After a brief stint in academe and several years in the restaurant business, David
Schildknecht logged more than a decade as a wine retailer in Washington, DC. with
the late Rex Wine & Spirits (from 1982), with Mayflower Wine and Spirits, and
lastly with Pearson’s. This was an exciting time to be Washington-based and David,
who grew up nearby, rediscovered his personal roots while discovering wine in company
with the many luminaries who were then regularly passing through or who, like Robert
Parker, were establishing their formidable future reputations from a Capital Area
base. It was David’s pleasure to repay some of Bob’s enthusiasm, information and
assistance in kind when he regularly assembled and presented wines from German growers
for Bob’s reports in the Wine Advocate from 1990 through 1996.
In 1993, David moved the scene of his retail operations and his family of six to
the banks of the Ohio River, establishing the wide-ranging wine program at Bellevue,
Kentucky-based The Party Source. From 1997-2002, he divided his time between reporting
from Austria, Germany and Hungary for Wine & Spirits and the International
Wine Cellar, and importing wines of France (as well as fulfilling numerous
other roles) for Cincinnati, Ohio-based wine importer and distributor Vintner Select.
Almost from the beginning of his career as a merchant, David has published articles
on wine, beginning with a 1984 piece on Alsace for the long-departed magazine Friends
of Wine. His commentary began appearing in Stephen Tanzer’s International
(then New York) Wine Cellar with coverage of Alsace in 1986 and expanded
to include Germany, Bordeaux, and occasionally California and Hungary. His comprehensive
vintage reports from Germany (beginning in 1989) and Austria (from 1997) became
a staple fixture of that journal.
David's familiarity with and championing of the wines of Alsace, Burgundy, and the
Loire has been a constant feature of his quarter century as a merchant. Like Robert
Parker, Alsace was the first wine growing region David visited, and in the June,
1990 issue of The Wine Advocate, he was headlined as "The force behind ...
this country's greatest selection of Alsace wines." David's fascination with and
annual trips to Burgundy began in the early eighties as a result of his contacts
with Robert Chadderdon, Robert Haas, Robert Kacher, Becky Wasserman, and other pioneering
American importers, and Anthony Hanson, in the second (1995) edition of his seminal
book Burgundy, took time to acknowledge and "warmly thank" David. In an October
31, 1995 profile in the Wine Spectator, Matt Kramer wrote "Probably no other
retailer so ardently promotes such an array of Loire ... wines as well as Burgundy."
Over the past fifteen years, David has also devoted increased attention and travel
time to the Languedoc, Roussillon, and Champagne (too often viewed only as a branded
celebratory beverage rather than as one of the world's great wine regions).
Always anxious to spot trends, champion little known regions, and lead consumers
to unanticipated vinous riches, David enthusiastically accepted Robert Parker's
invitation to report on wines from wide tracts of Central Europe and of North America
east of the Rockies that have been unjustly neglected by many of the world's wine
journals. His report on the wines of New York appeared in the June, 2006 issue of
the Wine Advocate and commentary on wines from Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia
will soon follow. It is in that same spirit of adventure that David has accepted
responsibility for covering wines of New Zealand and South Africa, two growing regions
which he will only now visit for the first time.
David has been a James Beard Award finalist for his wine journalism, the recipient
of the Vinea Wachau's 2006 Steinfederpreis, and has authored the material on German
wines in the newly released 3rd edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine.
In recent years, his observations and opinions on wine - soon to include a column
as North American correspondent - have begun appearing in The World of Fine Wine
(U.K.), and been regularly posted on the ethereal pages of erobertparker.com
and jancisrobinson.com. Beginning in Autumn of this year (2006) his musings as a
columnist also appear, for a German speaking audience, in Vinaria (Austria).
David is currently engaged in bringing his early work in philosophical fields to
bear on wine, in which connection he was recently invited as a guest instructor
in a pilot course in Aesthetics at U.C. Davis.
David’s inaugural (vintage 2004) reports in the pages of Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate
were based on his twenty-first annual tasting tour of Germany (averaging more than
seventy winery visits) and his ninth to Austria. He seldom breaks a sweat until
the number of wines (or their score) breaks three figures, and only once caught
himself napping on his numb feet, glass in hand, in the middle of a freezing cellar.
Since that day, he has taped thousands of hours of tasting notes with nary another
inexplicable silence. With the Wine Advocate as his new sounding board, that record
bids fair to continue.
After one memorable mid-‘90s session, Robert Parker wrote to compliment David on
his "legendary tasting abilities" and "laser-like precision", concluding: "I am
delighted that you are content to be only a part-time wine writer." That will now
no longer be the case, but only on account of the unique opportunity afforded him
by full time work as a member of Robert Parker's team at The Wine Advocate.
He currently covers the wines of Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe, America’s Eastern
& Midwestern wineries, Alsace, Burgundy, the Loire Valley, Languedoc-Roussillon,
Champagne, New Zealand and South Africa.
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