George M. Taber was a journalist specializing in financial news for 40 years before publishing his first book about wine in 2005. He worked for 21 years for Time magazine, where he was national economic correspondent in Washington, D.C. and then business editor. In 1988, he left Time to start a weekly business newspaper in New Jersey, NJBIZ, which he sold in 2005. He has since been writing about wine.

His first book was Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the historic 1976 Paris Tasting that revolutionized wine. Taber was the only reporter present at the event in Paris that put California wines on the map when a group of French judges in a blind tasting picked California wines to win both the red and white categories over the best France had to offer. The book was the basis for the 2008 movie Bottle Shock.

The highly acclaimed book was a finalist for the best wine book of the year of 2007 by both the James Beard Awards in the U.S. and the André Simon Awards in Britain.

Taber’s third book, published on October 13, 2009, is In Search of Bacchus: Wanderings in the wonderful world of wine tourism.

In it he chronicles his travels to 12 premium wine regions: Napa, California; Stellenbosch, South Africa; Mendoza, Argentina; Colchagua, Chile; Margaret River, Australia; Central Otago, New Zealand; Rioja, Spain; Douro Valley, Portugal; Tuscany, Italy; Bordeaux, France; Rhine/Mosel, Germany; and Kakheti, Georgia. He tells the histories of the regions and the people creating the most interesting wine adventures.

A Californian by birth, Taber graduated from Georgetown University and got a masters degree from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium. He now works and enjoys wine on two islands: Block Island, Rhode Island and Orchid Island, Florida.