Marvin R. Shanken, Visionary Publisher Who Transformed the Worlds of Wine and Cigars, Dies at 83
As Wine Spectator’s editor and publisher for more than five decades, Shanken built a powerhouse magazine by focusing on serving wine consumers
He was not on the list.
Marvin R. Shanken, the founder of publishing company M. Shanken Communications and longtime editor and publisher of Wine Spectator, died on October 29. He was 83 years old. Over a five-decade career, Shanken dramatically shaped the wine world, as well as the spirits, beer, cigar and restaurant industries. He helped educate millions of Americans on the joys and virtues of wine, and tirelessly encouraged and pushed winemakers to produce the best for their customers. First and foremost, he saw his role as serving his readers.
Shanken began his journalism career in 1972, when he purchased a small beverage alcohol industry newsletter named Impact. Within a decade, he turned it into essential reading for thousands of members of the wine and spirits industries. In 1979, he purchased a struggling newspaper given away for free at wine shops named The Wine Spectator, which he would grow and then transform into a glossy magazine prized by more than 3 million wine lovers as essential reading.
He also founded the trade publications Market Watch and Shanken News Daily, along with the lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado, and purchased Food Arts and Malt Advocate, which he renamed Whisky Advocate.
In his role as editor and publisher of Wine Spectator, Shanken covered and helped shape wine’s growing presence in American life, as it became less of a niche product and more of an essential companion with a good meal. He established Wine Spectator’s Restaurant Awards program to encourage restaurants to take wine programs seriously. He launched the Wine Experience to bring together the world’s greatest wine producers with their most devoted consumer fans. And he created the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation to give back, supporting education in the winemaking and hospitality industries.
“The holy trinity of wine in America is Ernest Gallo, Robert Mondavi, and Marvin Shanken,” said Gerry Ruvo, longtime wine and spirits industry executive.
An Unexpected Detour Into Journalism
Marvin Ray Shanken was born on October 4, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from Yale University, though he liked to joke, “I didn't go to Yale. The closest I got was the Yale Bowl, where I sold cold beer on weekends.” His father, Oscar, ran a small jewelry store.
After high school and a summer stint volunteering for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, Shanken studied business at the University of Miami. He became a devoted Hurricanes fan and would later serve as a member of the university’s board of trustees, but in 1965, he graduated last in his class, which he often joked about. He hoped to study for an M.B.A. from American University in Washington, but the school would only accept him if he first took night classes. “I got straight A’s,” he later told the New York Times. “They had to let me in.”
In 1968, Shanken got a job on Wall Street with a small
investment banking firm, primarily working on real estate investments. Two
years later, he was dispatched to California to help finance a vineyard
purchase for a client. While doing due diligence on the wine industry, he was
surprised to find out there was almost no public information.
After the deal was complete, the client took Shanken out for dinner at an elegant French restaurant in Westchester County, N.Y., called La Crémaillère, and told him he could order any wine on the menu. As he later told Wine Spectator’s former executive editor Thomas Matthews, “Frankly, I’d never had any great wine before, but there was one I’d heard of, so I ordered it: 1961 Pétrus. We drank it and bells went off. I loved the taste and wanted to learn everything I could about wine.”
Quickly he began studying about both wine and the industry that produced it. Two years later, a fresh inspiration struck after he was involved in a traffic accident during another trip in California. Lying in the hospital, he later told longtime editor Michael Moaba, “I had an epiphany that I love wine, not real estate, and decided I wanted to be a wine writer.”
But where to start? With no experience and $5,000 he borrowed from his sister Elaine, he bought the Impact newsletter from Jack Maxwell, a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Maxwell handed him a box with 200 index cards—Impact’s subscribers. For the next three years, Shanken ran Impact part-time while continuing his day job.
“Within the first three months, I was certain I had made the biggest mistake of my life,” he later said. “I had jumped out of an airplane without a parachute.”
