Neil Beckett: July 2007
Never heard of Neil Beckett? It's not entirely surprising but also a very great shame. Joanne Simon introduces a man causing ripples in fine wine circles - beneath the surface.
It's a pleasure interviewing Neil Beckett - former colleague at UK wine and spirit weekly Harpers - on his first visit to South Africa as a judge at the Old Mutual Trophy Wine Show. The London wine writing world is filled with big egos but Beckett's is not one of them - despite having a PhD and an MBA in addition to his wine qualifications.
"When he sent in his CV to apply for the job, I thought it was a hoax because he seemed so over-qualified," recalls our former editorial director, Tim Atkin MW. "Needless to say he was lovely and modest to boot."
Beckett boasts (or, rather, doesn't boast) a doctorate in Medieval History (Magdalen College, Oxford) and a fellowship of the Royal Historical Society (University of London). The softly spoken Scot admits he was destined for a career in the ivory tower of academia until he realised he preferred spending time down in the cellar. "Wine was how I got my kicks while studying and teaching."
He in fact taught Latin at St Andrews for four years. "But it wasn't quite as rewarding as I had hoped, so I struggled through an MBA to help me change direction."
The obvious route was to become a management consultant - "even though the only thing I'd ever managed was a few students at a time!" - and he duly went for an interview at leading firm McKinsey. But he also applied for and was offered a position at Edinburgh wine merchants Lay & Wheeler. "The annual salary they offered was less than the sign-up bonus at McKinsey," blushes Beckett. "But by then I'd realised that life was too short not to do something I enjoyed."
He continued studying - wine this time, eventually taking top prize in the Wine and Spirit Education Trust Diploma - and then joined Harpers, to which he still contributes. In 2004, however, he became the editor of The World of Fine Wine, an award-winning quarterly review which editorial advisor Hugh Johnson describes as "the first cultural journal of the wine world" (www.finewinemag.com). Beckett is also one of two UK tasters on the Grand Jury Européen, whose founder, François Mauss, says the following about him: "He can give you the most precise detail about a remote place in the Douro region, or this small hidden valley in New Zealand. He reminds me of this student who was asked 'what's the depth of the Danube in Vienna?' and who answered 'under which bridge?'… Thus, you have to be careful with Neil Beckett."
His first experience in situ of South African wines is beautifully articulated in his article for ICONS, the official book of the TWS. "But another thing does occur to me," he adds in an email from the UK. "There seems to be a rather surprising resignation, regarding both Cap Classique and Chardonnay, that SA can't get minerality into these wines. It seems strange to me, when you have such an amazing range of soil types, that none of them should be thought capable of contributing the minerals. I certainly got them in some of the best red wines I tasted, and also in some of the whites (e.g. The Observatory Chenin/Chardonnay) so I wonder whether it might not be a question of viticulture? Sorry," he ends off, "if that strikes you as either too obvious or too ridiculous for words!"
As Christian Davis, Atkin's successor at Harpers, sums up: "Neil is too modest and self-effacing for his own good. Count how many times he says 'sorry' while you're with him! Being an intellectual sort, he also has a slightly annoying tendency of dropping into Latin, Italian or ancient Greek - you have to read his features with a number of dictionaries and the Oxford Book of Quotations close to hand! But he is truly the nicest person you could ever hope to meet."
