The CSWWC is the largest, toughest and most prestigious Champagne & Sparkling Wine competition, where every wine is judged (blind, of course) by the same three most experienced specialists in the world and ALL the medals awarded are special (Silver is the lowest we award, and if it is a Champagne prestige cuvée, Gold is the lowest ... but we do proactively help and encourage bronze medal winners from new or obscure wine regions to progress and improve). We expressly do not have 4 judges with a chair with the power to overrule (that way lies madness!). The CSWWC is the only wine competition that opens up a second, third or fourth bottle of every single non-award-winning wine to compare side-by-side with the bottle (or bottles) the judges tasted, to check for bottle variation. We are the only competition with a category for future releases (our judges have 55 years combined experience of tasting forward, something that some specialists never have zero experience of).

Although I started writing in the mid-1970s, my career did not take off until 1980. In the 1980s and early 1990s I wrote about wine for more than 100 publications globally, everything from glossies like Vogue, through newspapers such as The Daily Telepgraph, to trade publications like The Publican and, of course, consumer wine publication like Decanter and, later, Wine Magazine. If nothing else, it taught me to specialise, primarily in Champagne and once I had built a reputation, in books, particularly major, longterm projects (such as Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia and Christie's World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine). I have a regular Champagne column in The World of Fine Wine, and I have judged at wine competitions in Australia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, South Africa and the USA. In the UK, I held the chair of both the Champagne panel and Alsace panel for the Decanter World Wine Awards from its inception until 2012. In 2014 I launched my own competition, the Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships.

Published continuously by Dorling Kindersley since 1988, Sotheby's Wine Encyclopedia is used as a standard reference for Master of Wine and Master Sommelier examinations all over the world, it has sold more than 700,000 copies in 14 major languages, and has won 4 literary awards.

Published by Absolute Press, Christie's World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine was the first book to publish a 17th-century document proving that the English invented the so-called méthode champenoise six years before Dom Pérignon even set foot in Hautvillers, a revelation that ensured the book made history as the only wine book to warrant a leader in any UK national newspaper (The Guardian, 14 October 1998). Revised and expanded (double the original size) by Essi Evellan MW in 2013.