Pam Strayer | Writer & Journalist

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A journalist with wide-ranging interests, Pam covers business, wine trends, climate, the environment and other topics in the wine industry. 

She is also is a subject matter expert on U.S. organic and biodynamic wines and wineries which she writes about for other wine publications.

For consumers, she edits  and writes for Slow Wine Guide USA, a book that features 400 eco-friendly, organic and biodynamic wineries. Other consumer outlets she writes for include Full Pour, Pix.wine, Voices (from Maze Row Merchants) and Sante. 

A long time health editor and journalist, she has also written for The Guardian and The New Lede, focusing on science, health and climate. 

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• Wine Journalism

• Environmental Journalism 

Teaching and Speaking

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Full Bio

Pam Strayer

Website: https://winecountrygeographic.com
Linkedin: https: //linkedin.com/in/strayer
Instagram: @winecountrygeographic

Pam Strayer is a wine business journalist and wine writer, who formerly specialized as a journalist and editor in health, science and the environment for 30+ years. In 2010 she expanded into wine journalism, focusing at first on organic and biodynamic producers as well as general eco-wine topics. In 2024, Porto Protocol recognized her for her journalism on climate and environment.

Early on, she earned a certificate in wine studies at U.C. Berkeley and studied wine at U.C. Davis and with the North American Sommelier Association. She has attended and written about hundreds of wine events. 

Recently she attended the 2023 Slow Wine Fair in Bologna, the 2023 ASEV conference, the 2024 and 2022 OIV sponsored Vineyards and Biodiversity conference in Avignon, and the 2021 Environment Day in Bordeaux, in addition to dozen of U.S. presentations and events. 

Her 2023-2024 coverage includes reporting on the Wine Business Financial Symposium, Wine Market Council, TTB hearings and Unified Wine Grape Symposium for Wine Business.com and Grape and Wine magazine. 

Deeper in the past, she began writing about wine when she established a blog focused solely on organically grown wines in 2011. (It just passed the 1 million page view mark.) In 2013 she authored and published seven wine apps on organic and biodynamic wines (not currently available), which were featured in the Los Angeles Times. 

In 2018 she served as conference program director for the highly successful International Biodynamic Wine Conference in San Francisco. That event featured an international roster of acclaimed experts, including regenerative soil health experts Dave and Anne Montgomery, organic and biodynamic pioneer Paul Dolan, Bordeaux's pioneering Comme family, and Tuscany based organic and biodynamic wine expert Monty Waldin.

 
She has also consulted to Vivino, the world’s largest wine app, on organic and biodynamic wines, which licensed (under a non exclusive basis) her database of organically grown wines. 

Her writings appear in Full Pour, Grape and Wine magazine, Santé, Seven Fifty Daily, Pix, Somm India,The Tasting Panel, VOICES, WineBusiness.com, Wine Business Monthly and more. 

She has given guest lectures and talks at Cabrillo Community College and Santa Rosa Community College, and for community groups in Sonoma and Napa, as well as for Women of the Vine & Spirits, the OIV Wine Marketing Program at U.C. Davis and Sonoma State's Wine Business Institute. 

PREVIOUSLY 

As an environmental journalist, she consulted to Earth Island Institute (David Brower’s last environmental group) and on environment and climate projects for United Nations Environment Programme award winner Huey Johnson and his Resource Renewal Institute (RRI), where she directed and produced YouTube video interviews with leaders in large scale green planning programs in New Zealand, Mexico City, the Netherlands and the EU.

Her environmental journalism, including coverage of environmental justice topics, has appeared in Civil Eats, The New Lede and The Guardian. She is a member of the Society for Environmental Journalists and an active participant in the climate journalism nonprofit Covering Climate Now.

Earlier, she worked frequently in Silicon Valley where she made pioneering multimedia projects and films for Apple, directing and producing 50 films for Apple, making the first Quicktime video and creating the first multimedia CD-ROM. In the 1990's as producer, she launched the first interactive television channel on health, HTV, for a Time Warner trial, and later served as Director of Content for one of the first personal video player companies, ZVUE, created with Carl Page. She later served as editor in chief of major health websites where she oversaw all content for WebMD’s genetics channels as editor of DNA.com, a Jim Clark company. Other clients include the Dalai Lama, Jerry Garcia and the United Nations. 

Recent articles have focused on the threat of the spotted lanternfly, impacts of invasive species, government regulations on pesticides, new wastewater standards to protect groundwater, glass recycling, alternative fertilizer (azolla) and a sustainability group’s efforts to phase out Roundup.

She also regularly writes about 60-80 wineries for Slow Wine Guide, visiting and tasting at wineries in California and Oregon, and edits the guide, working with its talented team of field contributors on the 350 wineries in the 2025 guide. 

She is a member of the UK-based, international Circle of Wine Writers and a graduate of Smith College.