Thinking About Fathers

I celebrated Father’s Day early this year. I was in Los Angeles June 3, so I travelled down to Carlsbad, Calif., to see my dad for dinner. My dad is 86 years old and if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be a wine critic.

Many of you know that I started my career as a daily journalist. I studied journalism in undergraduate and graduate school and I worked at daily newspapers to pay my way through school. I thought when I left graduate school in 1980 that I would find a job as an investigative journalist at a daily newspaper in Southern California, but in the end I started working in December 1981 for a small publication out of a garage in San Diego called The Wine Spectator. The rest is history.

But I always remember that my dad was so encouraging those early years at The Wine Spectator. He was a well-known international tax attorney, but his passion was collecting and, more importantly, drinking wine. “I work hard every day to do what you do every day,” he would say, suggesting that I spent my whole day drinking wine. It wasn’t really true as I spent most my day editing poorly written stories, but his enthusiasm for wine was contagious.

We were always talking about wine and hanging out and tasting. I still remember the first time I understood how fascinating wine was thanks to my dad. It was a bottle of 1966 Lafite. My dad invited me to a dinner with his best friend at a small restaurant in Belair in Los Angeles, and he poured the bottle after some German wines. “This is what great wine is all about,” he told me. I was amazed with the complexity and beauty of the wine. I can still seem to taste its cigar box, currant, light prune and leather character.  Thanks dad!

That’s why I bought a bottle of 2004 Château Lafite-Rothschild from Wine Exchange while I drove south on Interstate 5 to my dad’s house to share with him. You should have seen his face. “That’s for us to drink tonight?” he said.

I am not going to say how much that bottle cost me but it was really expensive. My dad said that when he last bought a bottle of Lafite, it cost him less than $10 a bottle! Yet it was worth every penny. I will always remember early Father’s Day in San Diego in June 2016, just like I will always remember drinking that bottle of Lafite 1966 with my dad in the late 1970s.

-James Suckling, CEO