What is the future of the wine book? Or rather, whither wine book publishers? Life in the online age is tough for most publishers, and wine writers seem increasingly to be taking the initiative.

Allen Meadows, an American finance executive turned burgundy guru, aka Burghound, has just published his first book himself. Well, not exactly himself. In charge of just about everything except the 180,000 words in Pearl of the C?te, a handsome, fully illustrated 350-page monograph on the wines of Vosne-Romanée, was his wife Erica. What she had to do was “put together the entire team – and cover all the costs – featuring several artists, photographers (including taking one up in a helicopter for specific aerial views), mapmakers, book designers, copy editors, printing, computer programming for shopping cart and sales, indexing, book production manager, storage facilities, all fulfilment, etc”.

Or, as Meadows puts it, “self-publishing is not rocket science but it is still impressively complicated because of the huge myriad of details involved in taking a finished manuscript and turning it into a finished book. Then, even when you have a professional product, the marketing and fulfilment challenges are ultimately what make the difference between a successful and failed book project.”