Marvin R. Shanken, the publisher who built a media empire around wine, spirits and cigars, died on October 29, 2026, in New York City. He was 83. Reports say the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. His company announced his death the same day, and the tributes started right away.
One of the first came from Chris Swonger, President & CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. “On behalf of the Distilled Spirits Council and our member companies, we are deeply saddened by the passing of Marvin Shanken, a legendary figure in the beverage alcohol industry. Marvin was an early pioneer in industry publishing who understood the value of providing the trade with trusted insights and information. From those beginnings, he built an extraordinary collection of enduring publications that have informed industry leaders and consumers for decades. His entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to the spirits industry leave a remarkable legacy.”
Shanken’s story is a good one for any man who has ever wondered if it’s too late to switch careers or chase an idea that everyone else called a bad bet. He started with a borrowed $5,000 and a box of index cards. He ended up running one of the most respected niche publishing companies in America.
A Boy From New Haven
Marvin Ray Shanken was born on October 4, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut. The city sits close to Yale University, but he liked to joke that he never attended. “I didn’t go to Yale.” The closest he got, he said, was the Yale Bowl, where he sold cold beer on weekends. His father, Oscar, ran a small jewelry store.
After high school, Shanken spent a summer volunteering for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. Then he headed south to study business at the University of Miami. He became a lifelong Hurricanes fan and later served on the university’s board of trustees. He also liked to joke about his grades, since he finished 1965 dead last in his class.
That did not stop him from aiming higher. He wanted an M.B.A. from American University in Washington, but the school told him he would have to take night classes first before it would admit him. He took them and pulled straight A’s. As he later told The New York Times, the school then had to let him in.
From Wall Street to a Wine Bottle
In 1968, Shanken landed a job with a small investment banking firm on Wall Street, mostly working on real estate deals. Two years later, the firm sent him to California to help finance a vineyard purchase for a client. While looking into the wine business, he was surprised to find that almost no public information existed about it.
After the deal closed, the client took him to dinner at La Crémaillère, an elegant French restaurant in Westchester County, New York. He told Shanken he could order any wine on the menu. Shanken had never tasted a great wine, but he had heard of one, so he ordered a 1961 Pétrus. He later said the experience made him want to learn everything he could about wine.
About two years later, a traffic accident during another California trip left him in a hospital bed. He later described an epiphany there. He loved wine, not real estate, and he wanted to write about it.
Jumping Out of an Airplane
Shanken had no publishing experience. What he had was $5,000 borrowed from his sister Elaine. In 1972, he used it to buy a small newsletter called Impact from Jack Maxwell, a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Maxwell handed over a box holding 200 index cards, which were the newsletter’s entire subscriber list.
For three years, Shanken ran Impact part time and kept his day job. The early going was rough. He remembered being sure within three months that he had made the biggest mistake of his life. “I had jumped out of an airplane without a parachute.”
Impact covered the wine and spirits business, which was a tough crowd back then. Most of the companies were privately owned and kept their numbers to themselves. Most trade papers just reprinted press releases. Shanken said the industry was a closed kingdom run by a small group of liquor barons, and he was not welcome. At one conference, he tried to introduce himself to several industry giants and they all ignored him.
Wholesalers saw it differently. They wanted real information, and they became his first supporters. They bought subscriptions for their own staff and for their retail customers.
Quitting the Day Job
In 1975, Shanken quit his job and went all in on Impact. He had one employee. He had recently been divorced, and his office was the one-bedroom apartment he lived in on East 53rd Street in Manhattan.
Things began to turn around. In 1976, Impact put out its first annual research study, a deep look at volumes and sales across the alcohol industry. That study grew into a set of reports now known as Shanken’s Impact Databank. In 1977, he held the first Impact Marketing Seminar, a daylong event for industry leaders to talk about marketing, advertising and government rules. He hoped 50 people would come. A total of 125 showed up.
The late Abdallah Simon, who was chairman of Seagram Vintners, told The New York Times in 1986 that Shanken’s material was probably the most authoritative statistical work ever done on the industry.
Saving a Free Newspaper
In April 1976, a man named Bob Morrisey started a free tabloid called The Wine Spectator in San Diego. It was handed out at local wine shops. Shanken came across it on a trip and liked it. He thought it was simple, unpretentious and fun for consumers. He called Morrisey to say so, and the two became friends who talked shop often.
By 1978, Morrisey was struggling and offered to sell. Shanken said no, but he flew to San Diego and spent several days giving Morrisey ideas to turn things around. A year later, Morrisey called again with a warning. If Shanken did not buy it, the paper would shut down. Shanken said later that the only reason he agreed was that he did not want Wine Spectator to die.
His first issue as publisher came out on July 16, 1979. His editorial was titled “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Circulation at that point was 5,000.
