We welcome members to contribute to our monthly publication, The Circular, with their articles, features, photography and news. The Circular includes content from our members all over the globe and we aim to publish an informative and interesting monthly read for fellow members, Friends of the Circle and subscribers.
Some months we have a focus region or country, which we will advertise in advance in the previous month’s edition. However, content is welcome from all regions and tastings at any point during the year. We are also very keen to help share any exciting news about changes in your career, awards, book launches, exhibitions etc. It’s hard to keep up with all our members from afar, so please don’t be shy – and email us with your news so we can help share it with fellow members for you!
Please do get in touch with the editor, Amanda Barnes, before submitting any content for consideration. Publication of and amendments to the article will be at the discretion of the editor and sub-editor.
Here are some guidelines which would be helpful to consider:
Readership
Our readers are primarily our own members, based all over the world and all with a good general knowledge about wines. In addition, we have subscribers who generally also have good wine knowledge as they are almost all people who work in the wine trade or specialist wine PR.
Article types
We welcome all types of wine- and occasionally spirits-related articles from trip reports to encounters with wine producers and winemakers or discoveries and comments about new techniques in anything from viticulture to marketing. We also welcome comment or opinion pieces (please take care not to be libellous) on any aspect of wines or the wine business.
We do not welcome long lists of tasting notes. If contributors wish to highlight a few wines from a visit to a producer or region or tasting then it’s better to mention these wines in the main text and perhaps include one or two notes maximum. An exception can be made in a report of a CWW tasting, though even with these reports, it’s what’s said around the wines that is often more interesting.
Article style and length
Ideally length should be between 500 and 1,500 words. Please do not submit anything considerably longer without contacting the editor first to discuss. We do have flexibility, so exceptionally, a longer article may be welcome.
We use British (Oxford) English throughout. We use initial capitals for grape varieties and italics for most foreign words.
Please submit your article via email as an attached word doc. Any relevant links can be embedded in the copy. However, please submit photos or illustrations as separate attachments (not embedded in the text).
‘Recycled’ articles
We are happy to reproduce certain articles that have appeared elsewhere, providing the article is written for an audience that is wine-knowledgeable and that it has not appeared where many readers are likely to have already read it. It is always preferable if contributors adapt an article published elsewhere to make it more suitable for our readers.
Photographs
We welcome photographs or illustrations with all articles. As we are published online we require a minimum resolution of 500 pixels wide, however, please don’t send us photos that are bigger than 1MB! Please attach photos to an email as JPGs (or via www.wetransfer.com) and don’t embed them in your word doc.
We have several talented photographers in the Circle of Wine Writers and are also keen to publish samples of their work in our Circle Galleries. If you are a photographer and would like to submit a collection of your photos, please get in touch with Amanda to discuss size requirements and submission format.
Copyright: if you are sending any photos that were not taken by you, please make sure that you have permission to share them and give us the name of who to credit in the copyright.
Please do get in touch about any future submissions, we’d love to hear from you!
Amanda Barnes
editor (@) circleofwinewriters.org