Hello, and welcome to "Girl Meets Grape," a harrowing tale in which loving parents send their only daughter off to Harvard only to have her end up drinking alcohol for a living..
Well, the real story is a bit more complicated. No, brutal Cambridge winters didn't drive me to drink, and my career typically involves more spitting than a Skoal convention. It's a common misconception associated with my job as a sommelier that I sit around and drink wine all day. While such a career might have its charms, it is not what a wine professional actually does. One learns early on how critical it is to spit, and hopefully one also learns to spit wine samples with at least a passing nod to decorum. There's nothing quite as nasty as ricocheting in a spit bucket that 200 others have previously used, trust me.
Leaving that glamorous part of the job aside, being a sommelier is a ridiculously fun thing to do for a living. There are worse ways to earn one's way, let's be honest. In "Girl Meets Grape," I invite you to share in my wine-soaked adventures -- and, more commonly, misadventures. While I hope that you'll learn some wine basics along the way that will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of wine, I also hope to share why I think it is that wine can and should be an essential part of our daily lives. As the venerable Benjamin Franklin put it: "Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance." And couldn't we all use less tensions and more tolerance in this world? To me, wine represents a unique cross-cultural synthesis of land, food, history, and people. It's a passport to the sunflowered fields of Tuscany and to the jagged peaks of New Zealand just as surely as it's an everyday beverage to enjoy with old friends and good food. Wine is about soil, wind, sun, and water. It speaks as eloquently of the purple-stained fingers of workers as it does about the legendary feasts of kings, both ancient and modern. And if that doesn't convince my parents that I was right to bail on law school, I really am in trouble!
A few biographical notes on me: I ultimately got into the wine racket after earning millions in my lucrative previous careers as a teacher, poet, and actress. I finished up college lickety-split and immediately began a graduate program in comparative literature at Harvard. I believe it was a gray November seminar cheerfully entitled "Poetry, Suicide & Biography" that finally prompted my flight south to New York. There I was lucky enough to work at a terrific restaurant called Union Square Café, where I first caught the wine bug. It's a remarkably virulent bug, difficult to shake once it's in your bloodstream. Despite another round of grad school in Boston and some wonderful years spent teaching high school here and abroad, wine was always my passion. Eventually, I stopped searching for the "perfect" career and realized that I was already doing something that I in fact adored. And the research is a lot more fun than studying tort reform or contract law! I subsequently have worked for many years as a sommelier at other fancy restaurants like Jean-Georges and Spago Beverly Hills. I am particularly grateful to all the talented chefs, bartenders, servers, sommeliers, and managers who have been my colleagues over the years. (And no, I won't use actual names in this blog, so rest easy, guys.) Nowadays, I run my own wine consulting business based in Los Angeles, where I live with my darling husband, who prefers iced tea to wine.
I married him anyway.
In vino veritas!
Bonnie L. Graves