Margaret Swaine #177

At the source of her profession

Margaret Swaine has visited over 130 countries researching and writing about wine, spirits, food, restaurants and travel. Her debut in the wine field was as a winner of blind tasting competitions. In 1978, when Margaret entered her first Toronto competition, she captured both the first prize and the “women’s prize”.

An Honours Journalism graduate of Carleton University, Margaret spent over two decades as the wine and drink columnist for both Toronto Life and Chatelaine magazines. For 16 years, she wrote for the National Post, starting with features and then the weekly Wine & Spirits Picks column and later the weekly culinary travel column “Forks & the Road”. Her bi-weekly column under the banner “Global Gourmet” in www.travelindustrytoday.com won first prize in the 2018 Travel Media Association of Canada awards for best travel column/blog. She is a principal critic and partner with Wine Align, covering spirits.

A restaurant critic, a spirit columnist, and a spa correspondent

For some years, she wrote “Raising the Bar”, a spirit and cocktail column for Zoomer Magazine, was the Toronto restaurant critic for Gault Millau’s website gayot.com, a golf columnist for ClubLink’s newsletter, a spirit columnist (Pouring for Profits) for Foodservice Hospitality and ski columnist for SkiPress. She was the spa correspondent for six years for Reader’s Digest Best Health Magazine with a column “Paradise Home and Away”. She is also the author of the first three annual “Toronto Life Wine, Beer and Spirits Guides”, which reviewed the thousands of wines, beers and spirits on the general list in Ontario.