Marvin R. Shanken, the founder of M. Shanken Communications and the longtime editor and publisher of Wine Spectator, died on October 29 at age 83. His death closes a career that helped turn a small beverage industry newsletter into a publishing group that reached across wine, spirits, beer, cigars and restaurants.
For many readers, the name was already shorthand for influence. Wine Spectator grew under Shanken into a glossy magazine prized by more than 3 million wine lovers, and his company also founded Market Watch, Shanken News Daily and Cigar Aficionado, while buying Food Arts and Malt Advocate and later renaming the latter Whisky Advocate. He also established Wine Spectator’s Restaurant Awards, launched the Wine Experience and created the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation.
That reach was built from a start that looked anything but inevitable. Marvin Ray Shanken was born on October 4, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of Oscar, who ran a small jewelry store. After high school he volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, studied business at the University of Miami and graduated in 1965, later serving on the university’s board of trustees. He often joked about the gap between that biography and the wine empire he would later build, saying the closest he got to Yale was the Yale Bowl, where he sold cold beer on weekends.
The harder edge of the story is that Shanken did not begin at the top of his class or in the center of the industry he would later shape. He later recalled that he got straight A’s and that they had to let him in, a line that fits the self-mythology of a man who graduated last in his class at the University of Miami and still went on to become one of the best-known figures in wine publishing. In 1968, he took a job on Wall Street with a small investment banking firm, and in 1970 he was sent to California to help finance a vineyard purchase for a client. While doing due diligence on that deal, he saw how little public information existed about the wine business, and that gap became the opening for what followed.
He bought Impact in 1972 and The Wine Spectator in 1979, turning each into part of a larger business rather than a one-off bet. What he created was not just a magazine but a system of coverage, awards, events and related titles that made Wine Spectator essential reading for millions and gave Shanken unusual sway over how the industry was seen from the outside. Gerry Ruvo once summed up that standing this way: the holy trinity of wine in America was Ernest Gallo, Robert Mondavi and Marvin Shanken.
What remains unanswered is the immediate cause of his death. But the scale of what he built is not in doubt, and with his death on October 29, the wine world lost a publisher who spent more than five decades turning curiosity about a single industry into a media business with reach well beyond it.
