Only once in my life did I ever think I knew everything there was to be known about wine. It was in 1978, after finishing two years’ worth of courses run by the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. By dint of luck, and a dose of grammar school diligence, I was the top student of my year, and reckoned that with a WSET diploma under my belt, I was now a fully fledged wine expert.

The succeeding years have taught me just how much there still is to learn. But, as someone celebrating her 40th year writing about wine, I have to concede I am considered by many as a wine expert. However, I am keenly aware of the sands that have been shifting under the notion of expertise in this era of instant communication and (often anti-) social media.

In the last decade or two of the 20th century, when it took more than a nanosecond to communicate, the most successful wine writers around the globe were considered near-oracular. This was most obviously the case for America’s Robert M Parker Jr, who from 1977 promulgated a system of scoring wines out of 100 that made “understanding” wine or, at least, working out which he judged the best, delightfully easy, whatever your native language. The points system also made it possible for those selling wine to let a third party — often, but not always, Parker — do much of the work of selling (and selection) for them, and in the Parker era, shops, catalogues and websites featured not prose, nor enthusiastic verbal recommendations, but numbers, almost all of them between 89 and 101. Parker could certainly make or break wines and wineries with the same power as exercised by the most highly regarded theatre or restaurant critics.