I blame wine boards like this one. Connected with so many wine lovers, including winemakers. Talked some shit online about things I really didn’t know and before I knew it was I tagging along with another wine board guy to help out for a day and get some real lessons. My buddy was one and done I think, I’m the idiot who kept coming back haha. Apparently most people don’t!
I sorta fought the urge for a few years, just seemed so impractical, had one and then a second child, just couldn’t envision how it would work. Then coming back from a final interview for a job I didn’t want but felt pressure to go after because money, I had a proverbial come to Jesus moment when I knew I had to try to follow the wine dream. To either make it happen or learn why it didn’t need to. Started working harvests in earnest, making my own commercial quality wine at home as a mentor had done, got that out to friends and family for a few years and went “pro" back in 2009 with 220 cases of Pinot Noir. I went full time in the business in 2015.
Best move I ever made, never mortgaged the proverbial farm, if it hadn’t worked I would have been out time, a little money and mostly left in the uncomfortable place of - what the heck do I do now?
I’ve managed to keep my passion for wine very high. Life is different now and, in my 50s, I’m sure my passion for wine would have evolved without my entry into the business. So anyone considering it - don’t be afraid to kill the passion. I honestly knew back then I spent way too much time thinking and learning about wine almost to NOT do something with it. Success is a long road and I’m still working on it, but honestly I’ve never cared for my work as much as I have in this business. That’s the secret to success for sure.
Living in Europe allowed me my first taste of good wine. My mother bought me a bottle of a spaetlese - for something like 4 deutschmarks! Coming back to the US was tough as not much fine wine was available in Indiana. Thankfully, Louis Martini out of California made good quality, affordable real wines.
Moved to Oregon when I graduated partially because of the high quality of the soft fruits grown there. A small wine industry was growing there (1980). I used to pick peaches at a friend’s farm every August (there’s not much better than a tree-ripened peach). We would walk by an old quarter acre vineyard on the way to and from the peach orchard. My friend (Bill Beran) told me he thought it was Wadensville clone Pinot noir.
Now I had a friend with winemaking equipment (he made kit wines (not special)) and knew where I could get some Pinot noir fruit so in 1985 I picked 100 pounds of Pn - at 24.2 brix and 1.05ta. Good numbers! '85 was a good vintage year for Oregon.
I can hardly describe how much I enjoyed turning this fruit into must (vinifera grape juice is very tasty!), then fermenting it into a yeasty, muddy concoction which settled out, eventually going through malolactic fermentation and aging in barrel (a 5 gallon barrel I bought from David Adelsheim) turning into this beautiful beverage. I was hooked!
The next year I made 40 gallons, then 100, until I reached the legally allowable max of 200 gallons per year. If I had a particularly good wine I would seek out the source and see if I could buy the fruit (which I picked myself). As fruit was somewhat undervalued I was rarely turned down.
Eventually I started working at a local winery as a harvest volunteer, learning about the (boutique) industrial side of winemaking. A marketing fellow they brought in was the one who convinced me to go “pro” as we used to share food and wine at meals. I had made Zinfandel off the (by far) oldest vineyard in the Pacific Northwest. It made great wine and he had the idea that the combination of quality wine and a good story would allow us to make a go of it. In 1994 we launched Sineann.
Does wine being your profession hinder your enjoyment of it “off hours”?
Most people love to watch TV at the end of the day after work. Or go to the movies on a Saturday night.
When I worked as an editor at The Hollywood Reporter, I disliked doing those things. Reminded me too much of work. I missed having that easy connection to entertainment as entertainment, as it were.
For 3 decades, I would regularly spend ~20 - 30 days a year tasting ~100 wines a day and taking notes on every one (and usually doing blends).
On those days, dinner would usually be accompanied by beer or everyday wine. My palate was simply too tired to appreciate fine wine. If dinner was in a winegrower’s home (which happened often), and they asked what I wanted to drink, I would simply ask for whatever they normally drank at dinner. If they didn’t ask and brought out the best, I’d just smile and enjoy it.
No time for such things, alas. I passed the master gardeners exams but didn’t formally join the organization. With all humility, I have a corner lot and a sort of “show garden” right up to the street. The local gardening club did a tour. Everyone walking by says nice things. Some people stop their cars. I collect bearded iris and am on the board of the Historic Iris Preservation Society. I have 500-550 different cultivars, some going back to the 19th century. 40+ different types of lilies. Japanese iris, Louisiana iris, Siberian iris. Cactus and agave. Peonies, asters, lavender, gladiolus, Montauk daisies, globe thistle, way too much to mention. Perennials and annuals. Basically from March to October+ I work in the yard 16-20 hours a week easy, probably more. Always some new project.
Wine and University of Miami football are the only chat boards I participate on. Ole Miss going down!
