Getting Started...

Getting Started...

Bottle of Gramp's homemade wine

My experience with wine has taken off over the course of the past year.  Before that I had learned a little from my parents and grandparents – my grandfather has bottled his own wine for years, so we’ve always had some of that in our basement and on the table.  But while my dad has been more of a scotch drinker, my mother’s always been willing to teach me a thing or two about wines.  Throughout my early drinking experience, though, I was a lot more enthusiastic about drinking different beers, probably because it was easier to taste the differences from beer to beer, and because that’s what my friends were drinking, so it was on hand.

Over the summer, though, I found myself in desperate need of a job, and on short notice things weren’t looking good, until a friend of mine said she would love to work at a winery.  That got me thinking that I might be able to finagle my way into working at a winery in the Northern Virginia area, as there are several.  I contacted about five different wineries and got mostly no’s or no response at all, but then on my last one I happened to have stumbled on a brand new winery in need of pourers.  Even better, it turns out it was right in my back yard, about 8 minutes from my house and definitely the closest one to my house.  So I went to an interview and they hired me and so began my career as a wine pourer at the Winery at Bull Run.

The Winery at Bull Run - located right next to the Manassas Battlefield and the closest winery to D.C.

To kick things off I had to memorize characteristics of the 9 wines, as well as other facts about wine and vinification in general.  It really helped to have a bunch of coworkers who all knew their stuff, so I was learning fast and having a lot of fun.  The best thing about the job with regards to learning about wine was simply talking to people.  The Winery at Bull Run is the closest to Washington DC, and being brand new, there were hundreds of customers coming through.  All of them had different wine experiences, so I was able to discuss preferences and benefit from the knowledge of others.  A major perk was that we were allowed a glass of wine with every shift, so the more I worked, the more I was allowed to taste the wines.  My coworkers would also bring in bottles and we would have our own after-work taste tests.  This gave me a lot of insight into what to expect from different wines, and I also learned a lot of terms.  I’m looking forward to this class and blog so that I can further my knowledge of wine and keep working at the winery on weekends.

Becky and I outside the winery, rockin' the apron