Impact was a trade newsletter analyzing the wine and spirits industry. In the 1970s, most of these companies were privately owned and kept their financials to themselves. Most trade publications simply reprinted press releases. “I quickly learned the liquor industry was a closed kingdom, controlled by a small group of liquor barons. They didn’t want outsiders. To suggest that I was unwelcome would be an understatement.” Shanken remembered attending a conference where he tried to introduce himself to various industry titans, who all pointedly ignored him.
But while the producers did not want independent, professional journalism digging into their finances, alcoholic beverage wholesalers did. They proved Shanken’s early supporters, buying subscriptions for their staff and retailer customers. In 1975, he quit his day job and began working on Impact full-time, with one other employee. Recently divorced, his offices were the one-bedroom apartment on East 53rd Street in Manhattan that he lived in.
Slowly but surely, he found success. In 1976, Impact published its first annual research study, an in-depth look at volumes and sales figures of the alcohol industry, which has now grown into a series of reports called Shanken’s Impact Databank. In 1977, he held the first annual Impact Marketing Seminar, a daylong event for industry leaders to discuss trends in marketing, advertising and government regulation. He hoped for 50 people, and 125 showed up. Impact quickly became essential reading.
“Marvin’s material is probably the most authoritative statistical work ever done on the industry,” Abdallah Simon, the late, iconic chairman of Seagram Vintners, told the New York Times in 1986.
A White Knight for a Wine Magazine
The Wine Spectator was founded in San Diego in April, 1976, by Bob Morrisey. A free tabloid newspaper, it was distributed in local wine shops. Shanken saw it on a trip and loved it. “It was simple, unpretentious and entertaining for consumers,” he said. He called Morrisey to compliment him, and the two men became friends, regularly chatting about their respective publications.
But by 1978, Morrisey was struggling to keep it afloat and offered to sell it to Shanken. Turning him down, Shanken instead traveled to San Diego and spent several days offering ideas for turning it around. But a year later, Morrisey reached out again—if Shanken wouldn’t buy The Wine Spectator, it would cease publication. “He flew to New York, we met and somehow he got me to agree. I think the only reason I agreed to do it is that I didn’t want Wine Spectator to die.”
In the July 16, 1979, issue, Shanken’s first as publisher, he wrote an editorial titled, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” At the time, circulation was 5,000 issues. Shanken’s goal was to transform it from a newspaper to a magazine, but that would require time and money. “I was never satisfied with it as a newspaper, but you have to crawl before you walk, walk before you run, and to print a newspaper costs a fraction of what a magazine in full color does,” he later said. “And so every year my goal was to grow the revenue, hire more people, to the point where one day, I could take it from a newspaper to a magazine and educate people all over America about wine. I’ve said from the beginning: We’re not in the publishing business, we’re in the education business.”
Changes came quickly. In 1982, the magazine’s small staff loaded a van with files and equipment and relocated from San Diego to offices in downtown San Francisco. In 1983, Shanken parted ways with the magazine’s editor, Gerald Boyd, a holdover from Morrisey’s tenure, and became editor himself so he could shape every issue. Still running M. Shanken Communications from New York, he would fly to San Francisco to finish each edition.
In 1985, the magazine adopted the 100-point scale for rating wines, in order to give American consumers a format that easily resonated. In 1987, Shanken redesigned the publication, turning it into a glossy magazine. The following year, circulation reached 76,000.
These changes were not smooth sailing. “We were growing but struggling,” Shanken later said. “Every year the circulation went up; every year the ad revenues went up. But because we were investing so much in the publication, Wine Spectator kept losing more and more money. It became an enormous drain on my trade-publishing business in New York, which during this period was going through enormous growth.” In 1986, his accountant begged him to sell the magazine. “‘It is bleeding cash,’ he told me. ‘You are in over your head.’”
But Shanken continued to stay the course. And he continued to fiercely declare his independence, even when it might have made things harder. In the Sept. 16, 1983, issue, he wrote an editorial: “I am tired of receiving letters, especially from winery executives and importers, complaining that The Wine Spectator is not giving them ‘enough’ editorial support. Let this column set the record straight once and for all that this publication is not ‘a promotional arm’ for any wine, or any wine region. ... Our task is to be relevant, informative and entertaining to our readers.”
