So, my six weeks' self-imposed absence from running this site is now over. As I explained in A new summer regime at JR.com, I just had to find a solid stretch of time to concentrate on the great new grapes book by Julia, José Vouillamoz and I that will be published in Sep 2012. I am mightily relieved to report that I have (just) met the deadline and Julia is now collating all the material for our publishers Allen Lane (Penguin's leading non-fiction imprint) to work on over the next 12 months. There are nearly half a million words, masses of charts and diagrams and all sorts of layout decisions to be made, not to mention copy editing, indexing and so on. But we are all very excited about the book.
I feel so fortunate to have been able to leave you in the capable hands of Julia Harding MW, Tamlyn Currin and Richard Hemming as I crouched over the grape text and would like to thank them for looking after the site so superbly. I'm also very grateful to the many others who contributed such interesting articles while I was off the job – not least Bartholomew Broadbent, whose article on alcohol engendered one of the most viewed and commented-upon threads on our forum – even if at times the intensity of discourse threatened our forum's reputation for courteousness. Ahem.
But, I have to say that I am delighted to be back. It was very difficult to force myself not to spend too much time on the site and interfering... Please note that I did a lot of wine tasting in the evenings, often adding my tasting notes to our tasting notes database – which by now contains almost 58,000 tasting notes. Members of our Purple pages can see my many recent additions of standalone wine reviews (those that are not part of published tasting articles) by going to our tasting notes search and inserting suitably recent dates into the Date of publication fields at the bottom of the black panel on the right.
Thank you all for sticking with JancisRobinson.com over the last six weeks, and please don't hesitate to offer any suggestions about what you would like to see more of in the next few months, or any general improvements. See the comments box below.