Bio:

About five years ago, while touring North Fork, Long Island, wineries as an interested resident of the Island's south fork, I came upon a free publication called the GrapeZine. A magazine junkie, I pick up just about every free publication that comes along, and most of them aren't worth the paper they're printed on. This one was different. It was genuinely funny. It was engaging and intelligent. It was offbeat and outrageous. It made me say, "Here's where I belong."

I didn't care that I knew virtually nothing about wine, except that I liked cabernet franc better than merlot, dry better than sweet, and blush not at all. There was also food in the 'Zine, which was something I knew plenty about. That's how I got the publisher and editor to let me in, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Thanks to the late Michael Todd, I became the wine novice, someone eager to learn who pays attention and can distill some of the vast body of oenologic knowledge into clear, concise writing -- that fit the 'Zine's style, of course. Irreverent, but never irrelevant, he used to say. Eccentric but essential. In short order I was senior writer, taking classes with the Sommelier Society of America's charter eastern Long Island group -- a very humbling experience for someone accustomed to getting all the answers right. It takes a lot of studying to be a sommelier.

Fast forward to the present. Working as a staff editor and writer at a weekly newspaper, I'm feeling an itch, a nagging feeling that I ought to be doing something better with my writing, something more fun, something where I can use more of my own voice and none of my bossy editor's, and where my expertise, such as it is, is appreciated. All it took was a Sunday afternoon spent at a local winery's harvest party and I knew: I had to get back into wine.

A Web search turned up Artisans, where I was happy to find Michael Fallow, with whom I'd worked for a time on the 'Zine, and who is one of the nicest guys named Michael I know. (And I know a lot of Michaels. Must be karmic or something.) He liked my idea of channeling Mike Todd's energy from the great beyond, filtering it through what I continue to discover about wine, and passing it along to you, the discerning consumer.

Stay tuned, maybe we'll learn something together.