Marvin Shanken

Coming Up

Independent trade publishing in beverage culture depends on audience discipline: knowing who reads, what they collect, and which occasions bring them back. At Impact, Marvin Shanken became owner from 1973, setting the operating pattern for work built around controlled platforms, specialized readerships, and a direct relationship between editorial judgment and market appetite. Wine publishing became the central register for that model. As founder of M. Shanken Communications and editor and publisher of Wine Spectator since 1979, Shanken worked in a category where the magazine had to cover wine alongside the practices that surround it: travel, cellars, restaurants, personalities, and the social habits of serious readers. In 1981, New York Wine Experience extended that editorial field into a live format organized around tasting and exchange. The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation added an education and opportunity arm within the broader food-and-beverage world. Adjacent connoisseurship required a similar editorial structure but a different vocabulary. Whisky culture brought ceremony and institutional lineage through Keepers of the Quaich, where Shanken has been an inductee and Vice Chair, USA Chapter since 1988. Cigar culture brought its own rituals of leisure, selection, and detail through Cigar Aficionado, where he has served as editor and publisher since 1992. Philanthropic service formed a separate line of work outside the publishing categories. At Els for Autism Foundation in Jupiter, Florida, Shanken served as chairman of the board until 2023.

Where They Are Now

The current publishing house works from a concise center: M. Shanken Communications. From that base, the work extends into magazines, events, and cultural projects built for readers who treat wine, whisky, and cigars as subjects requiring context, repetition, and company. “The experience is an extension of the magazine to feed and reward people that have a deep interest in wine, whisky and cigars.” The magazine-to-experience model is the useful craft point. A publication establishes language, authority, and audience; the live format tests that authority in the room. The tasting, the editorial franchise, the conversation, and the scholarship foundation each serve a different function, but all depend on the same premise: expertise has to be organized so readers and guests can enter it without stripping away standards. The through-line remains practical rather than ornamental: Impact from 1973, Wine Spectator since 1979, New York Wine Experience since 1981, Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, Keepers of the Quaich since 1988, and Cigar Aficionado since 1992. Across those platforms, Shanken’s role has been publisher, editor, founder, creator, and institutional participant in overlapping cultures of taste.

Signature

As a signature, Cigar Aficionado is not a dish but an editorial product with a clear cultural job. In Shanken’s body of work, the title marks the translation of cigar appreciation into a magazine format with its own audience, cadence, and rituals. Like Wine Spectator, it treats the publication as more than a record of a category: it is a setting for knowledge, preference, and community to take shape.

In Their Words “I was a freshman at the great University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. I started smoking Hava-Tampa Jewels, which were then 25 cents for a box of five. They had wooden tips. Rather unsophisticated, but they were fun to smoke.” “The experience is an extension of the magazine to feed and reward people that have a wine, whisky and cigars.”

Honors

Marvin Shanken has received MPA: Association of Magazine Media Lifetime Achievement Award (2019). Recognition for this kind of trade work tends to follow duration, category authority, and institutional reach. Shanken’s honors include Lifetime Achievement Award and Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America (2012), set against a record of publishing ventures, live experiences, philanthropic service, and editorial presence across wine, whisky, and cigars.