All of us hope that you have celebrated the turn of the calendar year exactly as you wished – whether with a surfeit of the finest wines or in prolonged communion with the inside of your eyelids.
Last year was a great one for JancisRobinson.com, with more visitors and more members of our Purple Pages than ever before – from all over the world – and
such admirable additions to the team as columnist Alex Hunt MW, who alternates each month with the admirable Alder Yarrow of Vinography.com in San Francisco. We also invested in a much-improved version of the site on hand-held hardware, instituted a free international events diary (see right) where anyone can add details of the wine-related consumer events they are planning, anywhere in the world. We continued to bring you wine news, often before anyone else, and broke the 75,000 barrier with our total tally of tasting notes.
Richard Hemming had a great year in that he not only wed the delightful Kath but also passed the second half of his Master of Wine exams. His Diary of an MW student is already in its 45th episode. Keep at that dissertation, Richard!
It was a year of huge achievement for the estimable Julia Harding MW, most senior member of Team Jancis other than me, because she saw her four years of hard labour turn into the massive book Wine Grapes – A complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties including their origins and flavours, co-authored by me and Swiss grape geneticist José Vouillamoz. We are delighted and humbled by the reviews, and to judge from the hundreds of comments about it on Twitter, an amazing number of people have been thrilled to receive it as a present over the past few weeks.
Our New Year's present to you, faithful visitor to JancisRobinson.com, is to at long last free you from the tyranny of seeing a sticky article pushing Wine Grapes down your metaphorical throat at the top of our home page. I'm sure you will breathe a huge sigh of relief not to see that massive tome clogging up our list of Latest articles.
For Nick and me and our families 2012 was something of an annus horribilis and we are very pleased to have it behind us. We wish you and yours a thoroughly happy, healthy and successful 2013.