The Plan to Teach America About Wine
Shanken wanted to turn the paper into a full-color magazine, but that took money and time. A newspaper costs a fraction of what a glossy magazine costs to print. So he grew the revenue year after year, hired more people, and waited. His mission never changed. In his words, “We’re not in the publishing business, we’re in the education business.”
The changes came one after another:
- In 1982, the small staff loaded a van and moved from San Diego to downtown San Francisco.
- In 1983, Shanken parted ways with the editor he had inherited and took over the job himself. He kept running his New York company and flew to San Francisco to finish each issue.
- In 1985, the magazine started rating wines on a 100-point scale, a format American shoppers could grasp right away.
- In 1987, he redesigned it as a glossy magazine. By 1988, circulation had reached 76,000.
- It was not easy money. Wine Spectator lost cash year after year, and it drained his New York trade business. In 1986, his accountant begged him to sell. Shanken stayed the course.
- He was also stubborn about independence. In a 1983 editorial, he told winery executives and importers that the paper was not a promotional arm for any wine or any region. Its job, he wrote, was to be relevant, informative and entertaining for readers.
Shaking Things Up Again
By 1991, circulation had hit 80,000 and the magazine was out of immediate danger. Shanken, naturally, wanted to change things. He told his senior editors at their annual meeting in Pebble Beach, California, that he found the magazine boring. His plan was to add travel, cooking, restaurants and more, since wine lovers cared about those things too.
It worked. Today the magazine has a circulation above 385,000, and each issue reaches an estimated 1.5 million readers. Gerry Ruvo, a longtime wine and spirits executive, once put Shanken in a group with Ernest Gallo and Robert Mondavi, calling the three the holy trinity of wine in America.
Restaurants, Events and the Wine Experience
Early on, Shanken had a problem with restaurants. They served good food but paid little attention to wine. Whatever a distributor sold them ended up on the list. So in 1981 he created the Wine Spectator Grand Award program. It honored restaurants that took wine seriously and helped readers find them.
Thirteen restaurants won Grand Awards that first year. In 1982, the magazine recognized the 100 top wine lists in America. In 1985, it added the Award of Excellence and the Best of Award of Excellence, so different levels of wine programs could be recognized. Today more than 4,000 restaurants around the world hold a Wine Spectator award, and 99 of them hold Grand Awards.
Shanken pointed to a change in dining habits as proof the program worked. In the 1970s, he said, a 30-table restaurant might sell one bottle of wine on a given night. Forty years later, every table had one.
How the Wine Experience Began
In 1981, Shanken and Kevin Zraly, the wine director at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center, hosted the first Grand Award banquet. That same year, California tourism officials held the California Wine Experience at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The next year, the organizers, including Robert Mondavi, asked Shanken to take it over. He hesitated, and he had good reason.
In 1973, a year after buying Impact, Shanken had helped organize the International Wine and Cheese Festival at the New York Coliseum. It was a week-long tasting that proved chaotic and lasted only a few years. It did teach him a lot about running events. Ad executive Bill Backer once called him “The P.T. Barnum of the wine and spirits industry.”
Shanken said yes in the end. With Zraly’s help, he combined the two events into one weekend of tastings, seminars and a Grand Award banquet. Today the Wine Experience draws more than 4,000 guests. It features two nights of Grand Tastings with more than 250 wines rated 90 points or higher by the magazine’s editors, poured by the owners or winemakers themselves.
The Cigar Man
Shanken started smoking cigars as a college student in Miami, and he often said he was the only kid in his fraternity who did. He remembered buying a box of five Hav-A-Tampa Jewels for 25 cents. In a 2012 interview, he described himself as a loner in the cigar world.
In 1984, he began writing cigar columns in Wine Spectator under the title “I Love A Good Smoke.” That is where he first used the phrase “cigar aficionado” in print. His senior editors were not thrilled. They thought cigar talk looked wrong in a wine magazine, and after three or four columns they pushed him to stop.
An Idea on an Airplane
In 1991, Shanken made a landmark trip to Cuba and wrote a cover story called “The Allure of Cuban Cigars.” On the flight home, he made up his mind. “I don’t want to die without having a cigar magazine.”
The first issue of Cigar Aficionado went on sale in September 1992. His entire management team had warned him that the audience was too small. Cigars were also out of fashion at a time when health magazines were booming. Shanken’s own goal was a modest circulation of 20,000.
The magazine turned a profit from its first issue. According to the magazine’s own account, the number of premium handmade cigars imported into the United States grew from roughly 100 million to well over 400 million in less than five years. Today the magazine reports an audience of more than 1.3 million people.
Fidel, a Famous Humidor and Michael Jordan
Shanken knew how to get attention for his magazine. On February 3, 1994, he sat down for a one-on-one interview with Fidel Castro, who was then the president of Cuba. He had spent two years trying to set it up. The cover story ran that summer.
In 1996, he bought a humidor that had belonged to President John F. Kennedy at the Sotheby’s auction of the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The price was reported at $575,000. Shanken later wrote that he had passed his own spending limit minutes earlier.
