What’s the recipe for running the food department at one of the most respected magazine brands in the nation? We receive an inside peak from Susan Westmoreland, Food Director at the Good Housekeeping Institute (GHI), one of the most trusted sources for consumer product evaluation for over a century (GHI was established in 1900). GHI evaluates thousands of products for Good Housekeepingmagazine which reaches 24 million readers each month.
At the Good Housekeeping test kitchen at Hearst Tower, Susan and her team produce all content, create recipes and test, taste and test again and again (an average of three times) for the magazine, special issues, cookbooks and special projects. And we’re wondering: How does she keep turkey topics fresh year after year for the Thanksgiving issue? We discuss in this edition of The Connected Table LIVE!
What’s it like to oversee one of the world’s most read wine magazines? How much wine can you taste in a week?
Wine Spectator Executive Editor Thomas (Tom) Matthews has spent the better part of thirty years reporting on the wine industry. He joined the magazine in 1988 starting as a reporter in the London office and moved to New York in 1989. Appointed to executive editor in 1999, Tom oversees the magazine’s staff of writers, editors and art directors for both the print and online operation. He is the lead taster for Spanish wines and one of the magazine’s principal restaurant reviews and travel writers.
Tom’s passion for wine began back in the vineyards picking grapes in Bordeaux during the 1979 vintage. He learned the business side as a wine buyer for New York restaurants, Odeon and Cafe Luxembourg, in the 1980s. His book, A Village in the Vineyard, written with wife Sara, a photographer, chronicles their life in France.
Tom Matthews
Tom and his team have helped build Wine Spectator into the world’s #1 wine focused magazine, by not just reporting on trends, but often, through its superlative journalism, helping to forecast them through in-depth interviews with industry mavericks and the lifestyle they help invoke to readers. While many look to Wine Spectator for the extensive wine ratings in the back of the magazine, it’s the profiles and destination reports of places we long to visit that fill our files. Some of the most highly anticipated issues of Wine Spectator each year include the annual “World’s Greatest Wine Lists” dining guide published in August and the upcoming “Top 100 Wines” guide.
Tom joins The Connected Table LIVE October 7, 4pmEST, to discuss his career, wine trends, his recent cover story on Spain and give a hint or two about the Top 100 Wines to be unveiled later this month.
We’re deciding what glass of wine to have with this interview! We know it will be Spanish since this show will air from Wines from Spain’s Great Match in Manhattan and in anticipation of our second guest, Alvaro Palacios, the esteemed winemaker whose, in the words of Wine Spectator’s October 15th cover story, “leads Priorat to new heights.”
