Keri developed a passion for wine while at graduate school, and cultivated this interest through classes, tastings, and travel. She received the Diploma from the Wine & Spirits Education Trust (WSET) in 2010. Keri successfully launched a wine shop, Maslow 6, in New York City, that focused on small producers around the globe, and also offered various educational opportunities.
Prior to working in the wine industry, Keri spent 18 years in technology in the finance industry, working for some of the top global investment banking firms, including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America. She also spent time at a smaller firm, Suite LLC, which provides financial analytics for pricing and risk management of derivatives.
Keri loves nuanced wines from all over the globe. They can be organic, natural, or not. Biodynamic wines are a favorite. Outside of wine, she loves horse-back riding and to spend time with her family.
As head of engineering at Vino Verified, Daniel is responsible for building out the full stack of the application, including the server architecture, database design, and the back and front-ends. In order to provide a highly secure and scalable application, his team leveraged Hyperledger Fabric to build a blockchain layer behind the scenes.
Early in his career as an Oracle consultant, his work developing the search and navigation platforms of several Fortune 500 companies inspired him to hone his expertise in a few programming languages, with a focus on Python. This path led to engineering roles at various start-ups, and in 2016, he launched a consulting company that specializes in building custom applications across a multitude of industries.
When Daniel is not coding, you can find him writing spec scripts for some of his favorite comedy shows such as The Office and Seinfeld.
Aleks joined Wine Spectator’s tasting department in 2013 and was soon promoted to associate tasting coordinator. He is the lead taster for Austria, Germany, South Africa and France’s Loire Valley.
Aleks was born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia, where his family table was home to traditional pairings of Montenegrin Vranac wine and Serbian cuisine. At age 19, Zecevic moved to New York to study business and philosophy before entering the wine industry, turning his curiosity and passion for wine into a career.
Aleks regularly travels to Europe, visiting vineyards and wineries, and detouring back to his native Serbia as often as possible. He loves Rieslings, Burgundies, and exploring natural wines while listening to jazz or alt-rock, and hitting the basketball court when he’s not tasting.
Peter grew up in the wine producing hills of Burgundy where he was witness to all things wine and occasional helper from a young age to his mother, the esteemed and greatly respected Becky Wasserman. It was a true wine house: not a meal would be served without full thought and discussion being held over the bottles that would be served that night. Amongst the guests on any particular evening that contributed to the education of young Peter might be Aubert De Villaine, Hubert De Montille, Richard Olney, Michael Broadbent, or Steven Spurrier.
During Peter’s career many years later, he was involved with the business of wine as cellars transitioned to becoming ‘collections’, and where wine was either investment quality or not, with different implications for how these two categories were treated. Burgundy has continued to be one of the top focuses of Peter’s extremely deep and broad knowledge, as well as one of the cornerstones for collecting. This uniquely positions Peter to bring the viewpoint of and to interface directly with the vignerons.
Alyse comes to the wine industry from, as she likes to say, the “ground up”. With a BS in Viticulture and Enology from Cornell University, and a post-graduate degree in Hospitality Management, she has gotten exposure to many aspects of the wine industry, and brings a strong background in technical knowledge to the position. She has spent the past six years in a unique role as a Champagne Specialist, encompassing a variety of activities, such as working with restaurants and bars on developing their Champagne programs to conducting trainings & seminars, always with a goal to get people to drink more Champagne!
Prior to becoming a Champagne Specialist, Alyse worked as a Beverage Manager, overseeing the highly successful program at Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo, Manhattan. Alyse has been a manger at Fairmont Hotels, helping to position food & beverage programs at The Fairmont San Francisco, The Plaza, NYC, as well as The Standard. Outside of work, Alyse enjoys equestrian sports, downhill skiing, and of course Champagne, her passion. She is always pursuing further wine education, and has thus far achieved WSET Diploma Level.
