I didn’t know Michel Rolland well, but we bumped into each other quite often over the years, and I heard what several of his clients had to say about him. So, here are a few personal thoughts.

1) He may have been blamed for favouring ‘over-ripe’ wines, which many people enjoyed drinking. He received little, if any credit for helping to rescue Bordeaux from the weedy, green fare that it was selling, and almost no one really liked.

2) He unjustly served as a lightning rod/proxy punch bag for people who wanted to attack Robert Parker (who also championed wines that many people really enjoyed.)

3) He was a generous, open man who characteristically made the mistake of allowing Jonathan Nossiter and his handheld camera to join him on his consultancy visits. And of giving the director of Mondovino the material to create a totally biased hatchet-job that totally misrepresented Rolland’s modus operandi.

4) He was wrongly accused of making the same wine wherever he worked. His retort to this was simple: when clients, like the owners of Ausone and Ornellaia ask me to help them achieve their ambitions, that’s what I do. When someone who’s just bought a winery simply wants to get a high score, that’s also what I do.

5) He was as interested in viticulture as winemaking

6) He was a remarkable taster. On one occasion, some of the team at Ornellaia thought he’d unfairly rejected a few samples they’d included in a line-up to go into the next vintage. So, they quietly slipped them back into the set of wines he’d shortlisted to be retasted after lunch. When he sniffed the first of these rejected wines, he instantly recognised it, and quietly said: “Please stop wasting my time”.

7) The owner of a small French estate that hired him told me that he treated them as well as he imagined they treated his most famous clients, and charged them far less than they expected.

8) His enthusiasm for Argentine Malbec and Petit Verdot - to name but two - helped to change the face of the wine industry.

Yes, he celebrated a generous style of wine that has gone out of fashion with critics and some - but not all - wine drinkers, and he can fairly be accused of not having changed his pace to march to the beat of the current drum. But that was his - and his clients’ - prerogative. Nobody ever forced anyone to hire him, or to buy a wine he had helped to produce.

Michel Rolland was a very likeable and extraordinarily gifted, hard-working member of the wine world. May he rest in peace - and my condolences to those who loved him.