Marvin R. Shanken, the founder of M. Shanken Communications and longtime editor and publisher of Wine Spectator, died on October 29 at age 83. He built a wine title that reached more than 3 million readers and helped define coverage across wine, spirits, beer, cigars and restaurants.
Wine Spectator and Impact
Shanken began his journalism career in 1972, when he purchased Impact, a beverage alcohol industry newsletter. He bought The Wine Spectator in 1979 and turned it into a glossy magazine prized by more than 3 million wine lovers.
He also founded Market Watch, Shanken News Daily and Cigar Aficionado. Beyond the magazines, he established Wine Spectator’s Restaurant Awards program, launched the Wine Experience and created the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation.
New Haven, Connecticut
Marvin Ray Shanken was born on October 4, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut. He studied business at the University of Miami after high school, graduated in 1965, and later served on the university’s board of trustees.
He recalled that early path with a joke: “I didn't go to Yale. The closest I got was the Yale Bowl, where I sold cold beer on weekends.” In another account of his route into higher education, he said, “I got straight A’s” and “They had to let me in.”
Wall Street in 1968
Before moving into publishing, Shanken got a job on Wall Street in 1968 with a small investment banking firm. In 1970, he was dispatched to California to help finance a vineyard purchase for a client, a step that put him closer to the wine business he would later cover and commercialize.
That shift followed a career built over more than five decades. Gerry Ruvo summed up Shanken’s place in the industry this way: “The holy trinity of wine in America is Ernest Gallo, Robert Mondavi, and Marvin Shanken.”
Shanken’s death leaves the leadership of M. Shanken Communications and Wine Spectator unresolved in the facts provided here. His work outlasts him in the publications and programs he built, but the immediate question for readers and the companies he founded is how those brands continue without the man who shaped them.
