How can you help me?
You love wine and you want to know which bottles to buy and what dishes to pair with them.
I’m here to help.
Think of me as your red-nosed superhero, using my jaw-dropping powers for your wine-drinking pleasure:
- Buy wines you love in your price range with my wine reviews that include food pairings.
- Download my free mobile apps that have front label scanners and barcode readers to instantly access my reviews and tell you which liquor stores closest to you have the wines in stock.
- Learn about how to taste wine and pair it with food in my free online video wine class.
- Meet other wine lovers in our light-hearted, lively chat on the weekly Sunday Sipper Club Video Show.
- Escape into the wine world with my new wine podcast, Unreserved Wine Talk, that Apple featured under New & Noteworthy … yay.
- Travel with me to meet wacky winemakers in beautiful spots around the globe in my books Red, White and Drunk All Over (including the new audio edition) and Unquenchable.
- Get the only wine emails that anyone likes anymore. Short. Sweet. Fabulously personal. Unless, of course, you’ve ever been emailed that you’ve inherited the wine cellar of a distant aunt who collected Domaine Romanée-Conti.
I’m just getting started with wine. Can you help a novice?
I didn’t name myself the Chief of Wine Happiness for nothing! Don’t panic. I’ll help you figure out the confusing choices with wines.
Start by following my wine reviews. Choose a bottle each week that I’ve reviewed and taste to see what you get from the aromas and
Also, take my free video class.
I’m advanced in my wine knowledge. How can you help me?
The podcast and Sunday Sipper Club Show will introduce you to experts who can help you take your knowledge to the next level. (These shows also help novices because we don’t dive into boring, technical jargon … it’s all about wonderful story-telling.)
Also, I offer an in-depth course about pairing wine and cheese. Email me at [email protected] to know when the next session starts.
Do you sell wine?
Nope, but I can help you buy better wine.
I work at a winery or wine agency. May I send you wines to review?
Yes. Email me at [email protected].
May I advertise with you?
Yes. Email me at [email protected] for details.
And who are you to teach me about wine?
Here’s my bio in the third-person so it doesn’t sound all conceited.
To fund her late-night vinous habits, Natalie MacLean holds down day jobs as a wine writer, speaker and judge. An accredited sommelier, she is a member of the National Capital Sommelier Guild, the Wine Writers Circle and several French wine societies with complicated and impressive names. Funny, brainy and unapologetically tipsy, her goal in life is to intimidate those crusty wine stewards at fine restaurants with her staggering knowledge.
At the World Food Media Awards in Australia, Natalie was named the World’s Best Wine Writer. The competition received more than 1,000 entries. An international and independent panel of 47 food and wine experts selected her from a short-list of 14 nominees from the U.S., Canada, U.K., New Zealand and Australia.
Natalie’s second book, Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines is packed with character sketches of obsessive personalities, travel to gorgeous vineyards, mouth-watering descriptions of food and wine, “hidden” wine education and neurotic humour. She whisks you to the mountainside vineyards of Germany, the baked red earth of Australia, and the shady verandahs of Niagara — as well as to scenic, offbeat locations in southern Italy, the Mediterranean, Argentina, Chile and South Africa — all in search of the best value bottles the world has to offer.
Unquenchable was selected as one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011 and judges for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards awarded it the Best Drinks Book.
Natalie’s first book Red, White and Drunk All Over: A Wine-Soaked Journey from Grape to Glass was chosen the Best Wine Literature Book in the English language at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. The competition receives more than 6,000 books from 60 countries each year. The awards were created at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany ten years ago to reward those who “cook and drink with words.” The book also won the Culinary Literary Book Award in the Cordon d’Or international culinary arts competition and was nominated for the Evelyn Richardson Prize for Non-Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards.
Red, White and Drunk All Over chronicles her last three years sipping, spitting and slogging her way through the international wine world to visit some its most evocative places and to meet some of its most charismatic, obsessive and innovative characters. The book has been described as A Year in Provence meets Kitchen Confidential then goes Sideways.
Natalie has also won four James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards. She is the only person to have won both the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation and the M.F.K. Fisher Award for Excellence in Culinary Writing from Les Dames d’Escoffier International. Both awards are in memory of one of America’s finest food writers, best known for her classic gastronomic tome The Art of Eating.
Natalie has also won six Bert Greene Awards, presented by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, six awards from the American Association of Food Journalists, four from the North American Travel Writers Association and three honorable mentions at the National Magazine Awards.
In the United Kingdom, she has been nominated twice for Communicator of the Year award, hosted by the International Wine & Spirit Competition. She was also just named the Louis Roederer Online International Wine Writer of the Year with fellow nominees that included the web sites of Jancis Robinson, Kate Thal and Robert Parker.
Her articles have appeared in more than sixty newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Reader’s Digest, BusinessWeek, Conde Nast Traveler, Time Out New York, enRoute (Air Canada), Hemispheres (United Airlines), Chatelaine, Saturday Night, The Age (Australia), Sydney Morning Herald, Wine Enthusiast, Wine International, Ritz-Carlton Magazine, Canadian House & Home, Worth, Canadian Business Magazine, Food & Drink, Ottawa Magazine, Grand, Upscale Living, Coastal Living, Ottawa Citizen, MD Canada, MD News, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, St Louis Post-Dispatch, Saltscapes, Halifax Herald, Pure Canada, Tasters Guild International, Vines, Wine Selectors, Wine Access, Wine Tidings, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, IE Money Magazine and President’s Choice Magazine.
Natalie is the drinks blogger for Epicurious, the web site for both Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. More than five million food and wine lovers visit the site every month.
Other than wine, her interests include highland dancing, which she taught for ten years, after placing fifth in the world championships in Scotland. A Rhodes Scholarship finalist, she studied nineteenth-century English literature at Oxford University, England; earned an honors Bachelor of Public Relations (MSVU, Halifax) and took an MBA with distinction (UWO, London). However, all of this training is irrelevant to her current preoccupation. Instead, she credits the long line of hard drinkers from whom she descends for her ability to drink like a fish—and for the motivation to write about it, in a transparent attempt to make it look respectable. (But if you really want to know how she got started, click here for an article or here for a radio interview.)
Wow. I can’t believe you scrolled to the end of this ;)
