Liz O'Connell lives just outside Melbourne in the Macedon Ranges now but spent 16 years overseas in the U.S. and Japan working in the wine and food industries. Liz is a consultant for wine, food and lifestyle brands and she also posts answers to common wine questions on her Wine Sister Facebook page and this blog.
Liz is a board member of Wine Victoria and she also sits on the Food and Wine Tourism Council for the State of Victoria. She was a judge of the Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards in 2010 and sat on the 2012 Starlight Five Chefs Committee for Melbourne.
When she lived in the US, Liz was a restaurateur and owner of South food + wine bar in San Francisco with Australian chef Luke Mangan. Before that, she was Vice President of Communications at Foster’s Wine Estates Americas in the Napa Valley, owner of leading global wine brands like Beringer, Rosemount, Penfolds and Wolf Blass. She also worked at Southcorp Wines, overseeing trade, media and consumer communications on leading Australian wine brands in America.
While in the USA, Liz also consulted to the Australian government on several large events including G'day USA in New York and Los Angeles. She held several non-profit and board positions including Chairwoman of Wine Australia USA and the wine council of the California Wine Institute. Liz was also a non-executive director of Advance, an organization of 10,000 Australians around the world and in 2006, she worked as a consultant on the Advance 100 Summit in Sydney, hosted by Advance Patron and former Prime Minister, John Howard.
While living in Japan, Liz wrote a regular column for the leading Japanese newspaper, the Mainichi Shimbun and she has been quoted in several U.S. publications including Wine Spectator and Forbes. She graduated from Curtin University, Western Australia in 1992 and her family owns Mandalay Road, a producer of great wines including a California style Zinfandel in Geographe, Western Australia.
