This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

One of the conversations we drink writers like to have over a late-night glass of port is who is the best in our admittedly rather limited field. In my experience, one name comes up more than all others: Andrew Jefford. He is the wine writer’s wine writer. 

Jefford is the author of two essential books: The New France, an insightful guide to the renaissance going on in French wine at the turn of the century; and Peat Smoke and Spirit, a dazzling, poetic look at the whiskies of Islay. In a sane world, or the Eighties as it’s better known, Jefford would be writing a book every couple of years and The New France, now 20 years old, would have been updated a number of times. 

But the economics of publishing being what they are, Jefford hasn’t done another in-depth book since 2004. You are unlikely to make money spending years researching a book about wine. So I’m making do with the next best thing, a collection of Jefford’s writing.

Most of it was new to me as it’s taken from two magazines I don’t subscribe to, World of Fine Wine and Decanter. At one time, Jefford wrote for a more mainstream audience in the Evening Standard and had a long-running column in the old Waitrose Food Illustrated. When the publication was reinvented as Waitrose Food Magazine, he was replaced by Phillip Schofield. What times we live in.

Well, it’s their loss. Jefford is that rare thing in the wine world, a genuine intellectual. I remember being on a press trip with him to Lebanon’s wine regions a few years back. These occasions can turn into ego trips as journalists attempt to outdo each other with the depth of their knowledge, but I remember being taken aback by how Jefford’s quiet, considered questioning illuminated the subject. As another journalist said to me at the time, Jefford is always two steps ahead.

There are more ideas in each of these short essays than in most books. A theme that Jefford comes back to again and again is that wine is too interesting and complex to be simplified. In “Of Jellyfish and Guardsman” he takes aim at the idea that you can appreciate a wine by finding out what grape varieties it is made from. He writes: “It’s hard to find an easier route to wine knowledge than by tracking grape varieties … When you start to put wines in your mouth, though, the system begins to collapse.” 

He’s not a fan of wine and food matching

He continues: “We pay lip-service to place and origin, but we continue to organise our wine thinking and build our wine aesthetics around the superannuated and treacherous varietal model.” Or on reducing wine to a score out of 100: “My view is that scores are foolish, philosophically untenable and damage wine culture rather than enrich it.” 

He’s also not a fan of that other pillar of contemporary drink culture, wine and food matching: “the subject bores me … My own approach is to eat whatever’s going and drink the wine I most fancy, in a spirit of easy-going gastronomic anarchy. Generally it all works out fine.” For Jefford, who you drink a wine with is as important as what you drink it with. 

In “The Best isn’t Interesting” he ponders why tasting famous wines often isn’t as much fun as you might think: “Such wines tend to be tasted reverentially amid formal surroundings … In other words, tasting great wine can often be a pre-programmed, ritualised experience. It may be exquisite … but it isn’t necessarily interesting.” Just to prove his point, some of the longer meditations are on comparatively ordinary wines such as Madiran, Petit Chablis and a Picpoul de Pinet.

He even heretically admits something I’ve always thought but never articulated: most Picpoul is good, it doesn’t really matter which producer you go to. “After that it’s the place that comes tumbling out: sunlight, fresh white, quiet music, a sea interlude,” he writes. Jefford has an uncanny ability of putting how a wine tastes into words; perhaps only the Daily Telegraph’s wine columnist Victoria Moore comes close.

As Jay McInerney writes in the introduction to this collection: “It’s not wine writing. It’s writing.” Jefford studied creative writing at UEA, where one of his contemporaries was Kazuo Ishiguro. In one remarkable essay, Jefford ties Ishiguro’s superficial simplicity as a writer with what makes a good wine in a way that would be pretentious if anyone else tried it.

Jefford is a throwback to a less specialised age

This effortless erudition means he is one of the few who can keep up with renaissance men like Peter Hall at cult Sussex producer Breaky Bottom. When I met Hall earlier this year I had the feeling that I was missing at least half of Hall’s cultural references. 

Reading through Drinking with the Valkyries — the title refers to the experience of drinking young vintage port — it struck me that Jefford is a throwback to a less specialised age. He’s like a learned clergyman from the 19th century, composing poetry, cataloguing wines he has tried, observing nature and taking an interest in everything around him. Thanks to Wikipedia, I discovered he is also the son of a Church of England minister.

If there’s one writer who is a rival for Jefford then it has to be Hugh Johnson, whose updated memoir The Life and Wines of Hugh Johnson has just been released by the same publisher. It’s his Wine: A Life Uncorked which was published back in 2004, with some new chapters and an introduction from New York Times wine writer Eric Asimov. 

They really could not be more different: Jefford the Roundhead and Johnson the Cavalier. Whereas Jefford sees himself as an outsider, Johnson is very much an establishment figure, chairman of the Sunday Times wine club, and author of dozens of books — including the mighty The Story of Wine, one I’ve probably lifted more from than any book. 

But they both have the same intelligence, curiosity, knowledge of culture and, above all, they’re both just damn good writers. If you want to learn about wine, switch off your phone, buy these two books and enjoy them with a nice glass of something. Publishers, please commission Jefford to write another full-length book. There’s a gap in the market for a new New France.