Robert Lawrence Balzer has been called the first serious wine journalist in the United States. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa. At the age of 24, he was put in charge of the wine department of his family’s grocery/gourmet market in Los Angeles, California. Because he knew nothing about wine, he quickly educated himself on the subject. Balzer soon championed quality California wines and stocked his shelves with the best American wines available. He promoted wine in his customer newsletter and was asked by Will Rogers, Jr. to write a regular wine column in his local newspaper in 1937.
Accomplishments
In 1948, Balzer published California’s Best Wines, the first of his eleven books. His wine writings include articles published in travel Holiday for over twenty years, a weekly column in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Robert Lawrence Balzer’s Private Guide to Food and Wine. In the 1950s he worked for United Press in Asia, at the same time producing propaganda pieces for the US Information Service. After reporting on the coronation of Norodom Suramarit in March 1955 his agency arranged for his widely publicized 12 day stay in the Wat Phrachumsagar. Present at his ordination was the creme of Cambodian Buddhism, his preceptor Dharmawara was taken to the US for the first time in 1955 by the USIA. Balzer was on a similar propaganda assignment in Japan late in 1959 when the AMPO riots had brought relations between the countries to a new low. Here his reporting about Zen and the 101 year old abbot of Hōkō-ji, Ashikaga Shizan, was to instill a positive image. In 1973, Balzer organized the New York Wine Tasting of 1973 which was a precursor to the matching of French and Californian wine at the Judgment of Paris. Balzer oversaw food and wine at the presidential inaugurations of Ronald Reagan in 1981 and 1985 and for George H. W. Bush in 1989. He was friends with some of Hollywood's elite, including Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando, Ingrid Bergman, and Gloria Swanson. Balzer died on December 2, 2011 in Orange, California at the age of 99.
