Wine writers celebrate sustainability

This year’s wine writing competition on JancisRobinson.com shone a light on the producers championing sustainable practices any way they can.

This year saw 75 hopefuls enter the competition, which Robinson told us was “a huge success and very heartening”.

Hopeful winners were tasked with writing a piece that celebrated a particular producer anywhere in the world who was going the extra mile to make wine in a way that leaves as little impact on the environment as possible.

Over the course of September, Robinson and her panel of experts managed to whittle down the entrants to a shortlist of 18 writers.

Ultimately though, the panel couldn’t decide on just one winner, and the top prize was awarded to two entries; US-based winemaker Pascal Brooks, who profiled his family’s Brooks Wines estate in Oregon, and Ashley Hausman MW and Martin Reyes MW, who collaborated on a love letter to Napa Valley’s Spottswoode winery.

Hausman herself, who was formerly Education Director at Guildsomm, had planned to work the harvest at cult Napa estate Screaming Eagle this year. She consults for Reyes’ Wine Group, headed up by Martin, who has known Spottswoode for a while. Spottsweoode became Napa’s first organic winery 35 years ago, and you can read the story here.

Brooks, meanwhile, has been based in Paris for the past two years. Despite being just 24, he took over as owner of Brooks Wines in the Willamette Valley. He is spending this autumn as a harvest intern at Domaine Ostertag. His thoughtful account of Oregon’s bountiful natural beauty, and his own estate’s place in it, can be read here.