A Senior Vinfolio wine expert since the company's inception, Phil has a Sommelier, Five Diamond hotel, and International wine buyer background.  Phil works with collectors and enthusiasts from around the world with cellars of 500 to 30,000+ bottles. His main focus is Collection Building and Advisory Services including buying and selling strategy and collection management. His private collection primarily includes Burgundy and Rhone.

Phil has more than 12 years of experience in the wine industry. His experience includes Sommelier for for Osteria del Circo in Manhattan (le Cirque's sister restaurant), where he received two Awards of Excellence from The Wine Spectator, assistant beverage manager at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in his hometown of Seattle, and head of sales and Burgundy buyer for The Wine Club San Francisco.

While in New York, he attended the International Wine Center and passed the Advanced Wine Course with honors. Phil started collecting wine in 1997 while becoming a Sommelier and studying viticulture and vinification in Napa Valley. His wine and food expertise has appeared in The Wine Spectator, Hemispheres magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle.

One of Phil's clients comments, "Vinfolio has always exceeded my expectations regarding service, selection, and knowledge. I am particularly pleased with my representative, Phil, because he is attentive to my needs and is pro-active about meeting them. 100 points, 5 stars, 3 wine glasses - all in all a perfect score!"

Phil is an avid sailor and enjoys racing in San Francisco's J-105 fleet as well as coastal and offshore cruising.

Christine Cristobal came to Vinfolio with eight years of experience in the fine wine industry. Prior to Vinfolio, Christine was employed for four years at Hart Davis Hart Wine Co., as a Senior Sales and Consignment Associate, where she spent several years as the leading sales specialist for the firms Retail division. Christine has extensive wine knowledge, particularly, in European and older vintage wines; some of her experience with rare wines include tasting many vintages of top producers across the globe, such as a vertical of Chateau Margaux and a horizontal of Domaine Romanee-Conti. She has a special interest in Italian wines and has spent significant time traveling the vineyards of Barolo and Barbaresco in Piedmonte. She recently completed the WSET Advanced Certificate course.

Born and raised in Chicago, Christine received her BA in Art History and Painting at DePaul University where she received a Smith Scholarship to attend The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to selling wine, Christine is an avid collector. Some of her favorite producers include Gaja, G. Borgogno, L. Sandrone, G. Conterno, Didier Dagueneau, Pichon-lalande, La Conseillante, Vieux Chateau Certan, and Lynch Bages. She also enjoys cooking, fine dining and annual "foodie" trips to Europe and New York.

Mabel came to Vinfolio with 20 years of experience in the wine and spirits industry. She was born in Hong Kong, but emigrated to Canada during childhood. Later, while in school, she developed a passion for wine and in  1989 decided to return to Hong Kong to pursue a career in the wine and spirits industry. She joined Seagram as a Sales Executive and was quickly promoted to Assistant Sales Manager. Mabel’s 10 years with Seagram provided her with the opportunity to taste a tremendous variety of wines and to visit a number of great vineyards, including Mumm Champagne, Perrier Jouet Champagne, Chateau Latour, Chateau Magnol and B&G in France, as well as Sterling Vineyards, Shafer, Far Niente and Schramsberg Vineyards in California.

In 2000, she joined Foster Hong Kong as Key Account Manager to deal with their HORECA accounts. Since then, she has been working in a sales capacity with increasing responsibilities for different wine and spirits companies such as Maxxium and Golden Gate Fine Wine.

Raised just south of Oslo, Norway, Tommy Svendberg's interest in food and wine began at a young age. Tommy and his friends experimented with food and wine as a way to pass Norway's long winter nights. By the time he graduated from Royken Teknisk Skole, Tommy was ready to explore Europe. His trips to France, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Holland, Germany and England intensified his passion for food and wine.

In 1993, Tommy moved to France. After enjoying the relaxed lifestyle of the south of France for a year, he moved to Paris. Over the next four years, he immersed himself in French culture and cultivated his passion for food and wine by working in the culinary industry for CHR Consultants. He worked in a variety of positions, from bartender and corporate trainer to accountant, which allowed him to establish relationships with vendors and sales representatives from all over France.

In 1998, Tommy and his wife relocated to Chicago where he began working for Knightsbridge Wine Shoppe and Epicurean Center. This work gave him exposure to multiple aspects of the wine industry, including cellar management, purchasing, vendor management and corporate partnerships, event organization, and the opportunity to work with well known wine personalities.

Tommy is fluent in English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and French.

Stomping grapes in her Fresno backyard as a kid and constantly making fun of her grape-growing "farmer" father, Amy never imagined she'd take a wine-related career path. Her circuitous route to the industry began with a move from Fresno to UC Berkeley for college, where she majored in Political Science, then on to graduate school to study International Relations. Six years of teaching, at every possible grade and age level, followed, keeping her firmly planted in the Bay Area and never more than an hour away from wine tasting. After stumbling upon "industrial winemaking" in the middle of Berkeley, Amy began working for a small production label, and while getting completely hooked on the juice, realized that winemaking is actually a euphemism for "cleaning everything, repeatedly".

Her California roots make Amy a champion of her great state's wines, and she enjoys exploring new and small-production outfits, especially those making Pinot Noir. She has also branched out, travelling to France to look at the dirt and rocks, and to sample the wines of Champagne, Alsace, and Burgundy. She looks forward to continuing to pursue the wines of the world, especially through travel, but has also taken wine chemistry and varietal seminars at UC Davis. A lover of history, Amy's ultimate fascination with wine lies in every bottle's unique capability to tell a story: of people and places, of climate and season, of mistakes and lucky breaks, and occasional pure genius.

