Endless moves as a child, including a year-long stint in North Africa, made Philip Goldsmith a travel addict from an early age. Since this restless childhood he has lived and worked on two continents, forsaking the rain in his native England for the California sun, and clocked up some impressive airline mileage as a globe trotting business journalist and a wayward traveler in search of personal misadventure. He has survived flash floods in Malaysia, been stranded by a train in Spain, seen the inside of a Dominican jail, fallen off the Great Wall in China, and tumbled down the side of a volcano in El Salvador. Still his desire for unusual new experiences remains as strong as ever.

It helped that Philip inadvertently chose the right career path. After putting in more hours working on the student newspaper at the University of London than for his degree in chemistry it was no surprise that he found it easier to get a job as a journalist than a scientist. More than a decade later, however, he once again found himself learning about chemistry, albeit the chemistry of wine.

Philip’s introduction to the joys of wine might have come from watching his father drink large quantities of the stuff to survive the many stressful family holidays in France. More likely, however, he acquired his expensive wine habit as a journalist while being wined and dined in style by some of Europe’s biggest corporations. A lot of companies wasted many a bottle of fine Bordeaux on Philip before he learned to appreciate what he was drinking.

Now Philip has a very European attitude to enjoying wine and hopes to live to a ripe old age by drinking a glass (or two) every day. When he’s not writing, traveling or working hard to extend his life at local wineries, Philip often seeks out misadventure in the great outdoors of the wine country, whether mountain biking in the Santa Cruz Mountains, hiking in Mendocino, or canoeing down the mighty Russian river in Sonoma. All are within easy reach of his home in San Francisco.