Tastings
Dorothy Gaiter and John Brescher have been the wine columnists for The Wall Street Journal for 12 years. I always enjoyed the Friday edition of the Journal – one of those reasons was Tastings. When the Journal started putting Tastings videos up several years back, it was fun to watch the two share their enjoyment of wines. Not fussy or concerned about points, it was somewhere between delicious or yucky.
In their travels they discovered exciting, little known wines that have become favorites.
The last edition of Tasting was December 26, 2009. If you haven’t read their column before, read it here: The Mysterious Heart of Deliciousness
June 4, 1973, was a big day. Dorothy Gaiter started her first job as a reporter at the Miami Herald and John Brecher, who would become her husband, also started his first day at the Miami Herald as bureau chief of South Dade County. “It was love at first sight,” Gaiter said.
In 1990, Brecher and Gaiter were hired at The Wall Street Journal, where Gaiter later became urban affairs editor and Brecher became Page One editor.
When Joanne Lipman became founding editor of The Wall Street Journal “Weekend” section in 1998, she asked Brecher and Gaiter to write about wine. “The concept is that they are experts but they are not snobs,” Lipman explains. “They were a hit from day one.”
One of Brecher and Gaiter’s early columns, suggesting that readers open a special bottle they had been saving for years, elicited more 1,000 letters. And, Lipman recalls, “They wrote a column about a Gallo wine that was unexpectedly excellent, and every bottle in the United States [was sold]. The winery wrote to us that it had to call in bottles from Europe. The influence was astonishing. … Everybody was walking into wine stores with that column in hand.”
As full-time columnists, Gaiter and Brecher found time to write several books on wine:
Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage (2003)
They tell their story through the wines they’ve shared from their first date, the birth of their daughter to Gaiter’s struggle with cancer.
Wine for Every Day and Every Occasion (2004)
From Thanksgiving and Super Bowl Sunday to wedding days, anniversaries, and birthdays, ‘the first couple of wine’ (Charles Osgood, ‘CBS Sunday Morning’) offers advice on choosing the best wines for life’s memorable moments, big and small.
The Wall Street Journal Guide to Wine (1999)
They share everything you need to know about buying, drinking, and enjoying wine, along with listings of 300 great wine values to get you started.
Tags: books
