 He was educated at Gresham's School, the University of Reading (where he read English) and the University of East Anglia, where his post-graduate studies were jointly supervised by the late Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Guido Almansi.At UEA he worked for two years on a PhD thesis on the short fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, which was not completed.He began work as an editor with Paul Hamlyn's "Octopus Group", and his passions for wine and writing led to articles and books on wine, after four years in publishing in 1988.