How to become a wine writer

I must get a dozen letters or emails a year from people who want my advice on how to follow me into the gloriously sybaritic profession of wine writing. Depending on where they are based, I usually suggest a few likely outlets and that they might consider specialising in one particularly useful but under-covered aspect or area of wine so as to bolster their value as an initially seriously underpaid contributor.

But the recent bolt from the blue that an old friend of mine, Tony Quinn, has been appointed wine correspondent of Esquire in the UK suggests quite another...