Robert Joseph

Former wine writer for the London Sunday Telegraph, founder-editor of WINE International magazine and author of over 25 books, including the annual Robert Joseph Good Wine Guide, The Complete Encyclopedia of Wine, The Art of the Wine Label, and Bordeaux and its Wines. His French Wines has been published in French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Italian, and Polish.

In 1984, he launched the International Wine Challenge and built it into the world’s biggest wine competition, with regional competitions held in China, Japan, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Poland. He now serves on the board of the Mundus Vini competition in Germany.

A frequent public speaker, he gave the keynote at the 2000 Outlook Conference in Adelaide, where he warned the Australian wine industry against taking the export success of the previous decade for granted.

Since 2005, Robert has focused on producing his own wines — 3.7 million bottles of le Grand Noir, sold in over 60 countries, Greener Planet, and now a groundbreaking new project called K’AVSHIRI in Georgia — as well as providing strategic and digital marketing consultancy for a wide range of companies and regions, from Châteaux Brane-Cantenacand Malartic-Lagravière in Bordeaux to Torres, Accolade Wines, Wine Australia, and the Republic of Moldova.

From 2006 to 2025, his often-controversial weekly thoughts on wine were published in Meininger’s Wine Business International, of which he was Associate Editor. Today, they appear in his popular Wine Thinking Substack.

He was co-presenter of The Real Business of Wine webcast, and his next books, Wine Thinking and The Wine People, will be published this year. Deviled Advocacy: A Personal History of the Last 50 Years of Wine will be published next year.