User:Murgh/Alexis Bespaloff

Jacques Alexis Bespaloff (November 15, 1934, Bucharest – April 22, 2006, Las Cruces, NM) was a Romanian-born wine columnist for New York Magazine for 24 years and a contributor to several other publications. An author of six books, The Signet Book of Wine, first published in 1971, sold over a million copies.

Career
Bespaloff attended the Horace Mann School and graduated from Amherst College with a degree in English literature. He attended Harvard Business School briefly before dropping out to work as a publicist for Simon & Schuster. For a period Bespaloff represented a New York wine importer in Bordeaux and worked a short period for Manhattan wine retailer Sherry-Lehmann, before he became a wine writer.

His work as wine columnist for New York Magazine lasted from 1972 to 1996, while he contributed to several other publications such as Food & Wine, Wine Enthusiast, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, House & Garden and Penthouse.

Among anecdotes frequently retold about Bespaloff is one concerning his telephone answering machine message, which was, "I cannot take your call right now, but if it's an emergency, white with fish and red with meat".

Bespaloff was a 2009 posthumous inductee into the Wine Media Guild of New York "Wine Writers' Hall of Fame".