I am sad, very sad, to hear that Bill Baker has died. He was, in a way, the best of us — in that he gave himself entirely to his vocation. Gleefully. On every occasion I met him, I marvelled at this, while at the same time worrying (on behalf of all those that loved him) that his devotion was too reckless, too absolute. His zest for life was so strong that I thought it would serve as his angel, whisking him away from the brink. Until last week, it did.

For those who never knew him, I hope that the following text, an edited version of a piece which I wrote last year for Waitrose Food Illustrated after a wonderful lunch together, will illustrate why this big man inspired so much affection.

Every profession needs its heroes. Those, in other words, who follow the path as far as it leads. Those who sacrifice everything to the cause. Those who leave common caution at home in the tooth mug as they hurtle down the Cresta Run of their chosen vocation. The SAS colonel, the pioneering heart surgeon, the actor who lives rough for a month for a down-and-out film role, the trapeze artist who disdains the safety net: so far, so obvious. But what if you’re a wine merchant?

Bill Baker tucked his napkin into his shirt collar and peered over his glasses (characteristically askew) at the trio of bones on the plate just deposited in front of him. The waitress looked anxious. “I’ll have the marrow,” he’d said to her ten minutes earlier. “But I’m hoping there’ll be more marrow than last time we were here.” Inspection over, he leant back and beamed. “Much better bones.” She smiled, with sudden maternal indulgence. Implements at the ready, a quick slurp of Sauzet’s `87 Puligny-Truffières, and we were off.

There is a sort of perfection in sitting opposite a 23-stone wine merchant dressed in an entire roll of black pinstripe cloth in London’s most blessedly fundamentalist restaurant, two bottles at the ready, just as the starting gun is fired on a three-course lunch. (Among the options we didn’t chose from the St John menu were pigeon and trotter pie; tripe, fennel and butterbeans; and rolled pig’s spleen and bacon.) Not for the gourmandise alone, of course; embonpoint and appetite are nothing if the brain is encased in suet. But Baker (he always answers the phone with a snap of his surname) is unfailingly zesty with it. He’s socially unreconstructed, politically incorrect and bubbling with mirth: the perfect lunch partner, in other words. Quite why nobody has yet made a television series which hitches him to Clarissa Dickson-Wright, I don’t know. They could charge around the country eating good meals and airing prejudices. Reality TV spiced with wit would make a welcome change.

Wine is meant for food, and the reason why I put Baker in the pantheon of great wine merchants is that the two are seamlessly fused in his work - and life. Most of what he sells is to restaurants, and the sale begins when he books a table for lunch or dinner. With eating comes understanding. He is a walking restaurant guide (as well as looking like the original Michelin man), and his career path was set from the moment when, while his baser Charterhouse coevals were fingering illicit copies of Penthouse and Playboy, he was working his way through the original five-book boxed set of Elizabeth David. “The school food was bloody awful. I used to exist on peanut butter sandwiches and the occasional six-egg omelette in the evening if you could get hold of the gas ring. I remember coming across the recipe for Sole Dieppoise in French Provincial Cooking. It was like food pornography. I thought, ‘I could just do with this dish NOW …’” The book led to a summer trip around France, and the Peterhouse Wine Society at Cambridge. Baker emerged with a third, but he did drink Latour `61 with the College Dean and shared `61 Pontet-Canet at Kings for £4 and 10 shillings the bottle. Michael Portillo was a Cambridge friend. “Very clever man. I fell out with him massively. Because he told me what to do. I don’t like people telling me what to do. He said I was an absolute idiot to marry my first wife. Sadly he was right. After the divorce, we held a ‘Portillo Was Right’ party. Clever man, Michael.”

The Lucullan picture I have painted may give you the impression that Baker is a rigid wine classicist - but that would be wrong. Another of his long-term jobs is acting as wine consultant for the Conran group of restaurants; every year the Decanter World Wine Awards sees him judging not claret or burgundy, but Australian wines. “Why am I in the wine trade? One, because I couldn’t do anything else. But the main reason why I’m in the wine trade is because you can never know all there is to know. I find it intellectually challenging - old vintages of claret, new Australian vintages. It’s fun. When it no longer becomes fun, I shall stop doing it.”

Needless to say, Baker has made enemies. “Robert Parker once wrote to me saying that I was a small and jealous person who should be selling refrigerators.” The distinctive Baker laugh follows - a peal of tee-hees followed by a noise which sounds like a small volcano venting. “Needless to say, he hadn’t met me. Even he wouldn’t write a tasting note as bad as that.”

I wondered if the trapeze artist in Baker ever considered the possibility of a safety net. “I have an attitude - which is not shared by my wife, who thinks that fat people automatically die young — that if you enjoy something, you should bloody well do it. I probably drink a couple of bottles of wine a day, on average, and it makes you fat. So does food. But some people are lucky. Though at the moment I have got a problem with my knee, which is painful. Jonathan Meades had the same problem, and he went and lost a vast amount of weight. Now he looks like a death’s head, but he’s fit and can walk. I don’t intend giving up walking. So a time may come when you see a rather thinner Baker.” Pending that moment, he set about his Eccles cake and Lancashire cheese with gusto.

I am sad; we are sad. But Bill would have no truck with our sadness.