about James Wright…
…best known to himself as the World’s Champion Cultural Compost Heap, James was trained as a classical musician, studying Composition and Harpsichord, earning a Master’s Degree from New England Conservatory, followed by ten years on the concert stage playing in chamber ensembles, at which point he traded his double keyboard antiquity for a Gibson Les Paul and a King Super 20 tenor sax…
Realising that his own proclivities were ultimately more literary than they were musical, Wright moulded a favourite hobby into an interesting and engaging job working with wine, one which did not lack for aesthetic reward… An inveterate composer of newsletters during his fifteen-year retail career (mostly in Washington DC and Los Angeles CA), the twelve years he subsequently spent selling Expensive Wine to a who’s-who list of Very Expensive Restaurants in Manhattan were spiced by periods of paid webloggery, plus a five-year stretch spending three weeks abroad each year tasting and writing about Austrian wines (in German) for a top Viennese publication.
James first learned to taste wine in Burgundy (thank you Becky Wasserman, thank you Bobby Kacher), but five+ years living in Berkeley and Venice (the one with the beach, not the canals) brought him into intimate acquaintance with the native product of California. Favourite themes of his are the love of Zinfandel, Champagne as a food wine, and Burgundy – still and incurably to this day. Moonlighting from time to time as a professional translator, James works with the Austrian Wine Marketing Board, the Austrian Tourism Authority and the prestigious Vienna PR agency Wine&Partners. A dinner party thrown by their directress a few years back led Wright to the piano, where he now sits fast, paying equal attention to the Viennese classicism of Mozart & Schubert on the one hand and the urbane jazz stylings of Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn on the other, with a bit of room in between for his own series Steinway Dreams.