Navigating a site that offers thousands of articles, a quarter of a million wine reviews, a world of maps, and an encyclopaedia of wine knowledge can be daunting when you’re new to it. But even some of our long-term members have yet to discover all the gems that JancisRobinson.com offers.
After numerous emails from readers over the years asking for help and tips, we’re going to be publishing a series of guides to the website, to help you get the most out of it. This is what we have planned; if you’d like to see other things covered, please let us know!
Part 1: Keeping up with the latest; free content; just for our Members; search 101
Part 2: Searching articles
Part 3: Finding tasting notes
Part 4: Exploring maps and the online Oxford Companion to Wine
Part 5: Taking advantage of the Forum; contacting us; FAQs
For today, we’ll start with Part 1, as there’s plenty here to keep you busy ...
Keeping up with the latest
Your first step: read our weekly newsletter, included in your membership. In this free Friday missive, Jancis will alert you to all the articles published in the preceding week and will keep you abreast of wine news around the globe, trends, vintage reports, new scientific insights and discoveries as well as the most recent wine reviews.
Our articles, written by genuinely passionate, highly intelligent and experienced experts, are published six days a week. And it is all brand-new content and ad-free; we do not take sponsored articles, and we reprint older articles only on Throwback Thursday, when we highlight an article from the archives which has current relevance. You can access articles via the home page or via our articles section – the most recent entries are always at the top.
Free content
Membership affords readers full access to the site, but every visitor to JancisRobinson.com can access a wealth of top-quality, expert-written free content.
For instance, the Learn hub contains a wealth of valuable free information. Does wine jargon baffle or even annoy you? We have a guide to help you talk about wine with confidence or cut through the waffle. Want tips on food pairing and serving wine? Do you want to know about specific vintages in your favourite wine regions? Take a look at our vintage guides for every key wine region in the world.
If you’re looking for wine merchants, we have one of the most comprehensive, global directories in the world, compiled carefully through personal recommendations and professional experience. Are you thinking of buying from auction, or auctioning your own collection, or looking for professional wine storage? We have hand-picked directories of best-in-class companies in auction and storage all around the globe.
If you want to learn about wine, we have one of the most comprehensive international directories of wine courses in the world, from fun two-hour masterclasses to degree-level study. If you’re keen to taste wines, our wine-events calendar gives you opportunities to sign up for a diversity of walk-around tastings, dinners and other wine-related events happening in the months to come.
Want to buy a great bottle of wine but stuck for inspiration? Check in on Fridays for our wine of the week – a wine which tastes delicious, is great value for money and comes with a cracking story. And every Thursday we republish a little gem from the archives, for free, just for you.
If you’re looking for other free articles, choose the ‘Free for all’ category from the drop-down filter menu on the left side of the Articles section. These now include podcasts – a new series of conversations about wine which we’re hoping to further develop. You can also find out more about books that Jancis and her team have written or edited, or the perfect wine glasses, and where to buy them.
Just for our Members
Members of the site also have at their fingertips:
- Maps – The World Atlas of Wine, 8th edition, is quite literally the most comprehensive, detailed and accurate set of global wine maps, here in printable and downloadable form (within copyright limitations).
- The Oxford Companion to Wine – the world’s single most reliable, accurate, well-researched encyclopaedia of wine, here in fully searchable digital mode.
- Articles – thousands of searchable articles on every conceivable subject pertaining to wine written by some of the world’s leading wine experts.
- Tasting notes – nearly a quarter of a million reviews of wines from all corners of the globe, with scores, background notes and recommended drinking dates.
- Forum – access to the collective knowledge of our lively and well-informed Members’ forum.
Search 101
The most generic ‘broadcast’ way to search for information is via the little magnifying glass tucked into the top right corner of the website.
This gives you the option to plug in a free-text keyword or phrase and search, by default, the tasting notes. It also gives you the option to search ‘everything else’ – ie all our articles, the Learn section and The Oxford Companion to Wine (OCW) – or to be more specific and search only within articles, or only within the OCW.
However, there are several ways to can search for something specific.
Example 1: To learn more about Priorat, you could
- Search for Spain and Spanish subregions in the free Learn section.
- Look it up in the OCW by keying in ‘priorat’ as a search term on the OCW search page (I counted 24 entries referencing the region).
- Search The World Atlas of Wine for the map of Priorat under Spain.
- Go to Articles via the top horizontal menu bar and type ‘priorat’ into the free-text keyword search field on the left.
- Or, staying in Articles, type and select ‘priorat’ from the drop-down filter menu on the left column of the page.
- You could also look for all our Priorat tasting notes by going to Tasting notes (top horizontal menu), and then filter the results either by typing ‘priorat’ into the top free-text, keyword search field in the left column, or by typing in and selecting ‘priorat’ from the All appellations drop-down filter menu in the same left column. From this point you could further narrow the results down by score, producer, vintage, date tasted, author etc by choosing other filter options.
Example 2: To find out more about Burgundy vintage 2002, you could
- Click on Articles (top menu bar), go to the Tag filter in the left column, click on the down arrow and type in ‘burgundy 2002’. When it appears in the dropdown menu, select it. That will return three articles specifically on 2002 burgundies.
- Click on Tasting notes (top menu bar), go to the filters column on the left side, type in ‘burgundy’ in the top free-text search box, then find the filter box called All vintages, click on the down arrow and scroll down to find 2002 in the dropdown menu. Select it. From there you could narrow your search to look at how reds fared v whites, or which crus scored highest or lowest.
- Go to the Vintages section of Learn, and choose either red burgundy or white burgundy to see what our verdict is on the 2002 vintage.
If you’d like to find out more about our team members, the Jancis Robinson story and our ethics, along with some very useful answers to FAQs, just head to the footer of any page.
Image credit: Larry Washburn/fStop via Getty Images.