Julian Belmont

Julian Belmont is the Editor at Large of En Primeur Club, founded in 2024 to address a gap in how the world's greatest hospitality and wine-focused experiences are aggregated, ranked, and recommended. His remit is to set the editorial position on what EP Club ranks, how the ranking is built, and where the line sits between an award worth printing and a placement that does not survive a second look. The brief is narrower than a general luxury title: aggregate the greatest places in the world, with a wine-experience emphasis, and keep every claim traceable to a named source.

The work behind the Belmont byline draws on EP Club's editorial track, a record built across 50+ countries and the rooms where the upper tier of fine dining and hospitality actually trades. That track runs to 500+ Michelin stars at the table, 200+ Michelin Keys across hotels, and 3,500+ placements across the World's 50 Best Restaurants, Bars, Hotels, and the regional family lists, with roughly 100 Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond properties inside the same record. Numbers of that order matter only against a peer set: the European Five-Star bracket, the Asian Forbes cohort, Relais and Châteaux, and Leading Hotels of the World are overlapping but non-identical registers, and the EP Club position is that they should never silently merge.

The wine map runs the same way. Bordeaux and Burgundy sit at the centre, with the Mosel, the Rhône, the Loire, Champagne, and Alsace forming the rest of the European axis; Italy reads through Tuscany, Piedmont, and Sicily; Iberia through Rioja, Ribera del Duero, and the Douro. New-world coverage runs from Napa, Sonoma, Willamette, and Santa Barbara across to Mendoza, Casablanca, Stellenbosch, Margaret River, and Marlborough. Reading at that distance is what allows the EP Club layer to write Burgundy at the climat rather than the village, split Champagne between grandes marques and the grower houses of the Côte des Blancs and the Marne, and treat Bordeaux en primeur as a long campaign across barrel pricing, La Place, and bottle market.

The methodology is the part Julian writes down. EP Club distils 97 sourcing organisations into a single editorial layer, and someone decides what each source is worth, how recency adjusts that weight, and where the provenance chain has to break before a claim is pulled. The house position on conflicts of interest, paid placement, and corrections at concierge@enprimeurclub.com sits under his name, so masthead, formula, and corrections inbox line up behind one editorial position rather than three.