There are competitions and there are competitions.

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In the world of wine writing, the JancisRobinson.com Wine Writing Competition is the one that matters. Jancis Robinson OBE MW is the most respected wine writer and critic in the world - author of the Oxford Companion to Wine, the World Atlas of Wine, and the publication that bears her name, which reaches wine professionals and enthusiasts in 180 countries. When her platform runs a writing competition, the wine writing world pays attention.

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In 2025, I entered this competition. And here is how the piece came to exist.

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The brief was open - write “an ode to a grape variety.” Most entries, I suspect, wrote about grapes. I wrote about rain. Specifically, the Indian monsoon - because the monsoon is not a weather event, it is a national reckoning. A season that reorganises an entire subcontinent’s emotional life for four months, feeds 1.4 billion people, and produces a specific quality of afternoon that no European wine guide has ever thought to address.

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The question I asked was simple: if you had to choose one wine to drink while the Indian monsoon does what the Indian monsoon does - what would it be, and why?

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The answer was Riesling. Not because a sommelier said so. Because the logic was irrefutable once you stopped applying European rules to a subcontinental season. Because the wine’s natural tension between acidity and sweetness mirrors the monsoon’s own emotional register - nervy one moment, generous the next. Because it does things with the fried food that Indians eat compulsively when it rains that no other grape variety manages with the same elegance.

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The craft decision was to write it from inside the experience rather than above it. Not as an expert addressing a student, but as a curious observer standing in the rain, making a case that the wine world had not previously thought to make. The voice was opinionated. The argument was specific. The reverence for wine orthodoxy was minimal.

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The judges - including Hugh Johnson OBE, who has been writing about wine for more years than I have been alive - awarded my submission the Judges’ Choice Award. The top prize. First Indian winner. First Asian winner. First winner based in the UAE.

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I mention this not to preen and pout, but because it answers a question that every writer’s platform implicitly raises: can this person actually write? The judges at JancisRobinson.com, who read wine writing professionally and at the highest level, answered that question in 2025.

 

The article is here: Monsoon Diaries with Riesling — JancisRobinson.com

 

Read it. And know that “petrichor” rhymes with “spätlese.”