Shanken’s oenophilia blossomed as he began brokering Northern California real estate deals involving vineyards.
“I was fascinated with the world of wine,” he says. “I needed to know more about it because at the end of the day, when you’re putting people into real estate investments in vineyards, what they’re doing is selling grapes. You need to know the economics of the business. I wanted to be able to understand it so when I talked to investors, I could explain to them the nuances of why it was a good investment.”
Marvin Shanken holds a custom-made humidor during his magazine Cigar Aficionado’s April 5 fund raiser. Surrounding him are, from left, Lee Einsidler, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh,
basketball great Michael Jordan, and businessman Michael Milken, who each contributed to the $2.5 million the event raised for prostate cancer research. |
As he recalls times more than three decades past, pausing to draw from his cigar, it becomes evident when the seeds of his overriding magazine philosophy—that of educating people on life’s luxuries—were planted.
“I fell in love with wine,” he says. “All I wanted to do was be a wine writer. I hated Wall Street. I was very idealistic, and I didn’t like what I was experiencing and seeing. I wanted to abandon real estate and finance and business. I heard about a newsletter that was for sale. They were going to close it down, because it was very unsuccessful. They only had 200 subscribers. It was very inexpensive. I bought it for $5,000, and henceforth I was a publisher.”
Shanken was 29 when in 1972 he purchased the wine industry newsletter Impact, which remains in his publications portfolio to this day.
Three years later Shanken took a leap of faith and left Wall Street to begin publishing Impact full time.
“I didn’t know what I was doing or how to do it,” he says. “It was a sign of insanity.”
Yet it worked. In 1979, Shanken paid $40,000 for a 12-page, tabloid-sized newspaper that had caught his attention a few years earlier, Wine Spectator.
“The guy wanted to give it to me, but he was a friend of mine, so I wouldn’t take it for nothing,” Shaken says. “I didn’t have the $40,000, so I paid for it over
five years.”
The magazine now has a circulation of 380,000, and its influence among the wine-drinking public is unmistakably powerful.
“Certainly, he’s introduced for consumers a level [of] comfort for understanding wines,” says Dan Leese, president of Beringer Blass Wine Estates and a longtime Shanken friend. “That drives some people crazy because it makes [Spectator] the overall authority of wine, but I think it’s necessary in a confusing industry.”
The magazine’s story, however, is not one of overnight success.
“It was many years before it broke even,” Shanken says. “It’s being committed to try to give the reader what I thought they wanted to read. The truth. Giving them news and entertainment and information so that they too could appreciate and learn about wine. I’ve always said I’m not in the publishing business, I’m in the education business, and all of my magazines tend to educate the reader regarding the subject that we’re covering.
“To drink wine and learn about wine is to learn about life, is to learn about agriculture, is to learn about geography, is to learn about chemistry, is to learn about craft and tradition,” he says. “When you discover all the different grape varieties, all the different flavors and tastes, it’s a complete kaleidoscope and rainbow of possibilities. Every year there’s new wines and new tastes, so it’s a never-ending journey of discovery.”
In 1991 that journey took Shanken to Cuba to research a Spectator cover story on Cuban cigars.
“When I was there, I was so taken by the country that I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to die without starting a cigar magazine,’” he says. “I made a commitment to myself that I was going to do it.”
Reaction in the publishing industry was frosty. At the time, cigar sales were stale, and smoking them certainly was not in vogue.
“All of my friends and people in the business told me I had lost my mind,” Shanken says. “I didn’t do it knowing it was going to work; I did it because I wanted to do it. I was hoping there’d be 20,000 people out there who wanted to read something to learn about cigars. Originally it was going to be a newsletter, but as more and more people told me I was crazy and I was going to lose money and destroy my reputation as a budding publisher, the more obsessed I became and I kept raising the bar.”
Today, 1.6 million people read bimonthly issues of Aficionado. Celebrities from Sharon Stone to Fidel Castro (Shanken is one of only a few North American journalists to have interviewed the Cuban president) have graced its cover, and it is widely credited with sparking the cigar boom of the 1990s.
“When you smoke a cigar, it’s a very relaxing, pleasurable experience,” he says, commenting on the allure of cigars. “Whenever I have a thorny business problem, if I smoke a cigar and step back, it will expand my mind and allow me to come up with a solution, an option that enhances what I’m trying to do in thinking about what’s correct for business. It’s a great relaxing vice.”
Asked how many cigars he smokes in a typical day, Shanken grins devilishly and says only, “I do enjoy a good cigar.”
Visitors walking into the lobby of M. Shanken Communications are greeted by a floor-to-ceiling, glass-enclosed wine cellar display that holds about 2,000 bottles. Like a proud papa, Shanken takes a guest into the conference room, where humidors once owned by the “world’s greatest cigar smokers” sit on display.
Castro’s mahogany box autographed “To Marvin” rests beside the walnut humidor Milton Berle gave John F. Kennedy on his inauguration day in 1961. Shanken paid $574,500 for it during the 1996 Sotheby’s auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s estate. Across the room is the majestic humidor the Cuban government gave to Winston Churchill in 1941. On the front of the humidor, which the Cubans had packed with 5,000 cigars, is a carving of Churchill; inside, an engraved message reads, “To the honorable Winston S. Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain, from the Democracy of Cuba.”
“More and more executives of communication companies, instead of going with their heart, they rely too much on the consultants and the accountants and the lawyers to take the vanilla road,” says Florio. “Marvin is an editor that knows his subject, lives his subject, and has great passion for it. He’s walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars in buyout money because it’s his. You’d have better success trying to buy one of his kids than trying to get that company away from him.”
Shanken’s daughters from a previous marriage, Samantha and Allison, work beside him every day, so it’s a safe bet that neither his children nor his company are going anywhere anytime soon.
“I had this vision of something that would be extraordinary, which in many respects has been achieved,” Shanken says, and with a wry smile leans back, puffs on his cigar and adds, “Life’s been OK.”
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