page_title: Gerald Asher
section_title: First steps into wine
hierarchical_section_title: Gerald Asher / Biography / First steps into wine
caption_attribution_description: English: Shepherd Market, Mayfair, London W1J
context_page_description: Gerald Albert Asher is an English wine personality, based since 1974 in San Francisco, California. Initially a wine merchant and importer, today he is a wine writer.
  Born in London and raised partly in rural Essex because of the Blitz, Asher's career in wine began in 1950, when he took a part-time job at a wine retailer in London's Shepherd Market. He founded his own merchant house, Asher, Storey and Co, in 1955, to import rare and lesser-known French wines to Britain. Active until 1970, the firm was widely seen as ground-breaking for its introduction to the British market of several previously obscure wines that proceeded to become popular. In 1971, Asher relocated to New York to take up a senior position at Austin, Nichols and Co, which imported Bordeaux-classed wines to the United States. The next year he also became wine editor at Gourmet magazine, a post he would hold for the next three decades, writing the "Wine Journal" column, which eventually became monthly. In 1974, he received the Mérite agricole from the French government for his contributions to French agriculture.
  He moved the same year to San Francisco, where he became head of the Monterey Wine Company.
context_section_description: Asher entered the wine industry in 1950, at the age of 18, when he took a part-time job assisting a wine retailer in Shepherd Market, between Curzon Street and Piccadilly in Mayfair, Central London. Within a year he had taken a full-time position with a small wine distributor, and by 1952 he was engaged by Blumenthal & Co, a major wine importer. Sponsored by Blumenthal, he attended tastings and lectures held by the Wine Trade Club at the Worshipful Company of Vintners in London, and in 1953 a scholarship allowed him to spend time working and studying in Jerez, the Spanish region that produces Sherry. Further such scholarships over the next two years despatched Asher to Burgundy in eastern France, then the Rheingau wine region in West Germany.
caption: Shepherd Market, where Asher's career in wine began in 1950
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