Clive Coates MW

We are sorry to inform Clive's friends that he died on 26th July 2022 in hospital in Lyon. He was 80 and had been in poor health for some time. He will be sadly missed by all who knew him and we are keenly aware of the influence he had on so many wine lovers around the world. We are sure that he would have wanted anyone who wished to remember him to open a bottle of something nice and raise a glass in his memory.

The family of Clive Coates

All of the tasting notes of the wine critic mentioned above in tastingbook, comes from press releases from wine importers and vineyards, or directly from the critic and can also be found on the critic’s own website, which can be easily accessed by clicking on the link above.

An Interview with Clive Coates

Q. Clive, you were a wine merchant for twenty years, before becoming a full-time wine writer. How did you get started?

My first ambition was to be a chef. So I enrolled at the Westminster Hotel School in Vincent Square, London.

But I soon found out that cooking commercially was quite a different thing from cooking for one's friends. It was hot in the kitchen. One was always under pressure. It was noisy. ...

BURGUNDY 2018 Vintage

All smiles in Burgundy !  The harvest, which began early, around the 20th of August, finished about a month later.  

After a very wet start to the year – it seemed as if it had rained eery day in the first three months of 2018 – the summer of 2018 was very dry, very warm and very sunny. This pattern started in June and continues even into the first days of October. There have been few interruptions for rain and than...

Clive Coates MW was an award-winning wine writer and long-standing member of the Circle. Author of several books on the wines of France, he also published The Vine from 1984 until 2005. Before his wine writing career, Clive worked for 20 years as a professional wine merchant in the UK. When he retired, he moved to southern Burgundy. He passed away on 26th July in Lyon. 

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‘Cleeve Co-atts’ was a name synonymous with authority for a genera...

Clive Coates And The Malmaison Wine Club

This is an excerpt from THE GRAND CENTRAL HOTEL, by Jill Scott, and published by Waverley Books in February 2012. Reproduced with their kind permission.

The Malmaison's (the Grand Central Hotel's restaurant) reputation for excellence extended further than its fine food. There was also the Malmaison Wine Club which sold the British Transport Hotels' wine by mail order to discerning customers all ov...

Is There Such A Thing As A Philosophy Of Wine?

Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine is the title of a series of essays edited by Barry C. Smith which was published last year by the Oxford University Press. Randy Sheahan has already reviewed it in these pages, and as I largely agree with him that it is a load of pretentious rubbish, and not very elegantly or comprehensibly expressed at that, I shall not bore you any more with it.