Liam Belgrave was born in the United States to parents who had no particular affinity for wine. Like any good American boy, he sought to be as dissimilar to his parents as humanly possible and thus, noting a conspicuous absence of the godly elixir in his childhood home, began a lifelong love of the grape. He was six years old when he first started his study of wine, but didn’t seriously begin drinking until much later at fourteen. After failing his first attempt at the Regional Junior High Master Enophile exam, he continued his studies and learned what he could from books and the thoroughly academic consumption of vast quantities of wine. He then entered the wine industry proper in his early 20's as a clerk in a small, family-owned wine shop. Fast-forward thirty years, and you can imagine a diminutive, glass-framed old curmudgeon sitting in a smoke-filled room late at night developing a system of mathematical formulae designed to turn the wine retail business upside-down.