Bill Shepard profile

Our Wine Editor, Bill Shepard, has lived extensively in France and speaks French fluently. A college French major, Bill then had a Fulbright grant and taught at the Lycee Jean Giraudoux, Chateauroux (Indre). During his leisure hours, Bill served as translator at chateaux tours throughout the Loire Valley. He also notes that he missed by just a year having the actor Gerard Depardieu as his student at Chateauroux. Bill took his law degree from Harvard, then postgraduate infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia, “which was harder.” His diplomatic career included tours as Consul or Political Officer at our Embassies in Singapore, Saigon, Budapest and Athens. He then served as Consul General in Bordeaux, where he got to know each of the 20 departments of the Southwest region thoroughly. Bill has personally visited and assessed the wines at over sixty of the finest wine chateaux of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne, including every first and second growth of the Medoc region of Bordeaux, every primary growth of Pomerol and St. Emilion, as well as Chateau d’Yquem, the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, the Domaine Comte de Vogue, Taittinger and Pol Roger, and other leading estates, from Alsace to Chateauneuf du Pape. Bill is the author of both Shepard's Guide to Mastering French Wines, and the popular Robbie Cutler series of diplomatic mysteries. See his website, www.diplomaticmysteries.com, for his latest book, and personal appearances. To order "Shepard's Guide to Mastering French Wines: Taste Is for Wine: Points Are for Ping Pong," copy and paste the following link to your browser: http://www.amazon.com/Shepards-Guide-Mastering-French-Wines/dp/0595288588/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256586935&sr=1-1