Words, words, words…

 If you do anything for long enough, you ought to get better at it.

I’ve been writing about wine since vineyard workers had to keep an eye out for dinosaurs. Or, more specifically, since the days when French producers nonchalantly shrugged off any suggestion that they might ever face competition from far off lands like California and Australia, when Sicily and Languedoc were - with a few exceptions - vinous slums, and when people of relatively moderate means could imagine drinking the occasional classed growth Bordeaux.

My first efforts with words appeared at the beginning of the 1980s, in a UK trade magazine called Wine & Spirit - then edited by a young woman called Jancis Robinson. By chance I then ended up - with help from Charles Metcalfe - launching a consumer publication ungrammatically called What? Wine, for Haymarket Publishing (who also had the highly successful What? Car and What? Camera).

That led to 19 years as a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, with occasional subsequent forays into other publications such as the Guardian, and a lengthy list of books, none of which is of much use in the wine world of the 2020s.

At least, not for anyone who is uninterested in the modern history of wine. I’m regularly fascinated in how regions like Priorat, Georgia and Etna have leaped into the spotlight, while others struggle to sell their wines for much more than they charged decades ago.

In 2006, returning to my professional roots at Wine & Spirit, I switched my attention from writing for consumers to analysing the industry, helping to launch Meininger’s Wine Business International. For 16 years, briefly with Joel Payne and then with Felicity Carter, I held the role of editor-at-large, chief interviewer and weekly commentator for what I believe to be one of the best publications in the sector. I also did a bit of blogging and freelance writing for platforms such as Tim Atkin.

Both at WINE International (as What? Wine was rechristened) and more especially at Meininger’s, I always did my best to look beyond the UK, which happens to be the place where I was born and have my home. Britain used to be the centre of the wine world, but even before the recent introspection born of Brexit, it was clear that other countries are progressing in their own directions and at their own speeds with less and less reference to the UK.

On this page, I will post writing from across the last 30+ years in the hope that some of it might be of interest to anyone wondering how the wine industry got to where it is today, and where it may be heading.