Getting Started...
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Becky and I outside the winery, rockin' the apron |
