We'd love to know what you think of the idea of another writing competition.
Last August and September we ran a writing competition whereby people sent in their accounts of how they fell in love with wine. It was extremely popular with competitors. We received almost 200 entries and judged more than 100 of them interesting enough to publish, which meant that at a certain point we were publishing two a day.
This meant that the competition rather dominated the site for a while and, while some readers loved the very personal stories told, some other regular visitors were not best pleased.
Last year’s competition was by no means the first we have held. It just happened to be the most popular of our series of writing competitions such as this Indie writing competition designed to identify favourite independent wine merchants around the world. (The winner, incidentally, was Chambers Street Wines in Manhattan, with whom Walter and I have since held several wine tastings in New York.)
We are thinking of organising another writing competition, one that should genuinely add to the amount of useful information on this site. Our idea is to ask entrants to contribute a description of what a particular place has to offer wine lovers – a sort of abbreviated version of our recent London for wine lovers 2019. It could be a place as small as a village or as big as a region, but we suggest limiting the length of the submission, as last time, to between 250 and 1,000 words. (This time entries don’t have to be prose; they could be bullet points or even lists, so long as they are as informative as possible.)
Before deciding whether to hold this competition, however, we’d like to gauge likely reactions to it and would be grateful if you would take part in this very brief poll.