Tom Cannavan - Wine-Pages
Wine writer Tom Cannavan publishes wine-pages.com and hosts fabulous Zoom tastings at online-tastings.co.uk.
Tom is a true pioneer of wine on the Internet, launching wine-pages.com back in 1995. Having previously picked up awards including Louis Roederer International Online Wine Writer of the Year and the Portuguese wine industry’s award as Wine Journalist of the Year, the latest trophy on his shelf is the big one: International Wine Communicator of the Year. Tom is also a popular broadcaster on TV and radio.
Having graduated from Glasgow School of Art, Tom had a spell as a professional musician, and still plays with his band Restricted Code. He then began a career as a teacher, but his passion for wine burned brightly and he began writing for magazines and newspapers in the early 1990s. By 2002 he had made the switch to full-time wine writer, broadcaster, and wine judge.
Richard Juhlin - The Champagne Club
THE CHAMPAGNE EXPERT Richard Juhlin is the world’s number one champagne expert, most famous for his skills in blind tasting. Since 1998 he has held the world record for most champagne ever tasted, having tasted more than 14,000+ different unique champagnes in his lifetime.
AWARDS & ACCOLADES In 2013 Juhlin was awarded the Légion d’honneur by the former French President François Hollande. His additional awards include the Chevalier d’Arc in 1997 and the Mérite agricole from the French Ministry of Agriculture in 2002, and in 2003 at the annual Spectacle du Monde tasting in Paris he correctly identified 43 out of 50 champagnes. Juhlin is also credited with arranging one of the greatest champagne tastings ever held, a 1999 Stockholm Millennium tasting event spotlighting 150 of the best champagnes ever made. In 2021 Richard Juhlin got the coronation as ‘Wine Author of the Year’, which pays tribute to a completely unique author as a wine writer. At the International World Cuisine Week in Paris, Richard was the outstanding wine book author star of the year with ‘Champagne Magnum Opus’.
THE BOOKS Juhlin is the author of nine books, including Champagne Magnum Opus, Champagne Hiking, The Great Tasting and 3,000 Champagnes, all four of which received the prize for ‘Best Book on French Wines in the World’ at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. Another release, 4,000 Champagnes, received an important prize – ‘The International Champagne Writer of the Year Award’ in 2005 at The Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards at Vinexpo in 2005.
Jim Murray - The Whisky Bible
Jim Murray has long been a trailblazer. He has been a professional writer his entire career – he even earned money as a sports reporter while still at school – and in 1992 gave up his life as a Fleet Street national newspaper journalist to become the world’s first full time whisky writer. That was in the days before whisky shows, whisky tourism, whisky magazines and whiskymania. Having visited his first distillery in 1975 he had spent 17 years learning all he could about the subject before boldly going where no writer had gone before.
Robert Parker - The Wine Advocate
The Wine Advocate has traditionally been a bi-monthly publication and Robert Parker Wine Advocate continues this tradition, although we now publish articles and reviews every week. At our core, we publish regionally focused reports, which mainly offer wine reviews of new wine releases, but we also produce important vintage retrospectives and occasionally single-label verticals and producer profiles.
Until 2002, The Wine Advocate was exclusively available in print format and available only to subscribers. While we still operate a subscriber-only model, in 2002 we launched our highly successful eRobertParker.com website, which has since become simply RobertParker.com.
Since 2019, Robert Parker Wine Advocate has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Michelin Group.
James Suckling - Jamessuckling.com
JamesSuckling.com reflects my four decades of experience as a journalist and a wine critic. From tasting notes and videos to blogs and events, we focus on the great wines of the world including Italy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Australia, New Zealand, California, Chile and Argentina. We have 22 employees around the world, with our main office in Hong Kong, and nine are editors/tasters. In 2021, we rated slightly more than 25,000 wines.
I believe that today’s wine drinker deserves more than just written reviews and criticism. They need to see with their own eyes the place, the people and the rating process. Truly, there’s so much more to learn about wine than just simple numbers and prose.
We taste thousands of wines each month as well. Those on location are generally not blind, but we bring out the paper bags for the larger, more organized ones. We taste young wines for both the pleasure they give as well as their potential to improve with age. I was told early in my career that an outstanding quality wine must improve with age, and I have always believed this since. When rating mature wines, we put more emphasis on their current drinking pleasure. My team of editors follow the same wine reviewing criteria. Finally, I rate using the 100-point scale. I’ve used this point system for close to 40 years, and I still believe it’s the simplest way to rate a wine, with its origins from grade school in the United States.
A wine that we rate 90 points or more is outstanding (A). It’s a wine we want to drink a glass of and is an outstanding purchase. If we rate a wine 95 points or more (A+), it is a must buy and a bottle that we want to drink in its entirety! If we rate a wine less than 88 points, it might still be worth buying but proceed with caution. I certainly wouldn’t recommend spending your money on anything rated lower. Wines rated from barrel, or unfinished wines, are rated with two-point ranges such as 90-91 or 92-93.