Tim Atkin MW: Mourning a giant of wine

By Tim Atkin

Published: 14 April, 2026

Twenty-five years ago, when Michel Rolland was in his pomp, I was lucky enough to have dinner with him in London. I arrived early and was sitting alone at the table ordering my thoughts. Two Portuguese winemakers saw me and asked if I’d like to join them. “I’m waiting for Michel Rolland,” I told them. If I’d said I was dining with Cristiano Ronaldo, they couldn’t have been more impressed. “Would he taste our wines?” one enquired.

The wines duly arrived at our table. They were ordinary. Rolland sampled them and, talking to me, recognised them as such. Ten minutes later, the winemakers approached our table. What did the great man think? He was commendably polite. “Thank you so much for showing them to me,” he replied. “They were fascinating.” The winemakers puffed with pride. “Why didn’t you tell them how they could improve?” I asked. His response was telling: “Why should I ruin their evening?”

I thought about that dinner this week when I heard that Rolland had died of a heart attack at the age of 78. Rolland was a people person, part of the reason he was so successful as a consultant. He was funny, warm, charismatic, generous and made you feel at ease. He was also smart enough to avoid making unnecessary enemies.

I first met Rolland in the early 1990s, when he was still relatively unknown outside Bordeaux. I spent a day with him visiting châteaux; he was still driving himself from cellar to cellar. At the end of the day, he invited me to have dinner with his oenologist wife, Dany, at their home in Libourne. She cooked wonderful food; he opened special bottles. We became friends.

It was a pleasure to witness his success over the subsequent decade. Before long, he had a chauffeur and a lengthening list of clients, not just in Bordeaux, but in the Napa Valley, Tuscany and elsewhere, most notably in Argentina. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Rolland became the most famous winemaker in the world. The reactions to his death prove that he was well liked by many people, too.

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Polarising figure

And yet he was also a polarising figure. Why did some people take against him? A big part of the reason was that his star rose with Robert Parker’s. Their palates had a lot in common. It’s a generalisation I know, but both men appreciated oak, ripeness, softness, texture and approachability in wine. Neither had any time for what they regarded as “greenness”, or “under-ripe” flavours. These plusher wines came to dominate the fine wine world in the 1990s and 2000s. They were a new paradigm in many ways; few wine regions were left untouched.

The backlash against Rolland gathered pace after 2004, when Jonathan Nossiter’s film Mondovino was released. A little unfairly, Rolland was portrayed as the personification of globalisation, the man who had perfected a recipe that was applied wherever he went, with no regard for terroir or vintage conditions.

Even his detractors would admit that Rolland improved the world of wine, especially at the start of his career. He was professional, knowledgeable and dedicated to excellence – at least excellence as he saw it. He helped to reduce the incidence of wine faults; he encouraged people to pick later, or “una semana más”, his nickname in parts of Argentina. He had strong opinions about wine quality and he stuck to them, pretty much to the end. There was no bad faith or cynicism involved. He believed in the styles he championed.

Even as Rolland’s power began to wane, he remained enormously influential, partly by default. Like Parker, he was a lightning rod for the dislike some people felt for what they regarded as the “wrong” way of doing things, of a style that was international, not local. This, too, was a caricature. But that doesn’t undermine the strength of feeling.

Many of the best winemakers in the world today produce wines that are “anti-Rolland”, or rather a reaction to the wines that he liked to make. Others, some of them big names, continued to use his services. Rolland himself could justifiably point to the number of 100-point scores he amassed over the years and argue that he gave his clients what they wanted.

One thing is for sure. We lost a giant of our industry last week, someone who had a massive and lasting impact on what we drink. We should all mourn his passing.

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