Michael Edwards

A gentleman in the wine trade

Michael died on 20 June. He had been missing from our lives for some time, apparently living in a care-home in Tooting in South London. He was always the gentlest of apparitions, amusing, often wry, with his old-fashioned diction and frequent ejaculations of ‘what?!’, ‘what?!’ that made him sound like a character from PG Wodehouse. He wasn’t a bit like a character from Wodehouse really, there was a notable humility about Michael, but it didn’t impair his judgment, and he had a keen tongue when it came to wine and food and wasn’t beyond using it to have a quiet dig at some of the other people in the wine trade.

I used to travel with Michael from time to time, and even worked with him on one book project before I decided to parachute out. He was born in Hertford, north of London, on 5 May 1944. He told me his father Frank was Jewish, and originally named Cohen; his mother Florence was an Irish nurse, who, if I remember rightly, used to look after Frank. Michael was sent to school at the old Imperial Services College at Haileybury which was originally created to train boys destined to govern the Raj. From Haileybury he went on to read history at York, where he was taught by the English Revolutionary historian Felix Aylmer, whom he held in high regard. One of Michael’s obituaries says he read for the bar, but I have to say I had never heard that story. After York he worked in the wine trade in Bordeaux throughout the seventies and early eighties, the reason why, I can assume, he spoke such good French.

In the eighties he moved away from the trade and joined Egon Ronay’s team as chief inspector of restaurants on the guide books. He was one of the founder members of the British Academy of Gastronomes with Peter Bazalgette at the helm. He told me that he was going to have me elected too, but I think the Academy was short lived, and possibly he did me a favour by failing to have me brought in. By that time he was also a regular contributor to the trade magazine Hotel and Caterer. Later he would a fixture in the glossy World of Fine Wine.

In the early nineties he introduced me to his best friend, John Turner, who I believe had been at school with him. John had worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the US where he had met his wife. Now he was keen to start publishing on wine and there was a role in it for Michael. Michael thought I might be a good man for the job too. The result was to be a massive book called The Companion to Wine which was published in 1992. I had already decided the book was not for me but I contributed a piece on the Rhone Valley all the same. I later worked with John and his wife on a projected Oxford Companion to Cheese. John was already suffering from the cancer that killed him and that book never happened. Many years later OUP New York did do a companion to cheese, but with an entirely different crew.

I have a nagging feeling that Michael was married briefly at a time when he was living in a cottage south of London that had been his mother’s. He had crushes on women, often unsuitable women. I think they generally got the better of him, rather than the other way round. His stock rose in wine and he became chiefly an authority on champagne, writing more than one book on the subject. His Finest Wines of Champagne of 1999 was crowned with an important prize. When we moved into this house around the same time he came to the party clutching a bottle of Pol Roger Winston Churchill, a very generous gift. I think we drank it in the maternity ward at University College Hospital when my son was born. This success led him to try to work from France. He bought a house in Bar-sur-Aube but work dried up as it does. I found him one day in my local high street. With brutal honesty he told me he was pawning some silver to tide himself over while he sold the house. ‘Never’ he said, ‘move to France unless you know exactly where your income is going to come from.’

After that he lived in a confusing number of addresses. Sometimes near here, sometimes further west. Michael was an observant Catholic. He had a way of popping up unexpectedly, and not just in the street. I spotted him more than once in the Dominican Priory in Hampstead, attending Mass. Now, sadly, he will pop up no more.