One of the first women to write about wine, she was known for her prickly putdowns and forthright views about food and drink
Pamela Vandyke Price, who has died aged 90, was the first woman in Britain to write seriously about wine and spirits. Writing about drinking – its tastes, smells, intoxication, history and innumerable scraps of lore and myth – had been the preserve of a variety of old buffers, long on purple prose, short on precision. Vandyke Price arrived on the scene just as mass wine consumption began in Britain. People had a taste for drink and needed fast, often peremptory, instruction. She provided it. She became a wine correspondent of the Times newspaper, closely followed by many readers, and wrote books on the subject.
She was born Pamela Walford in Coventry, daughter of a clockmaker and his wife, a part-French woman with a firm vision of her middle-class station. Pamela was privately educated and went on to study English at Somerville College, Oxford, being taught by both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.
Her life was peppered by a long list of dislikes and prohibitions: no perfume or talking in the tasting-room, no bought sandwiches, and above all, no bad manners. When she was making plans for her own funeral, there was a list of people not to be invited.
Her mother encouraged her to think of the stage as a career and she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, in the postwar years. She never actually trod the boards, though the apprenticeship bore unlikely fruit when she gave tutored wine tastings. These were impressive affairs, though heaven help anyone who asked a stupid question. Eventually, her series of tastings at Christie's – where she was the only teacher not drawn from the wine trade itself – came to an end in the early 1990s after just such an outburst.
While at the Central she met, then married, a student doctor, Alan Vandyke Price. Finances required that she find work, and in 1952 she answered an advertisement for household editor with the magazine House & Garden. As was the unlikely way of journalism in those days, she got the job and found herself in the prestigious offices of the Condé Nast magazine company.
In 1955 her husband died, and soon after she was sacked by Condé Nast. There followed years of working in public relations, mainly with food or drink concerns, and the first steps in writing books. Allan Sichel, head of the Bordeaux shippers of that name, a partner in Château Palmer, taught her much of her skill as a wine taster, and encouraged her in the pursuit of tasting qualifications. She was a lone woman among a bevy of suited gentleman apprentices following the arduous five-year course in the knowledge at Vintners' Hall that was the precursor of the Master of Wine exam. At the same time, she accompanied Sichel on buying trips, criss-crossing France for several years. The outcome was France, a Food and Wine Guide (1966).
By the time of Sichel's death in 1965, Vandyke Price was becoming a name to be reckoned with. Her guide to France was well received and gained more kudos than her earlier Art of the Table (1962) – a guide for the insecure hostess at the outset of the dinner-party years – or her Casserole Cookery (1961).
She began to write for the broadsheet newspapers – a useful preparation for her editorship of Wine and Food Magazine when it came under the aegis of Condé Nast in 1967. When that magazine was sold, the invitation to join the Times as wine correspondent was the more welcome. There she remained until being summarily sacked 12 years later. By now, a new generation of wine writers was ready to succeed her.
She wrote an increasing number of books towards the end of her active career. There were two further versions of her guide to France, as well as monographs on the wines of Alsace and the Graves, two Penguin handbooks on wines and spirits, a guide to the art of tasting wine, many subsidiary publications and her own memoirs, A Woman of Taste (1990).
Honours were deserved and were accorded. She was the first winner of the Glenfiddich award for her wine writing in 1971 and won a further Glenfiddich medal in 1973. The French recognised her activities on their behalf by making her a Chevalier de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole in 1981, and in 1983 she was the first woman to be elected to the Jurade of St Emilion. She also played a pivotal role in the formation of the Circle of Wine Writers in the early 1960s.
Vandyke Price will be remembered by many as a difficult, prickly character, whose put-downs were deadly and who raged more than was needful at the mutability of circumstance in a writer's life. By way of contrast, she was fiercely loyal in her friendships and she really loved her subject. Her nose and her palate – though always better on reds than on whites – were impressive to the end.
"Ah – the ladies have come! Now we shall not be able to taste anything – all your scents and smells," remarked an old buffer in Bordeaux as Pamela swung into the tasting room at Sichel on the Quai de Bacalan. "I can smell the preparation you use on your hair," she rejoined, "the cleaning fluid that has been used on your suit, your boot polish – and you have a pipe in your pocket." What's more, she could, and he did.
• Pamela Vandyke Price, wine writer, born 21 March 1923; died 12 January 2014