[2] Born in Wimbledon, London on 21 October 1941,[3] Coates worked for The Wine Society in Stevenage in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
[4] In 1975 he founded the award-winning magazine The Vine,[5][6] a monthly fine wine journal that ran for 241 issues until ill-health in 2005 forced him to stop.
Despite describing himself as semi retired, he published his latest book, The Wines of Burgundy in March 2008.
He died after a long illness at a hospital in Lyon, on 26 July 2022, at the age of 80.
The new book from 2008 is effectively a revision of this one, but expanded to include all major wine districts of Burgundy, and without the in-depth profile of a selected number of producers in the 1997 book.