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Gerald Albert Asher is an English-born wine personality, based since 1974 in San Francisco, California. Initially a wine merchant and importer, today he is a wine writer.
Born in London and raised partly in rural Essex because of the Blitz, Asher's career in wine began in 1950, when he took a part-time job at a wine retailer in London's Shepherd Market. He founded his own merchant house, Asher, Storey and Co, in 1955, to import rare and lesser-known French wines to Britain. Active until 1970, the firm was widely seen as ground-breaking for its introduction to the British market of several previously obscure wines that proceeded to become popular. In 1971, Asher relocated to New York to take up a senior position at Austin, Nichols and Co, which imported Bordeaux-classed wines to the United States. The next year he also became wine editor at Gourmet magazine, a post he would hold for the next three decades, writing the "Wine Journal" column, which eventually became monthly. In 1974, he received the Mérite agricole from the French government for his contributions to French agriculture.
He moved the same year to San Francisco, where he became head of the Monterey Wine Company. He writes that he had a "a topsy-turvy introduction to California wine", having never tasted any before a 1967 visit, but he soon began championing it, organising the annual California Vintners Barrel Tasting Dinner along with Paul Kovi and Tom Margittai of New York's Four Seasons Restaurant. The barrel tasting, which started in 1976, played an important role in building the image and understanding of California wines on the East Coast of the United States, and over the next decade became seen by critics as the wine event of the year. Asher started the Mosswood Wine Company in 1978, within the McKesson Corporation, and headed it until 1987, when McKesson sold off its interests in wine and spirits to concentrate on pharmaceuticals. Asher took early retirement to focus solely on his wine writing, which he continues today.
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