Allen Meadows

Allen Meadows is an American wine critic and publisher of the Burghound.com quarterly newsletter and website. He was a financial executive and private wine collector until a profile published in "Wine Spectator" in 1997 led him to decide to follow his passion for wine. By 2000, Meadows had left his role of CFO at a publicly traded insurance company and launched the Burghound.com site, which offers subscribers newsletters with reviews of Burgundy wine and California and Oregon Pinot noir wines. Meadows also regularly speaks on Burgundy and other wine subjects. Burghound.com also organizes wine events such as the Asia Symphony of Wine and Flavours - Burghound in Asia, which is held in Singapore.
Within a relatively short time following its launch, and despite a relatively high cost of subscription, the service came to be viewed by many as "the definitive word on matters Burgundian", and Meadows "a leading Burgundy critic".
Among the reasons cited for the success of Burghound.com are that Meadows already held a strong online discussion-group reputation, and that Robert Parker had ceased to cover Burgundy for "The Wine Advocate" in 1996, and delegated coverage of the region to Pierre Rovani with limited success, providing an opening for Meadows. As Parker already had strained relations with the Burgundy wine community, wine critics of global coverage such as Stephen Tanzer and Clive Coates were perceived to dominate the field. It has been suggested that the Burghound coverage of the 2005 vintage of Burgundy did as much to Meadows' reputation as 1982 Bordeaux did for Robert Parker.
In 2010, Meadows and his wife Erica self-published a book entitled "The Pearl of the Côte" on the subject of the history and vineyards of Vosne-Romanée, while opting not to list the book on channels such as Amazon.com.