People who rule the wine world

The most respected of all wine consumer magazines, Decanter, has just published its annual list of the top 50 'movers and shakers' in the world of wine. And there are some rather surprising results.

The top three (in descending order) are: the chairman of Constellation Brands, Richard Sands; The Wine Advocate's famed critic, Robert Parker; and the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Marianne Fischer Bold. Nicolas Sarkozy comes in at number nine which, I imagine, would irritate him enormously, despite being a teetotaller.

Robert Parker should actually be number one on this list. It is he who reigns as the world's top wine writer and critic by some margin. The Bordeaux 2008 en primeur campaign, for instance, was decidedly lacklustre until Parker wrote that it was actually a very good vintage.

Suddenly everything changed. Prices went up (mid-recession) and the wines sold out almost instantly in a buzz of excitement - something an EU commissioner could never achieve in a hundred years.

Constellation Brands sits at the top of the list because it is the major supplier of branded wines (as the name implies) to the world's supermarkets. Serious wine drinkers, however, tend to avoid their wines as most are mass-produced, bad value (thanks to high advertising costs) and lacking that extra dimension that small growers can give.

There are several other interesting entries. There's Robert Shum of Aussino wines in China - Aussino in Chinese means 'Rich, prosperous wine business'. There's also Greg Jones, a US climatologist; Sanjay Menon, the biggest wine distributor in India, and Shin and Yoko Kibayashi, authors of the Japanese manga comic The Drops of God, in which the hero has to uncover 12 great wines in order to inherit his father's cellar. Apparently, according to Decanter, this is "arguably the most influential wine publication for the past 20 years"!

My personal list would include Robert Parker; Michel Rolland, the world's most influential winemaker and consultant; Michael Broadbent, the greatest living authority on mature fine wines; Corine Mentzelopoulos, the dynamic owner of Chateau Margaux, and, last but not least, the French and American doctors whose findings (known as the 'French Paradox') showed once and for all that drinking wine in moderation is good for us rather than bad. ·