Endless moves as a child, including a year-long stint in North Africa, made Philip Goldsmith a travel addict from an early age. He has since 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 in Spain, 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 he found it easier to find a job as a journalist than as a scientist. More than a decade later, however, he once again found himself reading 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 when he was being wined and dined in style by some of Europe's biggest corporations. Many companies wasted bottles of fine Bordeaux before he learned to appreciate them.

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