Paircraft / Sommeliers / Christy Canterbury

Christy Canterbury

Master of Wine

Christy Canterbury, MW, was the 7th woman in the US to earn the Master of Wine title. Christy speaks and writes about wine and designs wine programs for hospitality venues and private clients.

Christy recently revamped the wine list for Scotland’s Loch Lomond Golf Club, and she currently is designing the 10,000-bottle cellar for a new, private Manhattan club. She also revived the wine programs at Ilili and the former Gordon Ramsay at The London in Manhattan. Previously, Christy oversaw 16 restaurants as the National Wine Director for Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group and directed international operations as the Corporate Beverage Director for Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, managing programs in restaurants and hotels from Istanbul and Doha to Vancouver and Bora Bora. In the retail sector, she directed wine purchasing programs for New York-based retailers Italian Wine Merchants and Zachys while also overseeing their Hong Kong operations.

Christy’s corporate client event roster includes Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Rackspace, Fitch Ratings and Mitsubishi UFG Financial Group. Her appearances have included Wine Masters TV, FOX Business, Chief Wine Officer, Grace Farms and numerous international wine fairs.

In 2014, the Roederer Awards short-listed Christy for the Online Wine Communicator of the Year Award. Her work has been published by Decanter, Wine Enthusiast, Huff-Post, Wine-Searcher, SevenFifty Daily, Edible Green Mountains, Food Arts, Kendall-Jackson, Tim Atkin and other outlets. She was the Consulting Editor of the GOURMAND AWARD-winning book, Rock and Vine, and the Italian Wine Editor for three other books: Sunday Pasta, Garrubbo Guide: The Importance of Eating Italian and the Professional Wine Reference.

Christy is fond of how the PairCraft methodology refines certain ideas behind textbook pairings while unearthing surprising–even confounding–new ones. Plus, Christy loves the practicality of the PairCraft takeaway, which is a wine style rather than a specific wine or grape or region, making PairCraft’s advice far more functional than most food-and-wine pairing approaches.

What is the importance of PairCraft?

What PairCraft is doing is throwing back the curtain to allow us to see the inner workings of how to create amazing food and wine pairings. PairCraft strips down the elements of food–from the raw ingredients to how they are combined and prepared–to explain why “classics” don’t always work or can be rather average and why the chosen wines turn out to be thrilling food companions.

More About Christy

From PairCraft Founder, Tracy Gardener

There are few sommeliers who have had to pair so many wines with such a diversity of foods as Master of Wine Christy Canterbury. During her career, she has honed the lists for a major American steakhouse chain, the haute Lebanese cooking of chef Philippe Massoud, the contemporary British fare of Gordon Ramsay, locavore menus for Jean-Georges restaurants throughout the world, and many more exceptional programs. There’s barely a dish that Christy hasn’t tackled to find the right wine to enhance it. The craft of pairing is her mission.

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