine & Spirit Education Trust Diploma exams in 1978, in 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to pass the rigorous Master of Wine exams. In 2003 she was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen, on whose cellar she advised from 2004. She continues to be a member of the Royal Household Wine Committee.
In one week in April 2016 she was presented with France’s Officier du Mérite Agricole, the German VDP’s highest honour and, in the US, her fourth James Beard Award. She now has six, including being the only wine writer elevated to the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame.
In 2018 she launched her own hand-made, dishwasher-friendly, ideal wine glass.
In 2021 she became a trustee of the Gérard Basset Foundation designed to increase diversity and inclusion in the worlds of wine, spirits and hospitality though education, and in 2025 became Patron of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, having campaigned for sustainability issues since 2006. She is also a patron of The Drinks Trust.
She has also been awarded two Lifetime Achievement Awards – once from the IWSC in 2018 and another from the Institute of Masters of Wine in 2024 – and is an Honorary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford.
See Jancis Robinson – the long version for more detail.
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