Education
Wines graduated from Pleasure Ridge Park High School in Louisville Kentucky. He received his Master of Surgery degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1974, after which he became a general assignment reporter for The Lexington Herald.
Career
He is currently based in the United States, before which time he was the China bureau chief for The New York Times. Previously, he had been The New York Times "s bureau chief in Johannesburg and Moscow. Later, Wines became a 1973 graduate of the University of Kentucky.
Wines covered municipal and state government, politics and education for The Louisville Times from 1974 to 1981.
He wrote about regulatory affairs and the United States. Department of Justice for National Journal magazine from 1981 to 1984. From 1984 to 1988, Wines was a Washington-based correspondent for The Los Angeles Times.
He has been bureau chief at international postings for The New York Times since 2002. In 2001, Wines was the victim of a pieing attack by Matt Taibbi of the Moscow alt-weekly The eXile.
Taibbi claimed that the pie contained horse semen.
Wines is married to Sharon LaFraniere, who also writes for the Times. They have three children, Brett, Jack and Nikki.