Jane MacQuitty, and the rise and fall of the newspaper wine correspondent

A look at the fascinating career of the longest-running drink columnist in Fleet Street.

When I worked in a wine merchant, customers would often come in on a Saturday morning waving a newspaper at me and demanding to know whether we had a particular wine. Usually we didn’t, and the customer would go away looking disgruntled. I’d then phone head office and try to get hold of this in-demand wine but it was hopeless because as soon as Jane MacQuitty from The Times recommended something that was it, it was gone.

We’d also get people waving the Guardian (Malcolm Gluck), the Daily Telegraph (Johnny Ray) or the FT (Jancis Robinson) but it was MacQuitty more often than not. I remember being disappointed that she’d usually pick a crowd-pleasing Chilean merlot rather than something obscure like a Saumur-Champigny which I’d been trying to get customers to buy. 

When I started writing about wine in 2010, my heroes were Jancis Robinson with her witty pedantry, Tim Atkin for his ability to tell a story, Andrew Jefford who brought a philosophical approach to the subject or iconoclasts like Patrick Matthews. What MacQuitty did, simply recommending wines, seemed, well, a bit boring.

Having written wine columns myself, I’ve come to appreciate that what MacQuitty does isn’t easy and why she is still there years after nearly every other paper has cut its coverage to a few weekly recommendations. She’s there at every tasting, trying everything. She doesn’t spend her time arguing with Jamie Goode on Twitter, we don’t know her views on Brexit or Black Lives Matter, and she’s not interested in the gossip that is the lifeblood of most people involved in wine (guilty as charged). 

Instead she’s 100% focussed on finding the best wines for her readers. Generally these have to be available in good quantity so that funny little parcel of Croatian wine from a bottle shop in Catford is unlikely to feature. MacQuitty’s choices might not get wine bores all hot and bothered but her readers clearly appreciate her.  But more than being a reliable consumer champion, along with better known names like Oz Clarke and Jill Goolden, she played a vital role in making wine a drink for everyone in Britain. 

MacQuitty got her wine education from her father, a film producer William MacQuitty, best known for the classic A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic. She grew up drinking some pretty serious bottles, as she explained when I sent her some questions on email:

“He bought their cellar for a song in the ‘60s when Pinewood's formal dining room closed, replaced by a canteen. Film people, like rock stars, only drank labels so claret was the first growths, burgundy was exclusively Romanee Conti and pudding wine was d’Yquem.” 

She began her journalism career with Conde Nast, talked her way into “writing the wine column, restaurant column and a news notes column for House & Garden magazine.” From there she was offered the wine column at The Times in the early 1980s taking over from Pamela Van Dyke Price who sounds like one of those people euphemistically described as ‘doesn’t suffer fools gladly’. This is from her obituary in the Guardian by Tom Jaine: 

“When she was making plans for her own funeral, there was a list of people not to be invited… Vandyke Price will be remembered by many as a difficult, prickly character, whose put-downs were deadly and who raged more than was needful at the mutability of circumstance in a writer's life.”

Huge fun! Nevertheless VanDyke Price was a pioneer, making it easier for women like MacQuitty to get on in a male-dominated world. The 1980s was a fascinating time to be involved in wine, Britain was becoming a wine drinking country, wine was becoming more democratic and exciting new brands were coming out of Australia, Chile and later New Zealand. MacQuitty recalls: 

“I had a kind email from the buying director of Oddbins the other day talking about John Ratcliffe’s ‘80s trip to Australia who returned with a humdinger range of ridiculously cheap Penfolds wines: ’The first to sing their praises was your good self. That Saturday morning I was visiting London stores and was amazed at how many customers had a copy of your article.’”

This interest in wine was noted by the media with Jancis and Oz beginning their long TV careers. It was also the heyday of the newspaper and magazine wine column. Supermarket wine selections, however, were still very basic. Most people would go to a specialist wine merchant or more likely an off-licence like Peter Dominic or Victoria Wine. 

MacQuitty doesn’t just cover wine, she has a general drinks beat which led to some interesting battles with Big Booze. She was one of the most vociferous voices against the United Distillers’s attempt in 2003 to reformulate its Cardhu single malt as a blended malt. There was huge outcry and eventually the drinks giant gave in and once again released Cardhu as a single malt. 

She was less successful in 1992 when she took on the same company over the reduction in strength of Gordon’s from 40% to 37.5%. There was outcry across the press spearheaded by MacQuitty but customers didn’t seem to care. It was a similar story with Pimms. As Nick Morgan writes:

“MacQuitty waged war against the covert change in the pages of The Times, urging readers to adopt a “cheat Pimm’s” recipe of one measure of gin, one of Italian or French sweet vermouth and half a measure of orange curacao, much to the displeasure of the brand owners. Then as now, she argued that “when you remove alcohol from any drink, you remove flavour”.

I highly recommend MacQuitty’s cheat’s Pimm’s, far superior to the watery version currently on sale. Her other claim to cocktail immortality is her role in the creation of the Bramble, a modern classic created by the late Dick Bradsell who also invented the Espresso Martini. What’s not so well-known is that the Bramble has an ancestor that is now almost completely forgotten. 

The year was 1982 and MacQuitty was writing a column on how cocktails were back in fashion, a perennial topic. To tie in with the feature, the Times team commissioned Bradsell and others to come up with a special cocktail for readers with Bradsell’s the clear winner. She wrote at the time: 

“A panel of experienced imbibers sampled several impressive concoctions before giving its unanimous vote to one which, although not in the fashionable fruit-and-parasol idiom, may well become a classic.” 

It was dubbed the Thunderer, after the paper’s nickname, and then seems to have largely been forgotten about. The only reference I could find of it was on the Absolut website with no mention of its inventor. It’s similar to the Bramble but uses cassis instead of creme de mure, vodka instead of gin, a tiny amount of parfait amour, and is served ice cold straight up rather than on crushed ice. Times readers apparently enjoyed getting smashed on it. 

Sadly the newspaper drinks columnist is an endangered species. The Times, FT and Daily Telegraph aside, most papers just have a freelancer recommending a few wines each week. It seems scarcely conceivable that when Tim Atkin stepped down from the Observer in 2010, he was earning £40,000 a year. Last month Fiona Beckett resigned as Guardian drinks columnist. I am pretty sure her role wasn’t a salaried position and it wouldn’t have been enough to be her main source of income - unless Beckett is a fearsome negotiator. 

I think it’s wonderful that The Times employs a full time drinks writer and it can only be because in this age of metrics and analysis that the higher ups know that people are reading MacQuitty and following her recommendations. A proper salaried writer doesn’t have to take outside work from wine merchants, producers, regional marketing bodies etc. MacQuitty is truly independent, which is why her readers trust her.  She told me: “My role is to entertain and inform and hopefully persuade your readers to buy a bottle or two to enjoy that weekend.” It sounds simple, doesn’t it?