Food, glorious food

Some people plan their careers. Others happen into them. Jancis Robinson went to university to study for a degree in mathematics and philosophy but it turns out the most important thing she learned there is that there is a world of difference between the Blue Nun everyone drank at 70s parties and the glass of burgundy a friend offered her one night.

“By the time I graduated I knew I was interested in wine but it would have been seen as terminally frivolous if I had tried to pursue it as a career,” Jancis recalls.

Instead, she joined a travel company, tasted as much as she could, listened hard, and studied with the Wine and Spirit Education Trust – landing a job in 1975 as assistant editor of Wine & Spirit.

It’s foreign travel that Robinson credits with beginning to alter the public’s appetite for wine. “That and being able to pick bottles up off the shelf, whereas before you had to go into a special shop and you had to be able to pronounce the name to a potentially snooty person behind the counter.”

By the time she’d become a household name,  writing about wine for The Sunday Times, editing The Oxford Companion to Wine, and picking up an honorary degree from the OU,  Jancis was speaking to an audience more interested, and  more informed, than those across the Channel where the wine was being produced.

Lucky dip for the palate

She says: “There isn’t a tradition of connoisseurship there; the average French person’s knowledge is less than in the UK and there are very few wine clubs.”

Indeed the existence of so many clubs – offering a form of lucky dip for the palate – demonstrates both how adventurous we’ve become, yet conversely how many of us still  prefer to listen to experts such as Jancis.

“Oddly, people don’t have as much confidence in their judgements of wine in the way they are confident in making a judgement about what they eat. But that will change,” she insists.

“We have a generation who’ve grown up seeing wine routinely in soap operas, nobody making a big deal of it. It is now Britain’s favourite drink and it’s thoroughly democratised, whereas when I was starting out I was always being asked ‘isn’t it a bit elitist?’”

Hopeful signs, for her, are the burgeoning number of wine courses, and the growing number of restaurants allowing diners to choose wine by the glass rather than committing to a whole bottle – where price prevents most of us from taking a risk.

Brave enough

“And if you’d asked me about supermarkets a year ago I would have given you a very upbeat answer. Every time the duty goes up there’s this awful business of who funds that extra duty. They are scared to hand it on to the consumer so it’s the supplier who’s got to fund it and the overall quality has to drop. The supermarkets were just getting brave enough to say okay let’s lift prices a bit, and then along comes the credit crunch and another duty rise.”

Wrinkling her nose about the quality of what’s in a bottle of supermarket wine when £1.70 of the £2.20 cost is duty, is one of the few occasions when Jancis is unequivocal in her assessments.

The Jancis Robinson whose lively columns also played a part in the democratisation that she alludes to, and whose website www.jancisrobinson.com has members in 90 countries - with nearly 100,000 unique users a month - is much more sanguine about whether her audience shares her taste. Taking their lead from their mentor it’s no surprise to hear that those who contribute to the tasting forums on her site have been dubbed by France’s leading wine magazine “the most courteous forum on the planet”.

She says: “Wine can lift the spirits and if it’s doing that – even if I wouldn’t necessarily agree with your judgement of the wine – that’s fine. And that’s the thing about us wine critics, as with any critics - you can take it or leave it.“

Useful links

• Jancis Robinson
• What does Jancis reccommend for celebrations? - listen to the podcast
• Jancis offers tips for tasting and good value