It is with great excitement that we share with you the news that today we unveil our new Robert Parker Wine Advocate website redesign. The major aims of the revamp are to allow ease of navigation and accessibility with a cleaner, more intuitive layout. Therefore, there will be more quick links to the most recent Wine Advocate articles. A couple of entirely new sections will include Highlights, which features quick access to the lead articles from our latest Wine Advocate issue. And Recommended Reads will provide a sticky listing and links to articles of major interest from throughout the last few months. We will also be presenting a new Notable Wine Regions section on our homepage, helping to quickly, easily guide readers to recent tasting notes and articles about the regions they love most.

 

More great news for our subscribers who like to read while on the go: Over the course of the next two weeks, our new homepage and site redesign will become fully responsive, meaning that it will detect if you are accessing the site from a phone or tablet and adapt the view accordingly. Once this happens, phone and tablet readers will no longer be redirected to our mobile site. As a related aside, mobile readers should keep their eyes peeled over the next couple of months for our announcement about our new Robert Parker app (for iOS and Android), which will include a number of exciting new features.

 

Another relatively new rollout on our site was the soft launch a few weeks ago of a new The Wine Advocate Comments Section at the bottom of each Wine Advocate article. With much of the wine conversations now happening on social media platforms, we wanted to provide an easy means for readers to comment directly about specific articles on our website and to simultaneously alert our Reviewers of new comments so that they can promptly respond. Our new comments section does this. Even more recently, we have added a comments section to the bottom of our Reviewers’ bio pages (which you can view here), so that readers can ask them questions or provide comments of a more general nature. With this new change to how we engage with our readership, we will be disabling our Bulletin Board. Once the most active wine bulletin board in the world, as technology has moved on, we recognize we must do so too. Our heartfelt thanks go out to our reviewer Mark Squires, the creator and loyal moderator of our Bulletin Board. We are also grateful to our faithful bulletin board members who stuck with us until the end. Salut!

 

Finally, those who have attempted to renew their Print subscriptions to Robert Parker Wine Advocate over the last few months may by now be aware that the End of June Issue was our last Print issue. Sadly, we’ve had to concede that our Print publication has become something of a dinosaur as more and more readers prefer to read our publication online. This is partly because so much more is available online—we publish four to five times more reviews and articles on our website than we can squeeze into the six print editions produced annually. Also, the reviews are available much more frequently and faster online.

 

However convenient our website may be, I’m sure this news will come as a huge disappointment to our most loyal Print subscribers who love the look and feel of our reviews in magazine format, who prefer ink on paper. We ask those readers to bear with us for a few months while we work to redevelop and produce a brand-new print format, which we hope to unveil by the end of the year. As we’re still at the drawing-board phase right now, I can’t say much about this new print format, just that we’re looking to offer a more bespoke, regionally focused publication that will not be as time-sensitive as our Print issues were.

 

Meanwhile, I’d like to extend a warm thank you to our Print readers who have stuck by us to this last issue. Know that we’ll be back in Print soon with a format we hope you love even more.

  

Cheers!