About Roy Hersh and For the Love of Port

Roy Hersh is the Founder of For the Love of Port, the internet’s leading source of information about Port, other fortified wines, and Portguese dry wines. FTLOP also offers a variety of Portuguese wines tours, and its online forum has become the internet’s largest English-speaking community for Portuguese wine lovers.

Roy’s diverse career in Food & Beverage management spanned more than three decades. Port wine discovered Roy in 1983. He finally achieved his objective to visit Portugal in 1994, after which he started writing articles about it. Considered a leading authority and journalist on Port and Madeira; in June 2003, Roy was one of just two Americans selected at that time for induction into the Confraria do Vinho do Porto (Port Wine Brotherhood). To honor his oath to the Confraria, Roy quit his day job and started the FTLOP newsletter in February 2004, and by mid-2005 the website and travel business were both launched.

Roy is a passionate student of wines from around the globe. Since 1999, he’s served as a professional judge at wine competitions in North America and the Iberian Peninsula. He has taught classes and written hundreds of articles on Port and Madeira for FTLOP, other websites and wine magazines such as Somm and The World of Fine Wine. Roy has traveled extensively throughout North America to promote the wines of Portugal, presenting educational wine tasting seminars to consumers, private organizations and members of the wine trade. Roy annual guides small groups on exclusive once-in-a-lifetime “insider’s tours” to discover authentic wine and food culture within Portugal’s wine regions, which have gained national media attention and a loyal customer following.

In 2016, Roy’s FTLOP website was inducted into the Port Wine Brotherhood, as the “first non-human entity” enthroned in the organization’s history. In the very same year, Hersh was also inducted into the Confraria da Vinha Madeira. More recently, in June 2017, Roy was the first American to be promoted to the rank of Infanção by the Port Wine Confraria, and the first individual to become a member of both Portuguese Brotherhoods outside of the Portuguese wine trade.

Roy relocated to Porto full-time in June 2022, where he has continued co-hosting tours and writing about Portuguese wines, with easy access to his favorite regions!