Patrick Comiskey has been a Senior Contributor for Wine & Spirits Magazine since 2000. He is the chief critic for all domestic wines not from California, and regularly contributes articles devoted to California, Oregon and Washington wine, winegrowing, and wine culture.
Comiskey is a native of Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in English and Psychology. He graduated from the MFA program at Brown University in 1987. In 1995 Comiskey became the Wine Director at 42 Degrees Restaurant in San Francisco, whose chef and owner, Jimmy Moffat, was included in Food & Wine Magazine’s Top 10 New Chefs awards in 1996. In 2000 Comiskey joined the West Coast staff of Wine & Spirits Magazine where he served as Associate Editor, Tasting Coordinator and, eventually, Senior Editor.
He has traveled extensively throughout the U.S. wine regions, as well as France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, and Australia, and tastes more than 4,000 wines a year. He serves regularly as a judge for some of the country’s most prestigious wine competitions, including the San Francisco International Wine Competition, the Los Angeles International Wine & Spirits Competitions (e.g., the LA County Fair Competition), Concours Mondial, and the Critic’s Challenge held annually in San Diego. He has taught classes and moderated panels on viticulture and wine tasting, and the world’s wine regions, and has written educational materials for restaurants as well as internet web sites.
From 2005-2018, Comiskey served as a regular contributor to the Food Section of the Los Angeles Times, where he wrote accessible, readable stories for a general interest newspaper. He has served as a regular columnist and reporter for zesterdaily.com, a high-traffic food and wine website, and served as the drinks editor for the LA Weekly for the column “Serious Drinking.” He has been a regular columnist with Wine Review Online, a widely read wine website. He has contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Wine section, and his work has appeared in Decanter, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Executive Travel, and the Robb Report.
His book American Rhône, How Maverick Winemakers Changed the way Americans Drink, was published by the University of California Press in 2017. The book garnered international acclaim and was shortlisted for the Roederer Wine Book Awards in 2017, as well as Best Wine Books in the New York Times, the Andre Simon Awards, and the Durand Award for Wine Writing.
Two years later he served as development editor for another U of C publication, Wine and Place: A Terroir Reader, written by Tim Patterson and John Buechsenstein. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles, with two standard poodles, Josie and Bella.
