LEN EVANS, a pioneer of the renaissance of Australian table wine, was a wine writer, judge, winemaker and champion of the cause in all its forms. At various times he even owned a wine shop and a restaurant. There is precious little that is related to wine that Evans did not do.

He was a notable bon vivant and larger-than-life, exceptionally generous, inspiring and thoughtful, commanding battalions of friends and admirers throughout the world.

Leonard Paul Evans was born in 1930 in Felixstowe, East Anglia. His father, Robert “Chick” Evans, had been with the RAF since its early Royal Flying Corps days, and ended up Air Force Provost Marshal in India during the war. His mother was born Kathleen Hewitt. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Wales, but returned to England when he was three.

Evans attended Framlingham College but had no great academic inclinations. His passion at that time was golf, and he haboured dreams of a life as a professional. After his demobilisation from National Service in 1950 he became a PE instructor with the RAF. He left for New Zealand to work in the Forestry Commission in 1953 and went on to Australia two years later.

Evans’s Australian beginnings were not auspicious. He worked as a welder for General Motors and erected fences against rabbits in the bush. In his peregrinations around Australia, however, he did meet some of the people who were to become important to him later, such as the great winemaking Hill Smith family in the Barossa Valley.

In Sydney he got a job washing glasses, and eventually, in 1960, achieved the status of assistant general manager of the Chevron Hilton. In this position he had the opportunity to develop his interest in wine, and established one of the country’s finest cellars of Australian and imported wines at the hotel.

In 1962 he became Australia’s first regular wine writer when he was taken on by the Observer (later The Bulletin). He was to write a number of books on Australian wine, including The Galloping Gourmet (1968), although The Complete Book of Australian Wines (1973) is his best known.

In 1965 he founded the Australian Wine Bureau and became busy with the promotion of table wine in a country which was still largely wedded to its native ports and sherry.

Evans is always credited with being at the forefront of the movement to create palatable table wine in Australia, but in truth wine has a much longer history on the continent. David Wynn, for example, had begun producing great table wines in Coonawarra in 1954 and even Australia’s most prestigious wine Grange (then called Grange Hermitage) had already been launched when Evans landed in Australia. Evans, however, rode the rising wave and remained on its crest until the end.

He was behind the creation of a number of world-famous wines. From 1969 to 1996 he was chairman of the Rothbury Estate and from 1978 to 1992 of Petaluma. Both companies changed the face of Australia. Rothbury created the style now known as Australian chardonnay, although some critics always maintained that the Rothbury semillon was superior. When Mildara Blass took over the company, it was already a multi-million-dollar business.

At Petaluma he worked with Brian Croser, who had returned from California with the fervour of an evangelist, determined to see the creation of real cabernets rather than look-alikes made from the ubiquitous Shiraz (Syrah) grape.

When he moved on from Rothbury and Petaluma, Evans continued on his own, with Evans Family Wines Vineyard in the Hunter Valley. He was also briefly involved with wine in France and California, when together with the millionaire Robert Fox he bought Châteaux Rahoul in the Graves and Padouen in Barsac and Round Hill in the Napa. The venture came to an abrupt halt when Fox was killed in a car accident in 1981.

Evans was generous to a fault. Young English wine writers who went to visit him in his eyrie above the Hunter Valley were treated to a glass of Bollinger champagne (a rarity in Australia) and the run of his huge cellar. In later years he became passionate about ceramics and sculpture and would make highly individual presents for his friends around the world. He was heavily involved with various charities, and used to force his guests to play a blind tasting game called “Options” where the losers made donations to good causes.

He was famously direct and disarmingly honest. He was above all a great lover of life and a major player in every sense of the term. His parties were the stuff of legend. Wine was no academic pursuit; Evans was certainly no windcheater-wearing “wine-spotter”. As he was fond of saying: “You only have so many bottles in your life, never drink a bad one.” His own cellar was a testament to this. Its contents was all for drinking and contained many treasures, not just Australian, but Italian, German and French: he maintained that France was the supreme master as far as wine was concerned.

His efforts were duly recognised with numerous honours. In 1982 he was appointed

OBE for services to Australian wine and in 1999 the Order of Australia. In France he was made Chevalier de Mérite Agricole. Decanter magazine made him man of the year in 1997. He was president of the Australian Wine Foundation from 1990-96 and for 35 years he was involved with selecting the wines for Qantas flights. In 1982 he joined the all-important Australian show circuit, judging wines in the federal states and in the capital, Canberra. From 1982 to 1990 he was chairman of the Canberra Show as well as chairman in Sydney from 1977.

Len Evans’s end was sudden and unexpected. He had gone to fetch his wife from hospital in Newcastle, New South Wales, where she had undergone extensive surgery. He was found dead at the wheel of his car in the hospital car park after suffering a massive heart attack.

He married Patricia (née Hayton) in 1959. She survives him, together with a son and two daughters.

Len Evans, AO, OBE, oenophile, was born on August 1, 1930. He died on August 17, 2006, aged 75.