VALHALLA, N.Y. (January 3, 2024) — Wine Enthusiast Companies announced today that Elaine Chukan Brown will taste and review wines from Napa Valley, and Tom Capo will taste and review wines from Sonoma Valley. The new year will expand Napa and Sonoma with a dedicated taster for each region. Brown and Capo will join Wine Enthusiast as Writers at Large and review alongside the other two California tasters. Matt Kettmann has been working with Wine Enthusiast for nearly a decade and will continue to rate wines from the Central and South Coasts of California. Tonya Pitts joined Wine Enthusiast as a Writer at Large in November and tastes wines from Northern California and California AVA.
The tasting department expanded to two Italy tasters splitting the different regions in July 2022. Wine Enthusiast brought Danielle Callegari and Jeff Porter on to the tasting team, with Dr. Callegari reviewing wines from Southern Italy and Tuscany, and Porter reviewing wines from Northern Italy. This strategy has proven successful in allowing more Italian wines to be tasted and more reviews to be provided to Wine Enthusiast readers and producers.
With its expanded tasting regions, increased content on trending stories, and a fully relaunched website, WineEnthusiast.com achieved record-breaking numbers and is the industry leader with the most traffic of any wine media website (per SimilarWeb). For the month of December 2023, the media and commerce company’s website reached 4.5 million monthly pageviews, 2.5 million monthly sessions, and 1.9 million monthly users (per Google Analytics 4).
“We are excited to have Elaine and Tom join the California tasting team and offer our readers fresh perspectives on Napa and Sonoma,” said Jacqueline Strum, President & Publisher of Wine Enthusiast Media. “Wine Enthusiast’s business is growing, and we will continue to put structures in place to support this business growth. The expansion of the Napa and Sonoma tasting beats is the first change of 2024 as we implement systems to set the team up for success.”
Elaine Chukan Brown serves as a writer, speaker and global wine educator. Previously, Brown served as the Executive Editor US for JancisRobinson.com, a columnist for Decanter Magazine, a contributing writer to Wine & Spirits Magazine and to both the 4th and 5th editions of Oxford Companion to Wine, the 8th edition of the World Atlas of Wine, the compilations On Burgundy and On California from Academie du Vin Library. Brown is Inupiaq, and Unangan-Sugpiaq, that is Indigenous, from what is now known as Alaska. Brown’s career has been dedicated to the intersection of sustainability, climate action, and reducing gatekeeping in the wine industry. Brown co-founded the Diversity in Wine Leadership Forum and has advised diversity initiatives in multiple countries. Brown also serves as a judge for the Texsom Awards and is a board member of the Wine Writer Symposium.
Tom Capo has a two-decade career in the wine business. He started as a sommelier for Cindy Wolf’s Charleston in Baltimore, Maryland, where he studied under Tony Foreman. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, he worked across the industry from smaller wineries and wine bars to national retailers and producers including Treasury Wine Estates. In 2012, Capo founded Marathon Wine Brokers, which sought to carve out space for smaller, family-owned producers as well as fledgling importers that represented grower-vignerons. He became a freelance writer, editor and stay-at-home dad, and then pivoted back into the wine space as a sales and hospitality associate at Idlewild Wines and Ciao Bruto! Capo tastes and writes about wine in Sonoma County.
The Wine Enthusiast tasting department blind tastes more than 25,000 wines annually and provides reputable reviews for readers across the globe. Wine Enthusiast magazine focuses its reviews exclusively on wines and spirits. For more information about how to submit wines and spirits for review, visit https://www.wineenthusiast.com/submit-for-rating/. For more information about Wine Enthusiast Companies or request an interview related to the Wine Enthusiast tasting and review program, contact Bonnary Lek.
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