Who Is SavvyTaste?

SavvyTaste Chairman Michael Michael "Mac" McCarthy, SavvyTaste chairman and co-founder has more than 25 years' experience managing technology publishing: from magazines and newspapers (InfoWorld, SunWorld and others) to books and Web publishing (JavaWorld and others).

Mac served executive editor of InfoWorld, editor-in-chief of SunWorld, and founding editor of IDG Books, where he dreamed up "DOS for Dummies," the first of the recordbreaking bestselling Dummies book series.

He was founder, CEO, President and Publisher of IDG's first Web-only publishing business, WPI, in 1995, where his team, which grew to 35 employees, launched four successful online computer magazines.

McCarthy has experience in managing all publishing departments including editorial, production, sales and marketing, in producing and managing budgets, and in managing his board of directors. He has created business plans and budgets for new businesses including VC-backed BLOSM.com, a book-publishing social network site to discover promising new manuscripts.

As an avid wine enthusiast for the past dozen years, Mac manages SavvyTaste, belongs to two local winetasting groups (BAWDY and The Pompous Twits), and does light duty as host for corporate winetasting events.

On the side he is on the board of directors of Friends of the Arts, a nonprofit that supports the arts at the California State University/East Bay.

SavvyTaste co-founder and President Lewis Perdue SavvyTaste President and co-founder Lewis Perdue has founded four companies including a wine importer/wholesaler, a wine-trade publishing and Internet company and two technology firms. He has also been involved as a consultant at the startup stages of a number of successful companies including Kalpana (acquired by Cisco) and LynuxWorks.

In 1982, Perdue co-founded Wines West, a Los Angeles wine importer of Italian wines (sold in 1984). In 1991, he founded Wine Business Publications. When sold in 1997, the business had grown into the North American wine industry's largest circulation trade publishing company.

Perdue has written 20 published books including two on wine:

1. The Wrath of Grapes: The Coming Wine Industry Shakeout And How To Take Advantage Of It which accurately projected the glut that washed over California wine in the 2000 time frame.
2. The French Paradox and Beyond: Living Longer With Wine and the Mediterannean Lifestyle, the best-selling book on wine and health,

The author of many published wine reviews, Lew has also judged wines at a number of competitions, including the San Francisco International Wine and World Spirits Competition.

He has served on the faculties at UCLA and Cornell University, served as a top aide to a U.S. Senator and a state governor, run political races for Congress, worked as a Washington correspondent (Ottaway/Dow-Jones, States News Service), a columnist for Gannett, The Wall Street Journal Online, CBS Marketwatch and TheStreet.Com.

He studied physics and biology in college and received his B.S. (1972) with distinction from Cornell University.
SavvyTaste Code Ninja William Perdue SavvyTaste Code Ninja and co-founder, William Perdue, began programming HTML at the age of eight and now slings code in PHP, MySQL, CSS a number of other handy processes.

William runs his own technology consulting and internet security business, YourTechWorx whose clients range from individuals to law firms and auto dealerships.