Very, very best wishes for 2007! Seems like only yesterday I was writing the same for 2001, admittedly only a few weeks after this site took its first few shaky steps in cyberspace.
I hope you appreciated last week's rather special content, most of it the work of others as explained here, and that in general you enjoy www.jancisrobinson.com at least half as much as I do. Do please keep sending feedback, whether directly to Subscriptions, General Enquiries or Site Problems via the Contact button at the bottom of every page, or by adding comments to specific articles or, best of all, via the extremely useful and erudite members’ forum. Very many thanks to all of you who contribute, and also to the many thousands from around the world who seem to observe without comment but validate the site’s existence. Please don’t be inhibited by a less-than-perfect grasp of English. We love to hear from you, even if (especially if) it is simply to point out how the site can be improved.
Speaking of which, we have many improvements in view. The Subhub team who run this site technically have been short of manpower recently but this, I am assured, is set to improve dramatically with the arrival of Carey Hiles just as soon as the working New Year starts in Wales (I am hoping at least a day earlier than in Scotland). Top of my wish list is a dramatic improvement in the general search function which is currently, ahem, idiosyncratic. Navigating our way round the thousands of articles on this site would be made infinitely easier if the search were more targeted and refined. Another thing that would make our lives easier is a more refined way of listing related articles at the bottom of each new one and I hope very much that this will be in place before too long. Another of my requests is to enlarge the Add a comment box at the bottom of some articles from its current letterbox size and to allow us to put bold, italics and hyperlinks in those comments. We also plan to reinstate the Send to a friend facility so that you can share the material here more easily. And I also know that the Subhub team have some exciting plans for making the members’ forum more sophisticated.
But that’s enough about site minutiae. What about the reason we’re all here: wine? Much more interesting. Here are my suggested New Year resolutions, packaged into bite-sized morsels for tabloid-eezee reference:
- Remember that in Europe 2006 is generally not nearly as promising as 2005 so don’t stint yourself when laying in those 2005s.
- Remember to justify the additional expense by explaining that you’re spending two years’ budget on one year.
- Don’t be too snooty about price. It doesn’t have to be a first growth or Grand Cru burgundy, and especially not a Brunello, Barolo or Gran Reserva. Remember that there are some stunning wines in the mid price bracket. See Trade up (or down?) but not too far.
- Since the world’s winemakers are trying so, so hard to please you, resolve to give a wine style you think you don’t like another chance. Are you so sure that all white Rhône is flabby? All German wine sweet? All sweet wine sickly? All Spanish red oaky? All Australian red over-the-top? All old bordeaux over the hill? Etc etc
Our continually strengthened team, including Julia Harding MW in the UK and the redoutable Linda Murphy in California have every intention of serving you even better in 2007 – not least because I am hoping that Julia will have more time to share her wisdom and excellent tasting notes with us all when her (and my) commitments on the forthcoming sixth edition of the World Atlas of Wine (to be published in Oct 2007 as explained here) become rather less onerous.
And finally, with both the Atlas and the New Year in mind, many, many congratulations to my gifted co-author and onlie begetter of this great work Hugh Johnson who was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the New Year's honours list just announced "for services to winemaking and horticulture". Richly deserved.