Clive Coates (21 October 1941 – 26 July 2022) was a British wine writer and Master of Wine, best known for his books about the wines of
Burgundy
Burgundy (; french: link=no, Bourgogne ) is a historical territory and former administrative region and province of east-central France. The province was once home to the Dukes of Burgundy from the early 11th until the late 15th century. The c ...
.winepros.com.au.
Biography
Born in Wimbledon, London on 21 October 1941, Coates worked for The Wine Society in
Stevenage
Stevenage ( ) is a large town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, about north of London. Stevenage is east of junctions 7 and 8 of the A1(M), between Letchworth Garden City to the north and Welwyn Garden City to the south. In 1946, Stevena ...
in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The Wine Society, ''Society News'', Jan/Feb 2007 In 1975 he founded the award-winning magazine '' The Vine'',winepros.com.au. clive-coates.com bio a monthly fine wine journal that ran for 241 issues until ill-health in 2005 forced him to stop. He also wrote a number of classic books about the classic wine regions of France in this time. Despite describing himself as semi retired, he published his latest book, ''The Wines of Burgundy'' in March 2008.
Coates lived in Saint-Bonnet-de-Vieille-Vigne, between the
Côte Chalonnaise
Côte Chalonnaise is a subregion of the Burgundy wine region of France. Côte Chalonnaise lies to the south of the Côte d'Or continuing the same geology southward. It is still in the main area of Burgundy wine production but it includes no Grand c ...
and the Mâconnais. He died after a long illness at a hospital in Lyon, on 26 July 2022, at the age of 80.
Bibliography
He is best known for ''Côte d'Or: A Celebration of the Great Wines of Burgundy'', a survey of the most famous wine-producing region of Burgundy covering more than 1000 pages, published in 1997. It includes technical information about the vineyards of the
Côte-d'Or
Côte-d'Or (; literally, "Golden Slope") is a département in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region of Northeastern France. In 2019, it had a population of 534,124.wine making techniques employed by hundreds of different producers and
wine ratings
A wine rating is a score assigned by one or more wine critics to a wine tasted as a summary of that critic's evaluation of that wine. A wine rating is therefore a subjective quality score, typically of a numerical nature, given to a specific bottl ...
of thousands of wines. The new book from 2008 is effectively a revision of this one, but expanded to include all major wine districts of Burgundy, and without the in-depth profile of a selected number of producers in the 1997 book.
Other recent books include ''The Wines of Bordeaux'' (2004) and ''The Great Wines of France'' (2005).