In 1991, Shanken gathered his senior editors for annual
meetings in Pebble Beach, California. The magazine had reached a circulation of
80,000 readers and was no longer in immediate danger of going under. And so, of
course, Shanken wanted to turn things upside down.
“I find Wine Spectator boring today,” he told them. “It is time for us to move on.” His plan was to expand the magazine’s coverage to other topics wine consumers wanted to learn about—travel, cooking, restaurants and more. That broadening of mission allowed the magazine to reach a larger audience than ever. Today’s magazine has a circulation of more than 385,000 and each issue reaches an estimated 1.5 million readers.
“I thought that this was what was needed to sustain and increase the growth of the audience of Wine Spectator,” Shanken said in a 2022 interview. “Wine was, is and will always be the core editorial subject. But I thought that wine, in and of itself, was too narrow. If you add the components of dining, cooking, travel and collecting, among others, then you really are inside the mind, the heart and soul of a typical wine lover who wants to enjoy many of the pleasures of life.”
One personal passion Shanken did not add to Wine Spectator was cigars. He had been smoking cigars since his college days and loved them. He wrote a series of columns on them in Wine Spectator. But he decided it was time to pursue another dream. The following year he launched Cigar Aficionado, a glossy lifestyle magazine for cigar smokers. His entire management team discouraged him, arguing there wasn’t an audience. The magazine quickly became a success.
“Marvin belongs to the elite coterie of magazine makers, the geniuses of our business,” said Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, as he presented Shanken with the Association of Magazine Media’s Lifetime Achievement Award in February 2019. He praised Shanken’s long history in publishing, particularly his refusal to compromise editorial integrity for advertising revenues. “In today’s media landscape, where the walls between ads and edit are nonexistent, Marvin maintains an iron curtain.”
Expanding Beyond Print
During his early days as Wine Spectator editor and publisher, Shanken had a beef with restaurants. “I would go to a lot of restaurants and they had good food but didn’t pay attention to the wine,” he later said. “Whatever a distributor sold them, they’d put on the list.” In 1981, he created the Wine Spectator Grand Award program, with the twin goals of recognizing restaurants that took wine seriously and helping readers find those restaurants.
That first year, 13 restaurants were granted Grand Awards. The following year, the magazine recognized the 100 top wine lists in America. And in 1985, the magazine added the Award of Excellence and Best of Award of Excellence, creating different tiers for the level of the wine programs. Today, more than 4,000 restaurants worldwide hold a Wine Spectator award, and 99 of those hold Grand Awards, signaling that they are world-class destinations for wine.
For Shanken, the reward of the program is that restaurants now recognize good wine programs—both the selection of wines on the menu and the quality of the wine service—as part of hospitality. “Back in the 1970s, if you went to a restaurant and it had 30 tables, one table would have a bottle of wine. [Forty years later], you go to a restaurant where there are 30 tables and every table has a bottle of wine on it.”
The Grand Awards led to another development. In 1981, Shanken co-hosted a Wine Spectator Grand Award banquet at the Windows on the World restaurant atop New York’s World Trade Center, with Windows’ wine director Kevin Zraly, celebrating the first recipients of the restaurant awards. That same year, California tourism officials hosted the California Wine Experience, an event to promote California wine, at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The following year, the Wine Experience organizers, including the legendary Robert Mondavi, asked Shanken if he would take over the event. After some hesitation, Shanken agreed, and with Zraly’s help, combined the two events into a weekend of tastings, seminars and a Grand Award banquet.
His hesitation was understandable. In 1973, one year after he had purchased Impact, Shanken had taken a position as an organizer and promoter of a new event—the International Wine and Cheese Festival, a weeklong wine and cheese tasting at the New York Coliseum. The annual event, which lasted only a few years, proved chaotic, but it taught Shanken valuable lessons in event organizing and regulatory logistics. In the early 1980s, Bill Backer, creative director of renowned ad agency Backer & Spielvogel, called Shanken, “The P.T. Barnum of the wine and spirits industry.”
