IAN D’AGATA JOINS TASTESPIRIT
TasteSpirit is happy to announce that Ian D’Agata has accepted the position of Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) of TasteSpirit. He will lead the creation of a new terroir-based wine school and be the Editor in Chief of the new Wine Review, a digital international wine magazine that will feature a limited staff of well-known world class wine writers and experts. We have known Ian for ten years and have always admired his huge knowledge about the world’s wines, his leadership skills, organizational abilities, and the almost endless amounts of energy and enthusiasm he brings to all the projects he is involved with. Given Ian’s current and past academic affiliations, and his having founded and co-founded numerous trailblazing wine schools all over the world, we believe Ian will help us achieve our present and future goals in further establishing a culture of terroir in both wine and food.
Ian D’Agata is the recognized world authority on Italy’s native grapes and wines: his two most recent, award winning, books Native Wine Grapes of Italy and Italy’s Native Wine Grape Terroirs (both published by University of California Press) are widely viewed as the “state of the art” textbooks on the subject. Along with his former student and best pupil, Michele Longo, Ian is also currently the co-author of the Italy section in Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Book of Wine, the world’s best-selling wine guide. As a former staff writer at Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar, Contributing Editor at Decanter, Senior editor at Vinous, and contributing writer at numerous other magazines and websites, he has also written extensively on the wines of France, Canada and other wine producing nations. In recognition of his work devoted to the communication of wine knowledge and research, in 2015 Ian was named to Italy’s prestigious Accademia della Vite e del Vino, Italy’s association of university professors, researchers and academicians in the field of wine. Over the years, he has been honoured with numerous other awards and titles, including the 2015 Louis Roederer International Book Awards Book of the Year, the Comitato Grandi Cru’s “Italy’s best wine journalist”, the 2016 Les Plumes d’Or awards nomination by French wine producers, winemakers and chefs (associated with Le Grandes Tables du Monde) as one of the world’s eight leading international wine writers and the 2017 Cuvée Award of Excellence (Ontario, Canada).
A trained medical doctor at the hospitals of the Universities of Cincinnati, Harvard, Montréal and UCSF, Ian has won grants in cellular/molecular biology which explains his interest and current research focus on the discovery and correct identification of forgotten, native, grape varieties all over the world and to have wines made from all of them once again.
TasteSpirit (www.tastespirit.com) is China’s leading wine media and education company with 3 Million active online users/year, animated by the vision to build the most dynamic community of worldwine terroir-driven wine lovers. TS runs wine schools in eight major metropolitan Chinese cities and each year organizes international academic and scientific conferences and events with leading wine and food researchers, experts and personalities.
