Sommelier Journal is a subscription

Subscription business model

The subscription business model is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to the product/service. The model was pioneered by magazines and newspapers, but is now used by many businesses and websites....

-based magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

 publication, founded in 2008 for sommeliers

Sommelier

A sommelier , or wine steward, is a trained and knowledgeable wine professional, commonly working in fine restaurants, who specializes in all aspects of wine service as well as wine and food matching...

 and others in the restaurant and wine business. The magazine summarizes consumer, restaurant, and wine trends and news for wine professionals.

History

Sommelier Journal was first published in April 2008. Its editor is David Vogels. The magazine has seven contributing editors: Shayn Bjornholm, Beverley Blanning, Randy Caparoso, Catherine Fallis, David Furer, Joyce Goldstein and Jim Meehan. It also has ten members on its Editorial Advisory Board: Robert Bath, Jesse Becker, Gilles de Chambure, Fred Dexheimer, Christie Dufault, Tim Gaiser, David Glancy, Bobby Stuckey, Alder Yarrow, and Brett Zimmerman.

Philosophy

According to an interview with wine writer Tom Wark, Vogels' family has operated and published a professional journal for orthodontists for more than 40 years. While fostering a growing interest in wine, he conducted market research and determined there was no publication targeted at the niche of wine professionals, which he described as "almost empty" prior to the debut of the magazine.

The magazine's self-described mission is to offer wine knowledge, best business practices, and service advice to professionals. Vogels says he makes an effort to be educated about wines to cater to the audience. The San Francisco Chronicle describes the magazine as “informative without being preachy."

The publication is unique among wine magazines in that it does not issue numerical scores. For the most part, tasting notes without scores are included instead, including "Hot Picks" from the magazine's Editorial Board. The only place Sommelier Journal does use numbers is in its "Tasting Panels", which uses a statistical plot of the opinions of a panel of tasters. The tasters’ opinions are summarized in a box plot

Box plot

In descriptive statistics, a box plot or boxplot is a convenient way of graphically depicting groups of numerical data through their five-number summaries: the smallest observation , lower quartile , median , upper quartile , and largest observation...

graph.