Ken Wytsma

Author, lifelong student of history, and wine historian — and the editor who reviews and fact-checks every article in the Wine History Tours archive.

Ken Wytsma co-founded Wine History Tours with his wife, Tamara, and edits its growing archive of articles. Before wine, his working life was in ideas and education: he served as president of Kilns College and taught graduate-level courses that ranged from the history of human rights to creativity — and led travel-learning trips through Italy on Renaissance history.

His training runs from a B.S. in engineering at Clemson University to graduate degrees in philosophy — with an emphasis on ethics, moral philosophy, and justice — and in religion, a path that taught him to read primary sources closely and to care, almost stubbornly, about getting the facts right. He is the author of six books and the founder of The Justice Conference, which has convened in eleven countries. One of those books, The Myth of Equality, earned a starred review and a place among Publishers Weekly’s five best religion titles of the year — and, in 2025, was one of 381 books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library under a Pentagon anti-DEI order, a purge reported by The New York Times.

His love of history began early. Almost his entire memory of childhood is European — the gift of years spent abroad before he was seven — and he traces his fascination with the past to those first years. Decades later, while traveling and speaking internationally, he started tacking extra days onto each trip to explore the world’s wine regions. Region by region, a conviction took hold: that wine and history are inextricably connected, and that the love of history he had carried since childhood had found a new way to express itself. He has been following those threads ever since.

He is the first to say he is a storyteller before a specialist. He does not lecture much on wine; he studies it, explores it deeply, and loves telling the stories he uncovers to people who love wine and history as much as he does.

On the archive — and how we get it right

Ken is the first to say he is a storyteller before a specialist. But accuracy is the whole foundation of the work, so every article in the archive passes under his review. Each one is researched and drafted with AI assistance, cross-checked against independent primary sources, audited in a separate accuracy pass, and then edited and fact-checked by Ken before it is published. The goal is simple: history you can trust, told in a way that makes you want to repeat it at dinner.

Read more from Ken at kenwytsma.com, or explore our Willamette Valley wine tours.