Joanna Simon (www.joannasimon.com) is the award-winning wine writer of The Sunday Times. She has a weekly column in The Sunday Times Style magazine and contributes to other sections of the newspaper, including travel and cookery (cooking with wine and booze is something of a speciality). She also writes for Decanter and a wide variety of other publications.

She is a former editor of both Wine and Wine & Spirit magazines in the UK and an internationally acclaimed author. Her books - published in many languages all over the world - include Wine An Introduction, Discovering Wine, The Sunday Times Book of Wine, and Wine with Food, the research for which involved several years of strenuous eating and drinking (plus ça change). Among her proudest book moments were seeing Wine with Food published in French (an English woman thinking she knows about food as well as wine? Mon Dieu!), receiving the Korean language edition of Discovering Wine and having Joanna Simonová emblazoned on the Czech and the Slovak editions.

As a broadcaster she presented The Bottle Uncorked, BBC Radio 4’s first series devoted entirely to wine, and over the years her television appearances have covered everything from matching food and wine to buying fine and rare wines at auction to vodka (don’t ask: it’s safe to say she regards tasting vodka as the low point of her TV career).

Joanna is much in demand as a panel chair and senior judge at top international wine competitions and equally enjoys giving tastings to consumer groups and one-to-one fast-track wine tutorials. When not talking about wine, tasting it, writing about it, visiting the world’s vineyards or cooking, she spends as much time as possible in a delightfully remote part of France (perhaps a little less remote now, thanks to Ryanair).