31 Aug 2023

WWC23 – article shortlist

2023 writing competition

Now that all the entries to our 2023 wine writing competition selected for publication have been published, we're able to share our shortlists with you. See the image shortlist, also published today. See our competition guide for a full overview of the competition and list of all published entries.

Our panel of judges has completed the quite challenging task of narrowing down their favourite written entries to the shortlist of 20 below. It is now up to you to vote for your favourite entries. See photographer Jon Wyand's shortlist for the visual section of our competition and get voting on each section HERE, by 8 am UK time on Monday 11 September, please. We plan to announce the Judges' and Readers' winners and runners-up in each section on Tuesday 12 September.

The judges – the JancisRobinson.com team was assisted by Hermione Ireland and Susan Keevil from our partner in the competition, the Académie du Vin Library – read anonymised entries to avoid being influenced by the identities or professions of the writers. We each marked every entry out of 10 and came up with the list below of the 20 entries with the highest total scores.

The shortlisted authors are based in nine countries, from Singapore to South Africa and the Netherlands to Malaysia. Several are professional writers, both on wine and on other topics. Many are involved in the wine trade, as sommeliers, importers or educators. Quite a few, however, are neither professional writers nor directly involved in the wine industry: there's a marketing professor, an aspiring novelist, an IT analyst, a digital marketer at Nike, a farmer and two actors. Regardless of their disparate countries of residence and occupations, what unites these writers is their love of wine and their wish to share stories of their favourite wine people.

Their submissions range from pieces on famous wine personalities such as Oz Clarke to stories about friends, parents, partners, siblings and even fictive personalities. Perhaps the winner will be Master Sommelier Rebecca Fineman's entry on her husband, fellow MS Chris Gaither. Or it might be Lebanese wine writer Farrah Berrou's story about moving to Los Angeles and encountering Auntie Yinka, her favourite customer in the wine shop where she worked. There's Franconian farmer and winemaker Emily Campeau's piece about English vintner Sophie Evans, and wine importer Athena Bochanis' submission on Jász Laci, a winemaker in Hungary's Somló.

Aspiring winemaker Jimmy Boldt's essay on Leo Erazo's resilience in the face of wildfires in Itata is made even more poignant by the recent, devastating fires that have raged in Maui, Canada, Greece and elsewhere. Glaswegian actor and wine lover Anna Larkin writes about her father, John, while South African wine writer Emile Joubert and English actor Richard Avery write about their respective mothers, Maureen and Sarah. Writer Erica Landis and wine educator and writer Melanie Webber have both submitted entries on how their favourite wine people helped them recover in the wake of losing a loved one. These are all great reads, and selecting one overall favourite will be a challenge. But you may vote only once!

The Académie du Vin Library is kindly providing the prizes for the winners of both the Readers' and Judges' awards: a complete set of their 20 published books. We also have copies of their forthcoming book On Burgundy to give away, plus two copies of the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine to be published on 14 September. Two of the shortlisted entrants, Emily Campeau and Anna Larkin, have also been included in our image shortlist, so one of them might just end up with the Académie's 20 books plus Jon Wyand's beautifully shot 4 Seasons in the Côte Chalonnaise (also very kindly provided by the Académie) and his tutorial.

To determine the lucky winners of these prizes, vote HERE by 8 am UK time on Monday 11 September. The 20 shortlisted written entries are listed below in alphabetical order of the authors' surnames.