Nowadays Jancis Robinson is one of a handful of internationally respected wine authorities, writing daily for www.JancisRobinson.com, weekly for The Financial Times and bi-monthly for a column syndicated on every continent.

In the early 1970s she left Oxford with a degree in Maths and Philosophy and a strong interest in food and wine which was not put to professional use until December 1, 1975 when she was appointed assistant editor of Wine & Spirit, then a trade magazine, replacing the Australian who left to be the founding editor of Decanter. It took a year in Provence, after three years in the travel business, to convince her that wine was not necessarily a frivolous subject. A Chambolle-Musigny, Les Amoureuses 1959, savoured while still an undergraduate, had already convinced her of its unique charms, both sensual and intellectual.

At Wine & Spirit she had to learn fast. She sat the full range of Wine & Spirit Education Trust exams, winning the Rouyer-Guillot cup, the overall trophy for the Diploma exam, in 1978. She also travelled and tasted widely and was lucky enough to meet many of the wine world’s most colourful and generous characters.

By 1979 she had been asked to write her first book, The Wine Book, and in 1980, when appointed wine correspondent of The Sunday Times, she went freelance. In the 1980s she married, had the first two of her three children, made three series of The Wine Programme, the world’s first television series about wine, for Channel 4 and in 1984 passed the notorious Master of Wine exams, becoming the first MW from outside the wine trade. After writing columns for the Wine Spectator in the US and the Evening Standard in London, she joined The Financial Times in 1990.

Much of the early 1990s was devoted to editing the first Oxford Companion to Wine, a multi award-winning reference book now in its 3rd edition. The major BBC tv series Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course was filmed around the globe and first shown in 1995. Other tv productions by Jancis and her husband, FT restaurant correspondent Nicholas Lander, have included two series of Vintners’ Tales for the BBC, of which the second won Jancis a second overall Glenfiddich Trophy and TV Personality of the Year award.

By the turn of the century she had been co-opted by her friend Hugh Johnson as co-author of the 5th edition of The World Atlas of Wine and, with her assistant Julia Harding MW, produced a 6th edition in 2007. Her total tally of books is now well into double figures and includes the professional memoir Confessions of a Wine Lover (Tasting Pleasure in the US, 1997) and the seminal book on grape varieties, Vines, Grapes and Wines (1986 and still in print).

She has been showered with international awards, including Vinitaly’s first International Communicator of the Year in 1996, an honorary doctorate from The Open University in 1997, Decanter (Wo)Man of the Year in 2000, two of America’s coveted James Beard Award, voted Best Wine Journalist by 300 leading figures in the US wine trade ‘by a landslide’ in Wine Business International in 2008, and in 2003 was made an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by Her Majesty the Queen, on whose cellar she now advises. This, together with her only other consultancy, for British Airways first and business class wines, is as close as she gets to any commercial involvement.

She is regularly invited around the world to conduct tastings, judge wine and talk about it and spends many hours each day keeping her website www.JancisRobinson.com with its news, views and thousands of tastings notes up to date.