About Us

**They say travel broadens the mind, or in my case saturates it…**

The Swig Coach has been studying and drinking wine since Hubert Green won the US Open at Southern Hills (that was 1977, but who’s counting?). And speaking of legendary drinkers, there was still a tour stop back then called the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic! That year I was offered a job as a maître d’ and wine steward in a French restaurant in Boston even though I knew nothing about wine and had never worked a day in a restaurant before.

To jumpstart my training, in the fall of 1977, I was enrolled in a crash course in wine appreciation taught by a legend in his own right, Christian Vannequé, the former head sommelier at the Tour D’Argent in Paris. He had a firm belief that the best way to learn about wine tasting was to do it blind, that is, without any knowledge of what was in the glass. In 6 weeks I learned more about tasting and studying wine from him than I have in the 40+ years that followed. A few years later that knowledge led to my victory in a major blind winetasting competition in New York where I beat 6000 people and won a trip to France. The backstory of how I invented “The Hangover Tasting Method” (see right) makes for a great tale at a future 19th-hole gathering, and I promise to get it down on paper someday

**Hanging with the irrepressible** **Antonio Caggiano** **in Taurasi**

After leaving the industry, I drank a lot of wine, studied it as a hobby, and continued to do a lot of blind tasting with friends. In 2006 I staked out a piece of social media turf on cellartracker.com where you can find about 1800 of my public tasting notes under the alias bevetroppo, a made-up Italian word that essentially means “he drinks too much.” A theme may be emerging here. If you want to see whether you agree or disagree with my taste in wine, it’s all there on display. In 2013 while furloughed from my day job, I spent a year as the exclusive representative in NJ of an amazing importer of Italian wines based in Brooklyn named Jan D’Amore. It was an incredible learning experience in understanding native Italian grape varieties and trying to explain them to others.

**Getting down to earth with assyrtiko vines at** **Sigalas** **in Santorini**

So let’s put it this way. I’m not a wine professional, but I have a passion and reverence for the subject that extends beyond the normal or perhaps healthy, especially at my age. But even as I’m starting to appreciate the beauty of forward tees, I’m not slowing down on the wine front.

Sometime in 2017, I was taking a lesson from one of the assistant pros where I play (Fairmount Country Club, Chatham, NJ). Peter was just as curious about wine as I was about fixing my pull/hook. I invited him to come over one evening to open a few bottles and talk about tasting, to give him a few basics for how to think about approaching the subject. That was my eureka moment: he was my swing coach, and I could be his swig coach. I began riffing on the idea that while there is an avalanche of content on golf and wine independently, no one had yet attempted to bring an exclusive focus to their intersection. I managed to secure the URL for swigcoach.com and said to myself, someday when I retire…