John Radford

John Radford, born in Nottingham on 1 December 1946, died on 19 October 2012, was a British writer and broadcaster in the field of wine and food, with an emphasis on Spain. He was educated at Stamford School in Lincolnshire. Career After a background in the food and drink industry and retail, Radford's writing career started with children's comics, principally for the Dundee publishing house of D. C. Thomson & Co., with Judy comic for girls, for which he wrote a good deal of the annuals from 1978 to 1985 as well as the weekly paper. He also wrote for the same publisher's science fiction series Starblazer, and contributed to other publications, including a series of stories about Dixon Hawke the Dover Street Detective for the Dundee Sporting Post. He began lecturing about wine whilst in the wine trade, from 1975, and started writing about wine from 1977. His first regular column was in 1981 in the Coventry Evening Telegraph and this was subsequently syndicated to local dailies around the UK. He also contributed wine articles to Decanter Magazine from 1985, as well as writing general features for regional and county glossies and business magazines. As a result of his perceived interest in Spain, he was commissioned by ICEX, the Spanish Embassy Commercial Office in London, to write the trade/press textbook for Spanish wines The Spanish Wine Education Notes, which appeared bi-annually from 1989 to 2001, after which ICEX took it in-house and it went online.