Gamliel Kronemer, the New York Jewish Week’s wine writer and a fellow member of Rogov’s forum, wrote a fitting tribute to Daniel in this week’s New York Jewish Week.
Some highlights:
It was after he had moved to Israel, that David Joroff adopted the pen name Daniel Rogov. Joroff was a shy, private man, and the use of a pen name, I think, gave him a greater sense of privacy. He chose the name Rogov in homage to a 19th-century Russian aristocrat whose colorful life story appealed to his sense of whimsy.
However, Daniel Rogov was not his only pseudonym. He also wrote under the names David Gershon and David Louison. During the early 1980s he even wrote a series of travel books and cookbooks that were “co-authored” by all three of his pseudonyms.
In the last decade of his life, particularly after he started publishing his annual “Guide to Israeli Wine” in 2004 (the last issue of which will be published, posthumously, early next year), Rogov became ever more influential as a wine critic. In one of our last conversations he told me that “if I give a wine a high score like 93, within a few days it can be sold out [in Israel.]”
While Rogov may have become a cosmopolitan Israeli, there was a part of him that was forever a New Yorker. “The greatest compliment I ever had in my life,” Rogov once told me, “is the day I opened an e-mail with a picture of a back of a New York City bus in Brooklyn. On the bus was an ad for a Herzog Special Reserve wine with [the text] ‘Daniel Rogov Score 92’ and my photograph … You know you’ve made it in life when they put your picture on a New York City bus!”
Read the full article here.
