[1] Lake was born in 1924 in Albany, in upstate New York[1] in the United States, where his parents, David and Hannah, worked in the film industry.
[1] He studied medicine at the University of Sydney, where he met another medical student, Joy Townsend, his future wife.
In 1988, The Bulletin magazine called Lake "the man who started the (Australian) wine boom".
[5] Many of these books relate to his third career as a "flavourolgist", his description of his "attempt to understand how taste, smell and flavour shaped humanity".
Lake died on 14 April 2009, aged 84, at his home in Longueville on Sydney's Lower North Shore, after sustaining a head injury from a fall.