Wine Beginnings – Part 4

This is the part that is a little trickier to trace accurately. So many different factors: our 2012 Christmas gift to ourselves of joining Plonk Wine Club, chosen both for their commitment to great wine under $30/bottle and the fact they shipped to Maryland (9th anniversary with them coming up!). Restaurant apps making it easier to search for new places to try based on wine lists. Finding places that focused on serving half-glasses of wine so that we could experiment. Then I started signing up for email lists of wine shops that offered dedicated tastings and classes. 

Moving to my current job at UMD also opened up a whole new world of taking vacations. I started being able to tag along on Roman’s summer trips to Malware Prom (technically called MTEM), so I would have a chance to explore a city on my own and geek out in my way as he was geeking out with his friends & colleagues. When it came up that MTEM 2016 was going to be in Livermore, California, just outside of San Francisco and thus close to the wine regions of Napa and Sonoma, we started hatching a plan to finally take our long-delayed honeymoon.

Being the travel agent in our marriage, I went to work gathering information and presenting scenarios to Roman. We quickly narrowed down to the less-commercial Sonoma. I found a company that will coordinate and drive you in your own (rental) car for a day of winery visits, tastings and a picnic lunch. We planned that for early in our week to help us learn about the territory, and it paid off dividends. At our first stop, Iron Horse Vineyards, we happened to be tasting next to folks that had worked in the DC theatre scene before relocating out West. They looked over our itinerary for the day, gave their approval, and then gave us the best advice: visit Three Sticks in Sonoma (a story in and of itself that I will share at another time). We left Sonoma having had amazing food, shipping home many bottles of wine, and as wine club members for Three Sticks getting twice-annual allocations of chardonnay and pinot noir (the good stuff).

Other trips started including long weekend trips up to the Finger Lakes in New York to hike and taste, and I was still taking various classes when I could, but I had signed up for a special event about Women in Wine taking place on the same evening we got back from our 2nd Finger Lakes trip, and that would be another pivotal moment for me. I listened to the guest speakers and one of the owners of the host shop talk about their experiences moving into the industry, and there was a fascinating discussion about the various education and certification organizations. So many people only know of the Court of Master Sommeliers because of the success of the movie Somm, so it was interesting to hear that there were other options, as well as the simple push to just get out and get involved in your own path. I left that evening knowing I wanted to become more serious about wine education, so I looked at the books that were recommended and began researching entities. I finally settled on the path of the Society of Wine Educators, and started May 2019 working toward my first certification as a Certified Specialist of Wine. The pandemic got in the way of my original two scheduled testing dates, but I finally passed my exam in September 2020.

The only real problem this has all brought up is that the more you learn about wine, the more wine you realize is out there to love. I hope I can help other people develop that problem too!