Over the years he interviewed many of the stars who appeared on the cover, including Michael Jordan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro and Francis Ford Coppola. Other cover subjects included Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Tom Selleck, Wayne Gretzky, Denzel Washington and Bill Murray. His 2005 interview with Jordan took place at Jordan’s home in Chicago, and he returned in 2017 for the magazine’s 25th anniversary. Video clips from that second interview have been viewed about 10 million times.
In 1999, Cigar Aficionado’s website won the first National Magazine Award for General Excellence in New Media.
More Than One Magazine
M. Shanken Communications is based in Manhattan, with offices in Napa, California, and Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Along with Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado, the company publishes Market Watch and Shanken News Daily. Shanken also bought Food Arts and, in 2010, Malt Advocate. He renamed it Whisky Advocate in 2011. Its WhiskyFest event was a big draw for him, and he expanded it.
The company also runs consumer events like the Wine Spectator Grand Tour and The Big Smoke, which first took place in New York in 1993. On the trade side, it holds MarketWatch Leaders and the Impact Marketing Seminar, which recently marked 50 years. Guest speakers at that seminar have included Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and basketball great Michael Jordan.
As technology changed, so did the company. Shanken launched websites for his consumer magazines, along with video, newsletters, social media, podcasts and mobile apps. In 2022, Wine Spectator released a rare video interview he filmed in 1999 with the famously private Ernest Gallo, on Gallo’s 90th birthday.
Giving Back
Ask Shanken what he was proudest of, and he did not point to circulation numbers. In a 2016 interview he said that from the early days, the company wanted to give back. “Charity and charitable events are an integral part of our company’s culture.”
In 1983, he started the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. All net proceeds from the Wine Experience go to it, and winemakers donate all the wine for the weekend. The event has raised more than $40 million for scholarships and grants for people heading into wine and hospitality careers. Past beneficiaries include Napa Valley College, the University of California-Davis, Sonoma State University, Cornell’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. In 2021, the foundation announced a record $10 million commitment, and the Marvin and Hazel Shanken DEI Scholarship was created for hospitality students at Florida International University.
Prostate Cancer and Autism
The black-tie dinners called A Night To Remember, which were held by Cigar Aficionado, raised about $30 million for prostate cancer research. The first was held in 1993.
In 2009, a friendship led to another cause. Pro golfer Ernie Els and his wife Liezl were parents of a son, Ben, who has autism, and they wanted to give back. Shanken and his wife, Hazel, joined them to start the Els for Autism Foundation. It raised money to build the Els Center of Excellence, an education and recreation center for autistic children in South Florida, which opened in 2015. The Els for Autism Pro-Am has raised around $20 million.
Honors
Shanken collected plenty of awards. In March 2018, the German media company Meininger Verlag gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award for his impact on the global wine industry. In February 2019, the Association of Magazine Media gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, presented it. He called Shanken one of the geniuses of the magazine business and praised his refusal to let advertising money bend his editorial standards. “Marvin maintains an iron curtain.”
The Man Behind the Company
Shanken married Hazel Rudy in 1981. She is a financial executive and now serves on the company’s board of advisers. They have a daughter, Jessica Shanken Reid, who is executive vice president for business development. He also has two daughters from an earlier marriage, Samantha Shanken Baker and Allison Cohen. Cohen’s son, Jake Cohen, works as an advertising account executive at the company.
Away from work, Shanken liked eating out, traveling with Hazel and playing golf. He loved movies, with Once Upon a Time in America and Animal House among his favorites. He was a lifelong fan of James Brown’s music. He also loved musical theater, from Jersey Boys to Gilbert & Sullivan, a taste that went back to age eight, when he played a role in H.M.S. Pinafore at his summer camp in the Berkshire Mountains. In 2000, he began paying for New York City schoolkids to see the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players.
Many of his employees stayed with him for decades. He liked hiring young people and watching them grow into bigger jobs.
An Editor First
For all the business success, Shanken did not see himself as a businessman. “I’m really an editor,” he said in a 2020 interview. He explained that he spent most of his time with his editors, picking cover topics, shaping stories and checking photos. He said his fingerprint was on every issue, even if few people knew it.
He cared about trust, too. In the same year, he said the company talked often about never misleading readers and keeping the objectivity and truthfulness he felt journalism had lost.
Asked why Cigar Aficionado lasted when so many 1992 launches folded, he gave a simple answer. Readers appreciated it. As long as they wanted to learn, he said, the magazine would be there to serve them.
A Legacy That Keeps Going
Shanken is survived by his wife, Hazel, his sisters Elaine and Susan, his three daughters, and four grandchildren: Jake, Lauren, Asher and Jordan.
He started with a box of index cards and a borrowed $5,000. By the end, he had changed how Americans dine out, how the trade covers its business, and how a whole industry talks to its customers. The publications, the events and the scholarships he created are still running.
