Tom Stevenson

Tom Stevenson
Tom Stevenson in March 2006
Born	(1951-03-08) 8 March 1951 (age 65) Tunbridge Wells, England
Occupation	Author, wine writer, wine critic, wine judge
Nationality	British

Tom Stevenson (born 1951) is a British author who has been writing about wine for more than 30 years. Described by his colleagues as one of today's most prolific wine authors, Stevenson is regarded as the world's leading authority on Champagne. He has written 23 books, the most important of which have been published internationally by more than 50 publishers and translated into over 25 languages. In 1986, his book Champagne became the first wine book to win four literary awards, establishing Stevenson's reputation as a serious author, a fastidious researcher with a talent for divining future issues, and a critic bold enough to take on the establishment.

Although Stevenson's first writings on wine were published in Decanter in the late 1970s, a magazine for which he still writes, he was a more prolific contributor to WINE Magazine for consumers and Wine & Spirit International for the trade (both since merged into Wine & Spirit) during the 1980s and 1990s. At the time he was well known for his monthly "Fizz File" column in WINE Magazine, and for being the sole author of the award winning annual Champagne supplements for both of these magazines.

In 1998, his Christie's World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine became the only wine book to warrant a leader in a UK national newspaper (The Guardian, 14 October 1998), when he published for the first time ever a 17th-century document proving that the English used a second fermentation to convert still wines into sparkling at least six years before Dom Pérignon arrived at the Abbey of Hautvillers, and almost 40 years before the French claim that sparkling Champagne was invented.

Stevenson is also regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on Alsace wine. In 1987 he was elected a confrère oenophile of the Confrérie Saint Etienne, when he was the sole person amongst the Alsace wine producers and other experts present to identify a 50-year-old wine made from Sylvaner. In 1994 Stevenson's 600-page The Wines of Alsace won the Veuve Clicquot Book of the Year award in the USA and caused Malcolm Gluck, then wine correspondent of The Guardian, to declare that "It is not simply the best book about Alsace wines ever written, or the most penetrating book about a French wine region ever written; it is the greatest wine book ever written, period".