What 20 Years in the Wine Industry Actually Taught Me

The year I passed my WSET Level 3, I opened a 2010 Barolo I'd been holding for the occasion. I'd studied hard. I could walk you through Piedmont's DOCG structure, explain the soil differences between Serralunga and La Morra, recite minimum maceration requirements. I had the vocabulary.

The wine ignored all of it.

Not because it was beyond description. Because it was so specifically, stubbornly itself that everything I'd prepared felt like a translation of something I hadn't yet heard. That gap between knowing about wine and knowing wine is where I've spent most of the past two decades. Here's what I actually found there.

Terroir is not marketing language. I spent years treating it as a story importers use to justify price. Then I started tasting the same grape from different volcanic soils, different altitudes, different aspects, and the differences became impossible to dismiss. Etna doesn't taste like Côte de Nuits doesn't taste like the Mosel. That isn't branding. It's geology. The ground is doing something the winemaker can't replicate elsewhere, and learning to taste it is one of the most genuinely satisfying things you can develop as a taster.

Credentials build a framework. They don't guarantee insight. WSET gave me rigorous tools and a vocabulary that made every conversation in the industry easier. I'm grateful for it. But I've met masters of wine who couldn't hold a dinner table, and self-taught enthusiasts who could guide a blind tasting better than half the certified professionals I know. The piece of paper opens the door. What you do with the room is something else.

The best teachers in this industry are the most curious ones. Not the most decorated, the most traveled, or the most expensive-bottle-having. The ones who still get lit up by a grape they've never tasted. Who dig into a region because they want to understand it, not because it looks good on a list. Twenty years in, I still feel that way about volcanic island wines, the Jura, what's happening quietly in eastern Washington right now. If that ever goes away, I'm in the wrong business.

There's a difference between teaching someone what to think about wine and teaching them how to think. Most wine education focuses on the first. Scores, tasting notes, critic rankings — useful reference points, but they create dependency. What I've found more valuable, both personally and in the rooms where I teach, is helping someone build their own palate. Their own framework. Not my take on the wine. Theirs. That shift is the whole game.

The industry has a gatekeeping problem it rarely names. I've been in rooms where making newcomers feel small seemed to be the point. That's not tradition or rigor. That's insecurity with a dress code. Every person who ever moved the needle for me was genuinely excited by my questions. That's the standard I try to hold.

What twenty years actually taught me is smaller than it sounds and harder to shortcut: wine earns your attention because it's connected to something real. A place with specific geology. A year with specific weather. Decisions made in a vineyard before anyone knew how the harvest would go. The glass in your hand is the end of a very long chain. Understanding that chain, even partially, changes the way you drink.

That's the version of wine education I'm building here. Not simplified at the cost of being real. Not technical at the cost of being useful. Just honest about what wine actually is, and worth your time.