It's more than two decades since I had to write something "bold, new and imaginative about wine for everyday drinking" to secure a wine-writer prize. As there wasn't a great deal to talk about outside the narrow confines of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Beaujolais (the three Bs, as my then editor put it), I decided instead to gaze into my crystal ball with a view to predicting how the wine world would be shaping up in the year 2010. It seemed at the time as distant a horizon as 1984 had been when I was at school; but, with only a few months till the witching hour, I'm amazed to see how much my crystal ball failed me all those years ago.