Prominent British wine writer sells website to U.S. publisher
Jancis Robinson, arguably the world’s most influential wine writer, has sold her eponymous digital publication to a company with offices in San Francisco.
Miami-based Recurrent Ventures, a fast-growing and venture capital-backed media conglomerate, announced its acquisition of JancisRobinson.com on Tuesday. The London subscription-based website, which has been operating since 2000, joins a portfolio of 17 other digital media properties, including Popular Science, Saveur and Domino. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Robinson, 71, said she began thinking about selling the business a year ago. She needed a succession plan for her website, which employs four full-time staff members and 13 contributing writers. And she said she believes the 21-yearold site has room to expand, with the proper marketing and business development tools.
“I’ve long thought there was real potential for growth but I don’t have the qualities needed to achieve it,” Robinson said. “This will allow me to concentrate on what I love doing: tasting and writing about wine, which I intend to do for many, many more years.” She will remain on board as editor in chief for at least five years.
The new ownership will be particularly focused on growing readership in the U.S.,
“This will allow me to concentrate on what I love doing: tasting and writing about wine, which I intend to do for many, many more years.” Jancis Robinson
which accounts for just under 30% of subscriptions. (Subscriptions in the United Kingdom are just over 30%, Robinson said.) A subscription currently costs about $117 per year.
“Since we share a language, and the number of wine drinkers is so much higher in the U.S. than the U.K., U.S. expansion is a no-brainer,” she said. JancisRobinson.com already has two regular columnists in California, Alder Yarrow and Elaine Chukan Brown, but “we plan even more focus on California,” Robinson said.
Recurrent won't make “any big, immediate changes,” said CEO Lance Johnson, but he hinted at “new initiatives down the line, whether it's events or ways to utilize the site's existing tasting notes.”
JancisRobinson.com launched in November 2000 on the trail of the dot-com boom. Robinson had been a famous wine figure for decades by then as the author of multiple books, including “The Oxford Companion to Wine” and was the host of a wine series on the BBC. Her site preceded other digital entries by well-known wine critics in that era; eRobertParker.com, the digital arm of the famous American wine critic Robert Parker's Wine Advocate newsletter, debuted the following year, in November 2001. The Wine Advocate was purchased by the Michelin Group in 2019.
Initially a free website, JancisRobinson.com added a paywalled section called the Purple Pages one year in. (The name referred not to the color of red wine but to the color scheme of the members-only website pages.) Today, much of the site is behind a paywall, including the tasting notes and an online version of the Oxford Companion to Wine. Subscriptions remain the site's sole revenue source. It has never run ads.
Since launching the site, Robinson's clout has only grown. She was awarded an Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 2003; she consults on the queen's wine cellar. Her books now number over 20, and she has long been a columnist in the Financial Times. In 2017, she donated all of her papers to the library at UC Davis.
The website has always traded on the personality of its founder, with articles written in a conversational register, producing the impression that Robinson is speaking to a circle of close friends. And JancisRobinson.com's subscribers often seem to regard each other that way, too: They're highly active on the site's forum, trading geeky tips about which German Rieslings to buy and which vintages of Bordeaux are showing best.
The publication covers the entire world of wine, with correspondents on four continents and subscribers in 82 countries, Robinson said. In addition to industry news and narrative features, Robinson's team also publishes reviews of individual wines, scored on a 20-point scale. The database counts more than 200,000 wine reviews.
“We weren't explicitly looking for a wine-focused publication,” said Recurrent's Johnson, but “when this opportunity came to our attention, we felt like we couldn't pass it up.”
Recurrent has been building up a collection of properties focused on home and lifestyle already, like the food magazine Saveur, formerly owned by Bonnier Corp.
“We really loved the idea of JancisRobinson.com and Saveur working alongside each other as well as together,” Johnson said.
Recurrent has been on a buying spree lately. In July, it acquired Mel Magazine, the men's lifestyle vertical started by Dollar Shave Club, and also Futurism, a science and technology news site that began as a subreddit on Reddit.
Recurrent's roots date to 2018, when the venture-capital firm North Equity was founded in order to purchase the Drive, an automotivenews website. This spring, with 15 digitalmedia properties then under its belt, North Equity created a new company, Recurrent Ventures, to operate its media brands. North Equity and Recurrent's headquarters are in Miami, though Recurrent has an office in San Francisco.
Johnson said he isn't ruling out further expansions in the food-andwine media space.
“If there were another brand that we thought could be a good fit in this category,” he said, “we'd certainly have a look because there is so much room here for expansion.”
It's not yet clear how JancisRobinson.com's devoted following, many of whom have been drawn to the site for its personal feeling and commitment to independence, will view the new deal. Robinson, for her part, emphasized that she isn't going anywhere just yet. She isn't ready to retire, she said.
But, she continued, she believes that the new partners will be able to improve its reach in ways that she couldn't on her own.
“My tech and marketing skills are definitely less impressive than my wine achievements,” said Robinson, who also holds the distinguished title of Master of Wine.
When asked about her long-term vision for the publication, Robinson said she hopes the editorial core remains the same, but that the business side will improve.
“I hope that JancisRobinson.com will still be admired for the quality and integrity of its wide-ranging content,” she said, “but that it will be appreciated by many more people, especially Americans.”