Our second guide to navigating and getting the most out of JancisRobinson.com. See Part 1 for the introductory overview.
Navigating the plethora of articles
JancisRobinson.com publishes new articles, written by members of our 17-strong team, six days a week, Monday to Saturday, at least two articles a day. The latest articles show up on the home page, so they are easy enough to find. However, you’ll get a fuller view of what has been recently published by going directly to the Articles search page – click the Articles link top left on the purple navigation menu at the top of any page.
Here the 15 most recently published articles are displayed and can easily be accessed by clicking on the thumbnails.
There is also a page-numbered navigation bar at the foot of the page, for you to browse articles backwards in time, page by page, 15 per page.
Searching for articles
With more than 14,500 articles in our archives, it’s a pretty good bet that whatever you’re curious about we’ve covered at one time or another. It’s possible to search for articles that include the content you are looking for via the little magnifying glass tucked into the top right corner of the website and selecting Articles only from the drop-down menu.
Finding exactly the articles you are looking for
While this magnifying-glass search can be useful, you will get better results by going straight to the Articles search page and using the filters and tools we’ve provided there, designed to help you find articles on precisely the topics you are looking for.
At the top of this page is a free-text search box, and you can type whatever you’re looking for in there. Please note: while it is not case or accent sensitive, this search is not as smart as Google – if you misspell a word, you will not get the results you are looking for.
On the left sidebar of the Articles page, there are three drop-down filters: Authors, Category, Tag. There are also two date fields: Start date; End date. The best way to find something specific is by using a combination of the free-text field and the filters to narrow the results. Some useful tips:
- The free-text keyword field is the easiest, quickest way to unearth any articles which mention your search term.
- The results are displayed with the most recently published article first, but you can change this order to ‘Most relevant’ by clicking on the re-sort option at the top right – this will prioritise the articles which either include your search term(s) in the title or have the highest number of mentions of your search terms.
- If your search returns many articles, you can narrow the results by using the filters on the left:
- You can select by tag, eg Burgundy.
- You can select a category of article, eg Wines of the Week.
- You can choose articles written by a specific author.
- You can filter by the date the article was published, eg in the last 12 months.
- The Tag filter is one of the most useful ways to narrow down your results.
- Start typing a word in the Tag search box, and if there is a tag for it, it will appear – you simply need to select the tag from the drop-down options (see screenshot below).
- You can choose more than one tag.
- The tags you have selected are displayed above the search results. From there, you can quickly de-select a tag by clicking on the x.
- We have 17 categories of articles, but the most used ones are:
- Tasting articles – these articles include themed collections of tasting notes.
- Wines of the week – every Friday, a member of the team chooses a wine that we think is great value, tastes delicious, has an interesting story, and is available in at least the US and UK, often in other countries as well.
- Inside information – this is ‘inner circle’ stuff: insider insights, expert knowledge and advice that you won’t find elsewhere.
- Don’t quote me – opinion pieces and the occasional juicy bit of gossip.
- Nick on restaurants – food critic Nick Lander’s restaurant reviews and observations on the world of hospitality and food.
- Alder on America and Max on Oz are columns from our on-the-ground specialists Alder Yarrow and Max Allen covering up-to-date news, reports, insights and analysis from those continents.
- Drinks not wine and Travel tips take a look at the world beyond wine.
- Free for all is a smorgasbord of articles which don’t require a subscription to read, and which include Jancis’s weekly FT column, our annual wine writing competition*, Throwback Thursday**, obituaries and site/team news, among other things.
As an example, I’d love to know what Australian wines Jancis has chosen as Wine of the Week – selecting Jancis in the Authors filter, Wines of the Week in the Categories filter, and Australia in the Tags filter gives me the results I’m looking for.
NB Although you can clear individual filters using the little x beside each one, the ‘clear filters’ button does not always do its job properly (we’re working on it …) – so if you want to start a brand-new search, just hit the Articles link in the top navigation menu and you can start searching again with a clean slate.
*Our annual wine writing competition, or WWC, as we have got into the habit of calling it, runs every summer. We set a different topic each year, and anyone can enter. We select anything from 30 to 100 entries to publish on the website, in front of the paywall so they are free for everyone to read, and then from that selection, we choose a shortlist which goes to both a public vote and a judges’ vote. The winner and runners up receive pre-announced prizes, and many of our previous winners have gone on to become well-respected wine writers. You can read about our writing competitions and all the entries by searching on the tags Wine writing or more specifically ‘XXXX writing competition’, where XXXX is the year it ran, eg 2021 writing competition.
**Throwback Thursday is our long-running tradition of republishing an article from the archives every Thursday and making it free for all to read. Type ‘throwback thursday’ into the free-text search box.
Image credit: Larry Washburn/fStop via Getty Images.