I am an independent wine writer, but once was a writer and producer of audio visual presentations in New York City, and a home winemaker in my spare time. I followed the winemaking bug to the Finger Lakes region of New York where I made wine for a small winery. Over the past two decades, I have also worked as a wine distributor representative and part owner in a retail wine shop in Manhattan’s East Village. I have had hundreds of articles about wine (and food) published in trade magazines, two ongoing upstate NY newspaper columns, and authored five books with wine and/or food history as their subject.