Jancis Robinson

Jancis Robinson is the premier English wine writer. She is amazingly pedigreed (OBE and Master of Wine), a media personality (including The Wine Programme), has a prodigious output of books (including the Oxford Companion to Wine, the World Atlas of Wine), and articles (Financial Times). Recently she has been focusing on her ‘purple prose’ website (www.jancisrobinson.com). The UK is more mature about wine investing and some would say wine appreciation in general. Robinson is the key face of that sophistication.

Robinson has decried wine speculation claiming that it pushes the top wines out of the reach of the general population. However, she also gives the wine reading public, what they want which is are ratings. She uses a different scoring system from 10 to 20, as do most of the other British wine writers, but the elements are the same. Very roughly you can achieve a comparison, by multiplying by five – it appears that the raters keep this in mind as the scoring seems proportional.

Robinson (and other British wine writers) and Parker have been portrayed in the press as often at odds with each other. The key claim is that Parker has pushed the wine world to develop extracted wines; ‘fruit-bombs’ which are drinkable with little extra cellaring. The characterization is that the British writers feel that his approach excludes great numbers of excellent, more subtle wines (including most of Burgundy) and that they are jealous of his undisputed power. This rift is mainly highlighted to sell magazines, but like any controversial story has elements of truth.

For Winevestors we do not care about the gossip about how the Winefluencers interact. Jancis Robinson is another very influential critic who moves the price of a wine by her score and her description. Her word is more avidly followed in the UK, but any US Winevestor will benefit from understanding her take on a particular wine. This is for two reasons: she is very insightful and just like the broader stock market there is a close correlation between the US and the UK wine markets.