Hugh Johnson (wine writer)

Hugh Johnson OBE (born 10 March 1939) is a British author and expert on wine. He is considered the world's best-selling wine writer. His 1964 tasting of a bottle of 1540 Steinwein from the German vineyard Würzburger Stein is considered to potentially be one of the oldest wines to have ever been tasted.

Johnson became a member of the Cambridge University Wine and Food Society while an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge in the 1950s, reading English. On describing his introduction to wine-tasting Johnson has recalled:

my room-mate Adrian Cowell, committee member of the University Wine & Food Society came in after dinner with two glasses and said, "Come on, Hugh, are they the same? Or different?" Both were, I am sure, red Burgundy, but one was magic and one was ordinary. This caught my imagination. It was my Damascene moment.

Johnson has been writing about wine since 1960, was taken on as a feature writer for Condé Nast Publications upon graduation, and started work on Vogue and House & Garden , becoming in 1962 editor of Wine & Food and in the same year wine correspondent of The Sunday Times, of which in 1967 he became Travel Editor. From 1968 to 1970 he edited Queen magazine in succession to Jocelyn Stevens.

He has published a wide array of books, starting with the publication of Wine in 1966. The publication of The World Atlas of Wine in 1971, was considered the first serious attempt to map the world's wine regions, described by the director of the INAO as "a major event in wine literature".

Since its launch in 1973 Johnson has been President of The Sunday Times Wine Club, part of Laithwaites, now the world's largest mail-order wine merchant. From 1986–2001 he was a Director of the Bordeaux First Growth Chateau Latour and in 1990 was a co-founder of The Royal Tokaji Wine Company in an attempt to rebuild the foundering Tokaji industry after Communism. In 1986 he started The Hugh Johnson Collection, which sold (until 2010) wine glasses and other artefacts related to wine,mainly in the Far East, with a shop in St James's Street, London.

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