In 2008 I started working in the wine industry and realized I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about wine. I wasn’t sure how to do this, being about to graduate with a degree in a completely unrelated field, but hey, there was a recession on, and jobs in the beverage business paid the bills. Read the full article.
I found out yesterday that I passed my last exam of the two-year WSET Diploma program. I re-read the email so many times, I actually screengrabbed it and made it my phone lock screen at one point (though I didn’t trust the image because I couldn’t refresh it, as if the results could somehow be redacted if the announcement email wasn’t connected to internet.) Read the full article.
After a bit of a hiatus from writing, you can now find posts in which I dispense my very best and most serious wine career advice on the website of my WSET Level 3 alma mater, the wonderful Napa Valley Wine Academy. Read the full article.
First things first: In late August I made the decision to leave Chicago and move to Oregon to work a harvest. Like most of the major life decisions I’ve made, it all came together pretty rapidly––we’re talking about a three-day window between “I should just work a harvest in Oregon” and giving notice at work––but between feeling completely disconnected from the winemaking side of the industry and nature/mountains/green spaces in general, my recently developed conviction that Oregon is making some of the most exciting wine in the world at present, and a sweet harvest gig offer that I couldn’t turn down, plus being known to enjoy a Craft Beverage and looking pretty good in flannel, I knew as soon as I signed my offer letter and made the announcement to my loved ones that this was the right decision. Read the full article.
I took my WSET Unit 3 exam on June 14 in South San Francisco. It was a very long day: most of us arrived outside the examination room around 8 and chatted nervously until we were allowed to take our seats sometime after 9 (I stopped looking at the clock and was just furiously checking my notes), and the blind tasting portion began sometime after 10. The tasting portion took a couple of hours, after which we broke for lunch and then came back for three hours of essay questions. By the time I got out I was ready for a drink. Fortunately a close friend in Alameda suggested we meet at a winery. Somehow I was not sick of wine by that point. Maybe I’ll never get sick of wine. Read the full article.