Your first choice is Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson’s World Atlas of Wine, which has sold millions of copies, been translated into 13 different languages and had a huge impact on the wine industry.

What’s so amazing about the book is its compendious nature. It really covers so much. The descriptions are very to the point and I love the beautiful production values of the book. It visually captures the depth and range of the wine world. What I love best about all the illustrations are the maps. They are exquisite and so finely drawn, and really give you a strong visual of how small some vineyards are and yet how different they are in relation to each other.

And what are some of your favourite vineyards?

The ones that are most amazing to me are the Burgundian vineyards, especially in the Côte de Nuits. When you see these maps, you appreciate how teensy these little appellations are in relation to their fame and grandeur. They are often two to three acre parcels which are world famous.

That is amazing. Next up is The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World by Lawrence Osborne, which is all about one English man’s quest to understand the world of wine.

It is a brilliant book, and I don’t say that simply because I happen to have been mentioned in it. He actually got a number of the details of our encounter quite wrong. But a good story is never compromised by strict adherence to the facts.

What did he say?

Oh, I can’t remember exactly but he got a few things wrong – about microbullage, for one, a winemaking technique we were using at the time. What is amazing about the book, for me, is the quality of the writing, which is lovely and very funny. He is so good at getting people to speak candidly and revealingly. He is especially good at doing that through using their own language. The subtext of the book is how language colours reality. There is this fight for language among competing ideologies.

One of the interesting scenes in the book is how he had a comparative tasting with the late [Californian winemaker] Robert Mondavi, where they looked at European and Californian wines. Osborne, being a proper European, prefers the restraint and elegance of the European wines. And Mondavi tries to steer the conversation back to how brilliant the Californian wines are, namely his wines. The words that he uses are “lively and bright”. It is interesting how this foreshadows, by a few years, the discussion of one of the American presidential advisers who describes Europe as old and tired, while America is young and positive. There is optimism in America. Although our wines might not be as complex as those in Europe, they are described as brighter and livelier.

It sounds as if some wine critics treat European wines like some people might treat their parents – as old fogies who are past it.

Something like that! There is this idea of an American can-do attitude, where our wines might not be so brilliant but they are lively.

Your next book is Roald Dahl’s Taste, a short story about a famous wine taster.

It is an amazing story. It is very funny and also captures how wine tasters can use language to assert cultural superiority. The language is so particular to a certain sort of wine taster. It is almost like a private language.

So it is the idea of the elite.

Complete elite snobbery. But the joke is that the taster who is using this language is a complete fraud. Dahl had his own issues, he was very elitist himself. The character in the book is a stockbroker who has a lot of new money, and with it he is trying to acquire taste, culture and sophistication. There is this idea that if you know the name of the wine that you are blind-tasting, you become more clever and sophisticated in being able to talk about that particular wine.