'1975: the wine world was about to blossom like a cherry tree'

Happy 50th, Decanter! I was 19 when the magazine first appeared. I bought my first copy shortly afterwards, and my earliest published text in Decanter was a letter.

- ANDREW JEFFORD

Pamela Vandyke Price had been replaced as The Times’ wine writer by Jane MacQuitty in the early 1980s. The transition was contested; the merits of a youthful approach to wine writing were impugned by the elder party; and the controversy spilled, like an overfull glass of Côtes du Rhône, onto the pages of this magazine. I wrote in support of youth - and Jane, now a doyenne herself.