Meet Rod

I’m a wine writer, wine historian, and wine judge based in Ottawa, Canada. I’m also a professor of history at Carleton University where I teach courses on European (especially French) history and the history of alcohol and food.

I was born in New Zealand and grew up there at a time when New Zealand wine was pretty dreadful. Most was (badly) made from hybrid varieties such as müller-thurgau and baco noir. Much of it was fortified and sweet and suitable only for pouring over ice cream.

Rod Phillips

Rod Phillips with his daughter Zoë

I got into wine as a teenager. I visited the wineries just north of Auckland (New Zealand’s first wine region) and I found a way to buy wine (mostly French, German, South African, and Australian) even though I was under the minimum legal age (then 21). By the time I emigrated to Canada, when I was 19, I had a modest cellar and a small library of wine books. Friends helped ne drink the cellar; I brought the books with me.

I studied in Canada, back in New Zealand, and then in the UK (getting my doctorate from Oxford University), and I started teaching history and writing on the history of the family, the French Revolution, and European history more generally. 

Wine remained a secondary interest until the late 1990s. I tasted and drank widely, and visited wine regions wherever I was doing research, especially in France.  In the late 1990s, when I was writing a book on the French Revolution, someone suggested I write a history of wine.  I immediately dropped the French Revolution book and started work on what became A Short History of Wine. It was published in 2000 by Penguin Books in the U.K., then by HarperCollins in the U.S., and in several foreign translations.

That was the first of several books I’ve written on wine and its history. Others include: 

  • Ontario Wine Country (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2006) 

  • Alcohol: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2014, paperback 2019, several foreign-language editions, audiobook)

  • French Wine: A History (Sacramento: University of California Press, 2016, paperback 2020)

  • The Wines of Canada (Oxford: Infinite Ideas ‘Classic Wine Library’, 2017)

  • 9000 Years of Wine (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 2017, update of A Short History of Wine)

  • Wine: A Social and Cultural History of the Drink that Changed our Lives (Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2018)

For ten years (2008-2017) I also wrote an annual guide to the wines in the LCBO, Ontario’s state-owned liquor retailing system.

After A Short History of Wine was published, I was encouraged to write about modern wines. I started writing articles and wine reviews for Canada’s main wine magazine and I wrote a weekly wine column for Ottawa’s main daily newspaper for 16 years.  I now write the wine features for the print and on-line editions of NUVO Magazine, Canada’s leading luxury lifestyle publication, and I contribute occasionally to The World of Fine Wine (U.K.), the world’s best wine periodical by far. I’ve also written for GuildSomm.com, the Guild of Sommeliers’ web site in the U.S.

In addition, I have judged in wine competitions in Canada, the US, France, Italy, New Zealand, and Chile, and I judge each year at the TEXSOM International Wine Awards in Dallas. I regularly visit wineries around the world and in the last two years I travelled to wine regions in Canada, France (many times), the US (California, New York, Virginia), South Africa, Argentina, and Australia. 

My current (early 2020) projects are: 

  • A book on cabernet franc around the world. So far I’ve visited key regions in France, Canada, the US, Argentina, and South Africa. My to-do list includes Italy and Hungary.

  • A book on the wines of South-west France, for the Classic Wine Library.

  • With a friend and colleague, Jean Bart, I’m preparing an edition of the wine records of the priest of Volnay (Burgundy) in the 18th-century.  It will be published by Éditions Universitaires de Dijon.

What drives me forward is the pleasure I get from thinking and drinking wine.  I love spending time in archives, reading about wine in the past and then writing my research up. I equally love talking to winemakers all over the world, tasting their wines, and writing about them. Wine simply enriches my life.