Elaine Chukan Brown

Elaine Chukan Brown serves as the American specialist for JancisRobinson.com, and as contributing writer to Wine & Spirits Magazine. She contributed to the just-released 8th edition of the World Atlas of Wine, as well as the recent award-winning 4th edition of the Oxford Companion to Wine. In 2019, the Wine Industry Network named Brown one of the nine Most

Inspiring People in Wine, and she was named by the International Wine & Spirits Competition and VinItaly as one of five of the Top Wine Communicators of the Year in the world. Her writing has been featured in Decanter, World of Fine Wine, the Robb Report, and others, and recommended by Food & Wine, Imbibe, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and more.

She has been a celebrated key note speaker and seminar leader for events in wine, philosophy, and writing in New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Chile, Germany, Canada, and throughout the United States. Her work also appears on her own website WakawakaWineReviews.com. She is known online as Hawk Wakawaka, and is known for having created illustrated tasting notes, which @KermitLynchWine named “a new standard in wine reviews.” Prior to her career in wine, Elaine was an academic philosopher. She served as the Charles A. Eastman Fellow at Dartmouth College and a Tomlinson Fellow at McGill University, where she did her doctoral work. Prior to her academic career, Elaine owned her own commercial fishing business in Bristol Bay, Alaska, where the rest of her family still operate their own commercial salmon fishing businesses.