Andrew Jefford was born in Gloucestershire but grew up beneath the wide skies of Norfolk. Having discovered the pleasures of wine in his early teens, he learned more about it by making it – from carrots, apples, nettles, elderflowers ... and grape-juice concentrate. The quiet plop-plop-plop of fermenting wine in air-locked demi-johns tissued the night silence of the family home, while the finished wines (swallowed with a grimace) contributed to mealtime merriment. After study at the Universities of Reading and East Anglia, he worked first in publishing as an editor and then, from 1988, as a wine writer, taster, educator, tour guide and occasional radio presenter (on BBC Radio 4). He has written for many British newspapers, notably The Evening Standard and The Financial Times, and continues to contribute columns to Decanter and The World of Fine Wine; he also acts a co-chair for the Decanter World Wine Awards and as academic advisor to The Wine Scholar Guild. His books include The New France (2002), Andrew Jefford’s Wine Course (2016) and Whisky Island (2019), a book about the Hebridean island of Islay. He has also published poems in The Spectator and The Independent. Andrew and his family moved to Australia in 2009 and to France in 2010, where they still live. He enjoys music and walking, but no longer makes his own wine.

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’For years Andrew Jefford has been one of the English language’s most thoughtful writers and stylists on wine … original and provocative, though not at all a provocateur. … Mr. Jefford is a poet, and he’s far more interested in the poetry of wine — the transporting thoughts and dreamlike reveries it induces — than in the technical details … a pleasure to read.’
Eric Asimov, New York Times

‘Jefford’s essays are like that glass of wine at day’s end – restorative, uplifting and enlightening.’
Dave McIntyre, The Washington Post

‘The greatest living wine writer in my opinion … more than a writer, Jefford may well be the most profound wine thinker’
Karen MacNeil

‘I open Jefford’s books to skim through and find myself drawn in.’
Victoria Moore, The Telegraph

‘A tumble of short stories, it reveals the kaleidoscope landscape of a staggeringly beautiful, complex mind, reflecting a staggeringly beautiful, complex world.’
Tamlyn Currin, JancisRobinson.com

‘A new sort of literary gumption arrived on the scene with Andrew Jefford: a powerful blend of science and poetry.’
Hugh Johnson

‘It’s not wine writing. It’s writing.’
Jay McInerney

‘Jefford is that rare thing in the wine world, a genuine intellectual. … There are more ideas in each of these short essays than in most books.’
Henry Jeffreys, The Critic