Since Shanken took over, the Wine Experience has grown into the premier wine event that focuses not just on the trade, but also consumers, and it was a pioneer of media events. Each year, more than 4,000 guests attend part or all of the weekend, including two nights of Grand Tastings of more than 250 wines rated 90 points or higher by Wine Spectator editors and poured by the winery owners or winemakers, plus in-depth tasting seminars of some of the world’s most amazing wines. The annual weekend, now in its fifth decade, has become a reunion for the winemaking community and an unmatched chance for consumers to learn more about the world of wine.
The Wine Experience also helped Shanken achieve a lifelong goal of giving back. In 1983, he launched the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation and now all net proceeds from the Wine Experience are for the benefit of the non-profit foundation. Vintners generously donate all the wines of the weekend, which has raised more than $40 million for scholarships and grants to benefit those aspiring to careers in the hospitality and wine industries.
“If you were to ask me what I am most proud of over these 40 years, the answer would be simple: From the very early days, we wanted to give back,” said Shanken in a 2016 interview. “Charity and charitable events are an integral part of our company’s culture.”
Foundation beneficiaries have included students at Napa Valley College, the University of California-Davis viticulture and enology program, Sonoma State University’s Wine Business Institute, Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, World Central Kitchen, The Roots Foundation, and the Culinary Institute of America, among others.
In 2009, Shanken launched a second charitable endeavor, inspired by a good friend. Professional golfer Ernie Els and his wife Liezl were looking to give back to the community as parents of an autistic child, their son Ben. Shanken and his wife, Hazel, partnered with them to launch the Els for Autism Foundation and raise money to build the Els Center of Excellence, an education and recreation center for autistic children in South Florida that opened its doors in 2015.
The Wine Experience served as a model for two other events Shanken spearheaded. In 1993, he held the first Big Smoke, a Cigar Aficionado–organized gathering for cigar lovers. And when he purchased Malt Advocate in 2010, a big draw was its WhiskyFest event, which he would expand and grow.
A Hands-On Leader
Shanken saw his communications firm as a family company. In 1981, he married Hazel Rudy, a financial executive who now serves on the M. Shanken Communications board of advisers. They have one daughter, Jessica Shanken Reid, who is M. Shanken’s executive vice president for business development. Shanken has two daughters from a previous marriage, Allison Cohen and Samantha Shanken Baker. Cohen’s son Jake Cohen works as an advertising account executive for the company.
When not working, Shanken loved dining out and traveling the world with Hazel. He was a cinema buff—favorites included Once Upon a Time in America and Animal House—and a lifelong fan of the music of James Brown. He was a lover of musical theater, including Jersey Boys and the works of Gilbert & Sullivan, ever since he secured a role at age 8 in H.M.S. Pinafore at his summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains. Hoping to pass that love along, in 2000, he began sponsoring school field trips for New York City kids to see performances by the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players.
For five decades, Shanken was the visible, hands-on leader of the company that bore his name, and believed that the company should also function as a family. He took pride in the fact that many of his employees worked for him for decades. He loved hiring someone young and having them grow into new roles and spend their lives at MSC.
He took pride in his company’s ethos of journalism. As he told an interviewer in 2020, “We also talk about how we can guarantee that we never mislead our readers, that we maintain the objectivity and the truthfulness that has escaped from journalism to a very large degree in the world. And I’m constantly asking questions of my editors to make sure that our readers know that what they read is the truth.”
He enjoyed conducting lengthy interviews with some of the world’s most interesting people, both in the industries he covered and outside. Notable Q&As included Ernest Gallo, Fidel Castro, Michael Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Despite overseeing a company, Shanken saw himself first and foremost as an editor. “People think of me as a businessman or an entrepreneur, I’m really an editor,” he said in the 2020 interview. “I spend more time thinking about, planning and working with my editors to execute each issue, in terms of everything from selecting the cover topic to the content, shaping the stories, to getting the photography, to making sure it’s right. That’s where my fingerprint is, but nobody necessarily knows that. I consider myself more of an editor than anything else.”
Shanken is survived by his wife, Hazel, his sisters, Elaine and Susan, his three daughters, Samantha Shanken Baker, Allison Cohen and Jessica Shanken Reid, and four grandchildren: Jake, Lauren, Asher and Jordan.
