TEN THINGS: To Do To Get A High Caliber Wine Education
TEN THING…
To Do To Get A High Caliber Wine Education
1. Get a job at a serious wine shop like K&L Wine Merchants or Zachys
2. Work in the Cellar at Robert Mondavi or Simi in the 1970s or 1980s
3. Agree to be Kermit Lynch’s Valet
4. Read the ten fattest wine books by English writers written in the past 20 years
5. Sell wine for a distributor in San Francisco or New York for 10 years
6. Spend a few years inspecting wine consignments at a wine auction house
7. Take your inheritance and buy a well-run winery producing 20,000 cases of wine.
8. Set aside five years and work for six months each in a cellar in California, Oregon, Argentina, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa
9. Plant, manage, care for and find buyers for the grapes from a 10 acre vineyard
10. Taste and take notes on ten wines per day for five years.
Ok, Now a post for the 10 REALISTIC things to do for a high calibur wine education.
You mean #10 wasn’t realistic?
Okay I’ll give you that one…
1. Buy only the finest Medocs during final year of college, from one of the nation’s best importers on the East Coast.
2. Work for Pillsbury’s kiln architected Yugoslavian oak 1500 gallon aging tanks independent grower consortium supplied all new winery in the mid 1970s.
3. Buy a vineyard in the 1970s that was plowed under in the 1950s and sits fallow with eroding terraces on a mountaintop only horses could negotiate.
4. Rededicate the concrete fermenters in the prohibition style barn to springwater storage.
5. Work for the first winery in Dry Creek Valley (near Healdsburg, CA) to build a stainless steel tank crush pad making chardonnays and zins that cost $10.-$40. in the 1980s.
6. Read everything Pierre Galet wrote in English; retrace every leaf shape until you can distinguish each cultivar’s morphologic identifier pink bud fuzz.
7. Work for an international conglomerate beverage behemoth meeting some of the best enologists and grape buyers in the 1980s as they pass thru on their way to better careers and enhanced personal esteem.
8. Ignore wine in the 1990s, in the belief Marin has better uses for its sub-Region I lands; study other sciences such as stream hydrology and livestock management.
9. Puzzle in 2000 at the inauguration of the only supermarket in a hub of 20,000 people in northern Alexander valley when the wine shelf is only ten feet long and is comprised half of jug wines. Think of writing a wineletter to the store’s corporate office in OR.
10. Express amaze that that tentative supermarket in 2006 has expanded its wine shelf to two aisles, nearly 100′ of 5 tiers high; enjoy the Spanish and Australian imports and domestic organic wines both of which represent double the cashvalue of any neighboring $40. wine AVA’d on the northcoast. Wonder how the supermarket merchandiser learned so quickly that this business is profitable. Must be some great wine public relations writing that educated them. Good going.