Laura’s love of wine originated from outstanding food and wine experiences in Europe and has been nurtured by the rich wine culture of San Francisco and Napa Valley. Although Laura appreciates a fine glass of Burgundy or Rhone, her palate is partial to vintage Champagne. In addition to collecting her favorite producers such as Krug, Bollinger and Pol Roger, she loves to discover small, hard-to-find producers.

As Content Editor at Vinfolio, Laura oversees the wine reference database which includes approximately 100,000 unique wines. In this role, Laura manages all professional reviews, auction & retail pricing, and customer data for existing VinCellar accounts.

Laura holds a diploma in wine & spirits from the London-based Wine and Spirit Education Trust, WSET, and is an Associate Member of the Institute of Wine and Spirits (AIWS). Previously Laura earned her Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW) certificate from the Society of Wine Educators.  She first became involved in the wine industry through attending wine classes at the Alliance Française and working the tasting room at Andretti Winery in Napa Valley.

Laura has a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in Comparative Literature and French, with a minor in Music. She obtained her Master of Arts degree in French at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to being fluent in French, Laura is conversant in Spanish and Italian. Her favorite hobbies include long distance running, sailing, and classical piano.

Growing up, Levi's initial interest in wine was sparked during summers spent driving across Europe. The endless visits to wineries and days spent touring the back roads of Bordeaux, Tuscany, Champagne, and the Douro left a lasting impression.

Later in life, while working in marketing and project management in Oregon, Levi began more formally developing his wine knowledge under the tutelage of several collectors and restaurateurs. The goal had been to expand his wine knowledge to woo perspective clients, however, his passion developed to the point that he eventually began working nights and weekends as the manager of a private home cellar of almost 12,000 bottles.

Upon re-locating to San Francisco, Levi continued to consult with private collectors and bolstered his production knowledge while working for a small, urban winery in Berkeley. Along with being a fan of Rhone wines in general, particularly those from St. Joseph, Levi's personal tastes skew towards Oregon Pinot Noir and esoteric wines from the Jura, the Languedoc, and the Jurancon regions of France. At Vinfolio, Levi serves as one of the Online Content Editors responsible for maintaining the reference database. This includes oversight of all the professional reviews, auction results, and consumer data for existing VinCellar accounts.

A graduate of Dartmouth College with a bachelor's degree in Geography, Levi is a former collegiate and nationally ranked cross-country skier. He raced on the professional circuit for several years and competed in ski marathons in Italy, Germany, and Japan. Born and raised in Alaska, Levi has also spent time living in England and Iceland.

Christina first fell in love with wine at a tasting with Danny Schuster in her first year at Canterbury University in New Zealand in 1987, and never got over it. After graduating with a BA and First Class Honors in Russian and Business Administration, her professional life started in the New Zealand Foreign Service, where she worked for almost ten years in a variety of positions, including postings to the New Zealand Embassies in Moscow and Bonn. In Bonn her responsibilities included work with the NZ Wine Institute on trade access and industry relations. She is fluent in German, and remembers speaking Russian. While living in Bonn she visited as many European wine regions as possible in her free time, and spent many weekends along the Mosel and the Rhine, developing a serious addiction to Riesling. When Christina left New Zealand for America, she decided to focus her professional life on what she loved - wine.

She set out on an apprenticeship, which took her from the shop floor at K&L Wine Merchants, to the Fine Wine Department at Bonhams & Butterfields, to establishing a new sales territory for a small distributor of French wines in the East Bay, and to Solano Cellars, a wine bar and retail store in Albany, California. Christina then went home to New Zealand and worked in a variety of roles at Forrest Estate Winery in Marlborough - out in the vineyards, in the tasting room, on the road with accounts, and in the lab over harvest, experiencing first hand how wine gets into a bottle. In parallel with this practical apprenticeship Christina has completed the WSET Advanced Certificate, UC Davis Introduction to Winemaking, and the NMIT Certificate in Vineyard Practice in New Zealand.

On returning to the US she continued to work for Forrest Estate as their Brand Manager, and started part-time at Vinfolio in the warehouse. Christina is now full-time on the Cellar Acquisition Team. In her spare time she enjoys trail running, reading widely, roaming second hand book stores, listening to any and all music, trying to figure out America, and after all these years, loves wine more than ever.

Brett was introduced to viticulture growing up in Illinois from his father, who toyed with his own small vineyard. Influenced by his father's hobby and his own scientific mind, he was led to a degree in Chemistry.

That knowledge on the molecular level elevated his food and wine interests, and with the memories of the days when he stood on a kitchen chair over the sink helping his great-grandmother churn butter, Brett left the Midwest for a world of travel, amassing experience in the kitchens of Chicago, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. From the shadows of the rear kitchen to the limelight of being a private chef, Brett has spent more than 12 years creating food and wine pairings.

Brett graduated top of his class at the California Culinary Academy in S.F., after which he was accepted as Poissonier for Operakallaren (the Opera House), then a Michelin 2-Star restaurant in Stockholm. Beyond cooking for the Royal Family, Brett was part of the crew that brought the Operakallaren from Michelin 2 to 3-Star...the highest achievement in food, wine, and service in the restaurant world.

He has backpacked throughout France and Italy's wine regions, and also enjoys acrylic painting and playing acoustic guitar.