Our annual wine writing competition is open for entries!
It’s our favourite time of the year, when we welcome your contributions to our annual wine writing competition. For the last eight years, this has been a chance for us to hear about the wine world from your point of view, to hear what interests you, inspires you, makes wine relevant in your life.
The topics have been quite varied, from travel-focused stories to more academic topics such as sustainability, regeneration and old vines. Our favourites, however, have tended to be the topics that allow us to get to know you, the reader, better, such as last year’s competition, focused on your favourite wine person, or, in 2018, your seminal wine experience.
So this year we’ve chosen a theme in a similar vein – a theme that was actually suggested by one of you in our follow-up survey. (Thank you!) The theme of our 2024 wine writing competition (WWC24) is:
The wine moment I’ll never forget
This moment could be a positive or a negative one; it could be one that changed your life, or just the course of your dinner. Anyone can enter; we ask only that the essay run to 500–1,000 words, and that you disclose any commercial ties to the subject. Full rules are printed below.
What’s in it for you, dear reader? For one, we will publish the top essays on our site, free for all to enjoy. The essays will also be judged by us with industry experts as well as by readers, and winners of the judges’ prize and the readers’ prize will each receive a selection of 20 books from the extensive and esteemed portfolio of the Académie du Vin Library, our generous partner in the wine writing competition. They will also receive six of the hand-made, dishwasher-proof wine glasses created by Jancis’s collaboration with designer extraordinaire Richard Brendon.
The runner-up in each category will receive copies of AVL’s Wine Confident and Wines of the Loire as well as a set of two of Jancis’s wine glasses, while the highly commended essayists in each category will receive On Tuscany.
All winners and runners-up will be also receive a free annual membership of JancisRobinson.com for themselves or for them to give as a gift.
Deadline is midnight GMT on Monday 17 June 2024 to give us time to review all the entries and choose which ones to publish 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’. The Académie du Vin Library is, like us, 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 run in length from 500 to 1,000 words 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.
- We ask that you include one copyright-free landscape-format image to illustrate your article. Suitable formats are JPG, JPEG, GIF or PNG with an aspect ratio of 7:4 with a minimum width of 1,275 pixels. Please include a caption and credit.
- If you prefer not to submit an image, we will illustrate your article with an image of our choosing.
- Please send your entry in a Word document attached to an email, along with your image. No other formats will 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 ‘WWC24’ followed by your name and the title of your piece in the subject line.
- Entries must be received by midnight GMT on Monday 17 June 2024.
- 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 their newsletter to you. Please indicate at the top of your entry if you would rather this didn’t happen.
- The entry can be about something in which you have a commercial interest, but you must declare this.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at WWC@jancisrobinson.com.
We very much look forward to reading your stories!
Image by Constantine Johnny via Getty Images.