Wine man put Palliser on the map

“There’s a quote here which reads: ‘The rich want good wine; the poor a lot of wine.’ Well, that’s bullshit. The rich drink a hell of a lot wine as well.” The speaker was Richard Riddiford. He was reading from my first wine book, which he’d agreed to launch over a decade ago. True to form, he was blunt, compelling and funny. It was a style of delivery that brought him notoriety throughout the wine world. With Riddiford’s death a couple of weeks ago, New Zealand wine lost one of its great contributors and personalities.