A friend of mine wants to relocate to wine country (possibly somewhere in CA) but I am sure he would consider other areas too outside of CA. We are both heading to Paso Robles next week for a tasting tour, and he wants to scope out the area for potential work, which has raised the question about how best to make the move from Minnesota to wine country for a job. He is single, no kids, and has only a beautiful Vizsla dog. He is willing to relocate at any time.
Does anyone here have advice on finding work in west coast wine areas (CA, OR, WA)?
He has worked at a couple of wine bars before (in MN), has a lot of bar management experience to include ones with wine inventories, completed (though didn’t test) in a sommelier course, and has worked wine retail also. The reason for the move is that he was very close to starting his own wine bar, but funding fell through.
I know this is rather general but here are some questions I had:
Are there any good websites/publications to look for opportunities?
How easy (or difficult) is it to get winery tasting room jobs?
Are there some areas that are better than others right now? I kind of figured that newer up-and-coming areas might be the best bet.
I know there are a lot of variables and many different routes (restaurants, wine bars, distribution, wineries etc.), but it is a bit more difficult to grasp from here in the mid-west. He has a fairly wide range of experience, so I am sure he wouldn’t be extremely set on one ‘track’.
I just thought I would throw this out there to see if anyone had any tips or advice. Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the tips. I’ve sent them on, and I forgot about that WB post.
Sometimes I wonder if places like Walla Walla would be easier to find work in or ‘secondary’ areas in CA. He and I both visited Walla Walla last year and found the place very accessible.
Additionally, a few local trade organizations have listing on their sites, some of which are unique and others will also show up over on winejobs.
This would have been a damn easy question to answer back in August when basically every winemaker I knew was starving for decent interns with some idea of the business, it’ll be more complicated now.
As per what type of region-it’s all relative, but there are seemingly always tasting room jobs in Napa and Sonoma available-I couldn’t say the same thing about SB even.
Another piece of advice, especially in Paso-get a couple of minutes with some of the folks at smaller wineries and they can probably point him in the right direction as well. In Paso, I’d specifically ask at Alta Colina and Barrel 27, both of whom have staff and owners who are well connected and generally well liked.