She is founder-editor of The Oxford Companion to Wine, co-author with Hugh Johnson of The World Atlas of Wine (nearly five million copies sold) and co-author of Wine Grapes, each of these books recognised as a standard reference worldwide. The 24-Hour Wine Expert (2017) is a slim paperback guide to the practical essentials of wine.

In 1984 she was the first person outside the wine trade to pass the rigorous Master of Wine exams and in 2003 she was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen, on whose cellar she advised from 2004 until 2022. In one week in April 2016 she was presented with France’s Officier du Mérite Agricole, the German VDP’s highest honour and, in the US, her fourth James Beard Award. She now has six, including being the only wine writer elevated to the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. In 2018 she launched her own hand-made, dishwasher-friendly, ideal wine glass and in 2021 became a trustee of the Gérard Basset Foundation designed to increase diversity and inclusion in the worlds of wine, spirits and hospitality though education.

She loves and lives for wine in all its glorious diversity, generally favouring balance and subtlety over sheer mass, having campaigned for associated sustainability issues since 2006.