Ken Wytsma
Author, entrepreneur, and lifelong history lover — writing the stories where wine and history meet.
Ken Wytsma is a history lover through and through — a fascination that traces back to a childhood in Europe, where his earliest memories are of summers spent among ancient cities and regions with a castle on seemingly every hilltop. He is an award-winning author whose books explore the intersection of history, faith, justice, and rest, and an entrepreneur who has birthed movements, founded nonprofit and for-profit organizations, and consulted widely across creative and nonprofit spaces.
He founded This Day in Wine History out of a simple conviction: wine is one of the most revealing lenses on human history. Years spent teaching graduate students on the History of Human Rights gave him a deep understanding of colonialism — and of how the spread of wine shaped communities, cultures, and individual lives across centuries. Invitations to speak at international conferences and universities, tied to his published books, took him to many of the world’s premier wine regions firsthand.
Today he lives in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, one of the New World’s fine-wine regions, known for its Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. He can usually be found here helping people understand the history, story, place, and people that make this a region and community he loves. International group wine trips and local tours run through Wine History Tours; the writing and research live here.
Find Ken elsewhere
Ken is the award-winning author of six books at the intersection of history, faith, justice, and rest — including The Myth of Equality (a Publishers Weekly Top 100 Book of 2017), Pursuing Justice, and his newest, The Sleep You’re Longing For. Explore his writing at kenwytsma.com.
The stories behind the stories
We are fascinated by the side stories — the ones the history books leave in the footnotes. Everywhere you put your finger on the timeline of civilization, wine is hiding in the background: a bottle on the table, wine in the glass, a cup held up as a symbol of culture, philosophy, or salvation.
It turns up in war and peace, faith and science, trade and medicine, celebration and grief. Follow a single bottle far enough back and you find the whole arc of human history running through it.
This Day in Wine History exists to gather those stories and tell them straight — the overlooked moments where wine meets the larger currents of the past. We think they’re worth remembering. We hope you will too.
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