In a winery line-up, you wouldn’t pick out Peter Vinding-Diers as the winemaker. This tall, confident man, still dashing in his late seventies, looks as though he’d rather be striding across moorland with dogs in tow than pruning vines.
It was a glimpse of the vineyards of Beaune that first made him think that making wine could be his future. At that time, he probably never dreamed that in the years ahead he would be acclaimed as an oenological wizard, especially for his work in isolating yeasts and solving other winemaking conundrums; nor that he would play a major role as an early ‘flying winemaker’ and in reviving the ancient traditions of Tokaj in Hungary.