Smoke on East 53rd, Marvin Shanken of Wine Spectator Dies at 83

Marvin R. Shanken, the Manhattan publisher who built Wine Spectator and founded Cigar Aficionado, died on Thursday, October 29. He was 83, according to obituaries in both of his magazines.

He started small and close to home. In the mid-1970s the office of his first publication was his one-bedroom apartment on East 53rd Street, Wine Spectator reports. Fifty years later his name sat atop the mastheads of magazines about what people drink and smoke after dark.

Who Was Marvin Shanken?

He was a trade-newsletter man who turned wine, and later cigars, into a glossy after-dark life. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on October 4, 1943, he went to work at a small Wall Street investment bank in 1968, mostly on real estate.

In 1972 he bought Impact, a newsletter for the wine and spirits business, using a $5,000 loan from his sister Elaine. He went full-time on it in 1975. "I had jumped out of an airplane without a parachute," he said of that leap, as quoted by Wine Spectator.

Then, in 1979, he bought a free tabloid out of San Diego called The Wine Spectator. It had a circulation of 5,000.

How Big Did Wine Spectator Get?

Very. Wine Spectator, which published his obituary, says circulation today is more than 385,000. Suite 646 lined up the milestones it reports, and the arithmetic is ours.

1979, about 5,000 copies, a free tabloid. 1985, the 100-point rating scale arrives. 1987, the glossy redesign. 1988, 76,000. 1991, 80,000. Today, more than 385,000.

That is a magazine about 77 times the size of the one he bought.

The restaurant awards grew the same way. He started the Grand Award program in 1981 with 13 winners and threw a banquet for it at Windows on the World, on top of the World Trade Center. Now over 4,000 restaurants carry a Wine Spectator award, and 99 of them the Grand Award. For two recent New York rooms where the wine list matters, see Daniel Boulud's return to Broadway and Daniel Humm's casual turn on Hudson Street.

"We're not in the publishing business, we're in the education business."

He said that often, according to Wine Spectator. The money backed it up. Whatever the Wine Experience clears goes to the Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation, which he set up in 1983. Its total so far tops $40 million.

Why Did He Start Cigar Aficionado?

Partly because, by his own account, his flagship had gone stale, and he did it over his own team's doubts. In 1991 he told his senior editors, "I find Wine Spectator boring today," Wine Spectator recalls. Cigar Aficionado reached newsstands in the fall of 1992 over the objections of his management team.

It worked. The magazine now counts a readership above 1.3 million. The Premium Cigar Association credits it with bringing handmade cigars to a much wider crowd, and called his death "the loss of an influential voice whose enthusiasm helped shape the modern premium cigar industry."

The first Big Smoke came in 1993, a gathering that brought cigar lovers and cigar makers together. It was in New York City, Cigar Aficionado reports. In those early years the magazine worked out of offices on Park Avenue South, according to a photo caption in the same obituary. In 2010 he added Malt Advocate and renamed it Whisky Advocate.

His tastes were not all late-night. Since 2000 he paid for New York City schoolchildren to see the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, Wine Spectator says.

What Did He Call Himself?

An editor. "People think of me as a businessman or an entrepreneur, I'm really an editor," he said in a 2020 interview quoted by Wine Spectator. He named himself editor of his wine magazine in 1983, and he was still Cigar Aficionado's founder, editor and publisher when he died.

His survivors include his wife, Hazel, whom he married in 1981, his sisters Elaine and Susan, his daughters Samantha Shanken Baker, Allison Cohen and Jessica Shanken Reid, and four grandchildren, according to the Premium Cigar Association.

It started as a newsletter in a one-bedroom apartment on East 53rd Street. It ended as the house magazines of the late table.