Dan Philips

By JOSHUA COOPER RAMO

OCCUPATION Wine aficionado and founder of the Grateful Palate, a gourmet-food catalog based in Oxnard, Calif.

GOAL To make food and wine culture more egalitarian--and more fun

QUOTE "Great wine makes me horny. Why not write about it that way?"

Dan Philips dates his passion for wine to the Passover tables of his childhood, where "wine was the one thing forbidden to the kids." By the time he was in his teens, he was taking tasting courses in his hometown of Berkeley, Calif. And though Philips studied film at U.S.C., got a master's at Oxford and bounced from job to job, he spent his free time sniffing, swirling and spitting his way through the world's wines. "Preparation," he says, "for what I was supposed to be doing."

Philips, 40, is now known for his masterly palate. A couple of years ago, wine great Robert Parker--whose reviews can make or break vineyards--heard word of Philips' taste and invited him to set up a private sipping. "At the end of a day's work," Parker wrote, "I felt like a colossal stooge, for rarely have I tasted so many exceptional wines." Philips' palate, Parker said, was "brilliant."

Like Parker, Philips does more than just find wine: he also writes about it with zeal and charm. (His e-letters are available at gratefulpalate.com. And though many of the Australian wines he particularly champions are available only in tiny quantities, he's expanding into more plentiful epicurean joys. Among his passions: bacon flavored and sliced by tiny mom-and-pop smokehouses. It's one taste he presumably didn't pick up at Passover.

--By Joshua Cooper Ramo