When Robin Blackburne loses a game of tennis he can’t blame his racket.

The 82-year-old designed it himself.

In 1973 he grew frustrated with the ball bouncing off the frame and whizzing in the wrong direction, so he added an extra set of strings.

He sold somewhere around 15,000; he picks up one whenever he plays tennis, usually three times a week.

“It’s important to stay fit, otherwise you know what happens,” he said. “I play tennis mostly with people my age, but we do occasionally play with and against some hotshot 40-year-olds.

“Like anyone else, I probably win about half of the time. I don’t have any heart or blood pressure issues, that I know of. I seem to be very healthy. I think I make a very poor customer for my doctor.”

His real sport is inventing. One of his great success stories was a wine-cooling device, the ViniCool.

“It had very little inventive merit,” he said humbly. “But we sold hundreds of thousands of them.”

Eventually, the patent ran out.

He fell in love with wine at the tender age of 16.

“My school housemaster took four of us to France and Spain in his 1934 Alvis. We just squeezed in. It was totally normal to drink, even at lunchtime in those days.

“It was Spain where I was really first exposed to wine. It wasn’t so much the quality of the wine, because at that age I didn’t know anything about that, it was the sheer enjoyment and taste of it.

“It was a very pleasurable experience which has stayed with me for the last 60 years or so.”

Mr Blackburne was born in Bramhope, West Yorkshire outside of Leeds. His father, Arthur, was the internal auditor for Standard Oil, which later became Esso.

The Blackburnes moved south soon after he was born, and he was raised mostly in Surrey.

After his visit to Europe in his teens, he was determined to study Spanish at Cambridge University’s Corpus Christi College.

Things didn’t work out. There was an admissions backlog owing to war veterans seeking education after the war, and there was only one place on offer.

“Unfortunately, I’d made a terrible mistake and had not applied for any other colleges, although I probably would have got in,” he said.

He felt he should look for a job.

In 1953, after a disastrous, very brief stint as a prep schoolteacher, he found a job at Saccone and Speed. The London company was one of the world’s largest suppliers of wine.

“All I ever really wanted to do was wine,” he said.

He started out in the mail room, but didn’t stay there long. After a few months he was sent to France for a year, to train as the company’s Burgundy expert.

“It was after the war and everything in the region was crumbling,” he said. “There wasn’t any money to put bathrooms in the châteaux.

“These were magnificent buildings, some with 30 or 40 bedrooms.

“Money still hadn’t come back to the region. People were just beginning to buy wine again. Since then, the Bordelais have made billions and have redone all their châteaux. When I was first there it was very much like you were still living in the 30s.”

He fell in love with the region and its wine. Red Burgundy is still his favourite wine today. He came to Bermuda in 1962 after spotting a magazine advertisement for a start-up wine company, Bristol Cellars.

He’d done well at Saccone and Speed and was an assistant buyer.

“I was doing well,” he said, “but there were some minor irritations to life in London.”

He’d just broken up with a his girlfriend and was looking for a change.

Plus, an annoying parking meter, one of London’s first, was put right where he parked his Daimler. He found the parking situation frustrating.

“My father, a chartered accountant said, ‘Don’t even think about taking this job in Bermuda’,” said Mr Blackburne.

“David Graham, of Conyers, Dill & Pearman, arguably the father with Fred Reiss, of the offshore business in Bermuda, was one of the people behind it. The original directors were wine lovers, but the fledgeling firm had no wine, no premises and no customers.”

He took the job, after popping across the street to the Bermuda Tourism Office to check out what this place called Bermuda looked like.

He liked all the palm trees and turquoise water he saw in the brochures.

“Except for Hamilton, which has changed incredibly, it was not that different then,” he said.

“The roads in Somerset were incredibly narrow.

“The buses were already quite large but, amazingly, they managed to pass one another or they had to stop and wait for one to pass; the railway had been tragically taken down.”

He stayed, as CEO, with Bristol Cellars for 25 years before establishing Balmoral Wine Shippers Ltd to ship champagnes and other wines from France and New Zealand to the United States.

He met his Austrian wife, Joy, while skiing in her homeland.

“We got married in 1967,” he said.

“That’s not bad, eh? We’ll be celebrating our 50th anniversary next year.”

Today, Mr Blackburne is retired but still does a bit of consulting for the wine industry and continues to work on further developing the search engine technology.

In his spare time he enjoys writing comic verse. He collected some of his poetry into a book called Vintage Versage in 1984.

He loves reading and one of his more recent poems is about his concern that physical books might disappear in favour of electronic readers.

He and his wife have two daughters Amanda Temple and Sacha Blackburne Adamson, and two grandchildren, Oslo and Indigo.