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Natasha Hughes
Natasha Hughes
spent her childhood holidays travelling from one French restaurant to another,
courtesy of two food-obsessed parents. She later went on to run a catering
company while at university (where she studied anthropology).
Neither factors
were profound influences in her choice of a career as a journalist (both in
Australia, where she lived for six years, and here in the UK), but when she
began freelancing as a sub-editor for Decanter magazine in the late 1990s, she
felt like she’d come home.
Freelancing at the
magazine on a regular basis led to an offer of a job as deputy editor of the new
Decanter website, decanter.com, where she spent a very happy year before
Decanter’s publishers realised the road to riches weren’t paved with URLs and
made most of the team redundant.
Reluctant to
return to the world of women’s magazines, Natasha struck out on her own as a
freelance writer specialising in wine and food. A combination of luck and hard
graft has resulted in regular commissions from publications ranging from
Decanter and Australian Gourmet Traveller Wine to Food & Travel and Imbibe, as
well as websites wine-pages.com and matchingfoodandwine.com. She also has a
regular column in Traveller magazine and is the editor of sommelier-pages.com.
Alongside her work
as a journalist, Natasha provides a consultancy service to private clients and
restaurants and lectures on topics as wide-ranging as how to taste, how to get
value for money from your wine purchases and food and wine matching. She
believes that drinking good wine is a right, not a privilege – and that buying
good wine doesn’t necessarily entail spending a small fortune.
Regular visits to
wineries around the globe keep her up to speed on the ever-changing world of
wine, while studying for her Master of Wine keeps her wits challenged. Natasha
is a committee member of the Circle of Wine Writers and a member of the Guild of
Food Writers, and also judges wines for a number of international competitions. |
