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.
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