Impressive! My wife is the gardener in our household. But when we left the suburbs for Manhattan, she had to content herself with indoor plants, everywhere.
I think I am in an unusual situation. As I think I have pointed out elsewhere. My job is basically warehousing. “What do you warehouse?” “Well, glad you asked. Wine!” I look at a lot of bottles all day. Tasting wine is not part of my job in the least. It’s all theoretical or intellectual. It sounds smarmy but honestly how many bottles of DRC, Screaming Eagle, Liger-Belair, Lafite, Monprivato do you need to see before it’s just an object like any other. I could be looking at cans of soup. But you can drop a can of soup, just don’t drop the Soldera.
After work we drink a lot of plonk. Some clients say this bottle is too old, just dispose of it so I’m not paying storage for dead wine. Or a wine marketing client of ours loses their client or the samples aren’t current enough to send to a blogger or Wine Enthusiast. So guys get rid of these for us please. So many over the hill bottles being stored professionally. Then one day they wake up, or their heirs are like, is this worth anything? Short answer: highly unlikely. With a discarded bottle we take a sip and either it’s another sip or down the drain. (Freaking amazing how many collectors hold onto wine too long but are utterly convinced the wines are only getting better. Hey, man, your 1997 Kistler Chard is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.) Once in awhile someone buys a decent bottle to share. Or beer. So, if this hinders my enjoyment it’s just because the wine sucks.
By the time I get home I can still get into wine pretty well, that’s not the primary issue. Has nothing to do with being a wine professional [sic]. It’s much more that after god knows how many years of tasting wine little really excites me. Or the wines that do excite me are now outside my budget. Neither really has to do with my day job per se.
During harvest, a little. Not that the “off hours” are that many. But it’s more often the case that I find myself wanting something very different from what I work with, for a change of scene.
Most of the time, working in wine doesn’t hinder my enjoyment of it in my personal life. The one other thing I would say is that, when you work in the industry, there’s just a lot of free or inexpensive local wine around, at your place or your friends’. I have to make a conscious effort to spend money on non-Californian wine and continue to indulge my curiosity in global wines.
Good question. I mentioned in my post above that I still have a big passion for wine. And it’s true. But I notice I don’t participate here as much for example. Wine boards were such an outlet for me for many years but over time I don’t look to them so singularly. That said, I still love them and really appreciate all the people who contribute here and other online sites. What a huge resource. Sometimes listening to a wine focused podcast is a little triggering, if business challenges come up or something about a suspect wine they have in barrel or whatever. Hard not to think - oh shit do I have the same issue?? At the end of a long harvest day yeah maybe a beer is more appropriate. But as I also said above, a sincere passion for this stuff is part of how you can do ok or well enough in a wine business career. I definitely still have the spark.
After doing a semester abroad in Italy (late 90’s) I was introduced to a whole new way of eating and drinking that I had not known as a New Englander. Something about it stuck and I found a way to CA in 2000. This was by no means a career switch, I had just finished college so my logic was: try this wine thing out for a while when obligations were scant—have never left. 26 years later I am as happy as ever. In fact, completely re-invigorated, loving the craft, the community and the beauty of the conversations with wine friends. These days I am eschewing a cocktail or beer (even though I love them) for another glass of wine.
To add to the follow up question—does being in the industry change the way you drink. There is no question. The line b.w work and not-work simply does not exist. Banking a single note from a glass of wine while on a road trip, noticing how a restaurant lists its wines in a more nuanced way than others, constantly thinking about what you might be eating and what wine would go well are just some of the daily experiences that keep wine on autoplay at all times. You cannot have the highs without the lows, and love dumping something sub-par in order to justify scavenging for something delicious.
Fun thread - here’s what made me pursue a career in wine
In the late nineties, I was living in San Francisco working as a lab technician in the Blackburn lab at UCSF. This was my first job out of college. My friends and I had a lot of fun eating and drinking and learning about food and wine together around the Bay Area.
One night in August of 1998, I was at Cafe du Nord with a friend, and she started talking to this guy she thought was cute. As they were chatting, he explained that he was a winemaker in Napa Valley who had worked all over the world, he spoke a bunch of languages, and he’d trained at the wine school at Davis. I interrupted their flirty conversation to get some emergency career counseling. He was describing my dream job, a combination of my interests in food and wine and microbiology and biochemistry. He suggested that before applying to the enology master’s program at Davis, I should work a harvest at a winery.
Six weeks later, I took a leave of absence from the lab to work the harvest with Cathy Corison.
2025 was my 28th harvest across 3 continents. I’m grateful for that chance meeting as I found a career I love and I’ve been fortunate to work alongside and share meals with such a generous and interesting winemaking community.
Long story long, dude was Aaron Pott who grows wine on Mt. Veeder with his family, Pott and daughters.
Liz Blackburn won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2009 for her work on telomerase.