What is the opposite of an ah-ha moment?

How I discovered my passion for Wine

Everyone who has worked in wine has been asked the same question at one point in time:

What was your ah-ha bottle?

Some industry professionals have a great story about a bottle that strikes like lightning. I do not.

Not that I haven’t had spectacular wines that linger in my memory. There was a glass of Madeira from 1880 served at the end of a beautiful Michelin-Starred meal at Meadowood. A bottle of Pomerol from 1986 that finally made the region’s reputation click. A bottle of Pinot Noir from Volnay vineyards harvested and vinified for the Hospice de Beaune in the 1960s — a bottle that had been made and pulled unlabeled from the cellar by a good friend’s grandfather. There is a bottle of California Sherry and a sister bottle of California Port from that same decade, vinified by my Great-Grandfather. But there was no singular story that sparked my passion.

I grew up with wine. My paternal great-grandfather was a cooper and a winemaker in the early days of California’s burgeoning post-prohibition wine industry. And my dad spent many of his formative years helping his grandfather — whom I knew and fondly remember — working in the winery. My dad would go on to be an engineer, but wine was always on the table when I was a child, particularly for holidays and special occasions. And I have fond memories of reading a book in a corner of a tasting room while my parents tasted wine and added to their own collection.

A career in wine was never on my radar. I studied Politics and Economics in college, but by happenstance, I stumbled into a hobby and passion that would become my career at a very early age.

My first exposure to working in the alcohol space began with a bartending class — one I took at Harvard, no less. It was something fun and silly. And one that had no bearing on the start of my adult professional life.

But after I had been laid off from my first grown-up job after college, I started helping some family friends run their bottling line, being paid in bottles. That week on the bottling line grew to yield an invitation to help in the tasting room, then to help with marketing and the club.

Eventually, that wine bug had sunk its teeth deep into my skin. And despite a full-time role at a tech start-up, I was sustained by weekends spent working in wine. The plan was always to pursue an advanced degree, so I applied to an MBA program in Bordeaux, one focused on the wine business. Despite a remote interview at 2 am, I got in. And three weeks later, fate gave me a giant push: I got laid off again. So, I spent the summer applying for a visa and brushing up on my French. And the rest, as they say, is history.

And over the past 15 years, I’ve slowly been drawn deeper into my love for wine. There are times when I get lost in the day-to-day grind of earning a living and forget the driving passion behind my choices. But then along comes another bottle or glass that reminds me of the magic and the reason I do what I do.

And so…what do I say when asked about that ah-ha bottle?

Every glass is an adventure. Wine is bottled sunshine and air. A representation of not only a specific place and time, but a winemaker’s interpretation and expression of it.

And there are thousands of unique places around the world working with thousands of unique grape varietals. It is a journey through space and time.

But wine also lives and breathes. It changes over time. Time in the glass. Time in the bottle.

And yet it is a mirror of sorts. An expression of who you are in any given moment. Who you are with, what you are eating, what music you are listening to, even your mood — they all have an impact on your experience of wine. An experience that is unique to you. What you are experiencing may be different from what I am.

And yet further still, wine has an X factor. That ability to make an ordinary moment something more. Something extraordinary. A unique alchemy that is almost too subtle to notice. One that is easy to forget or take for granted.

So consider this your reminder: Stop and savor the moment. Embrace the adventure. And the next time you open something special, think about who made it — and why. I do.

For me, that thread runs all the way back to a cooper and winemaker, a man I was lucky enough to know, whose bottles still stand in a place of honor in my home. Bottles that were made long before I was born, and that somehow found their way back to me.

Maybe that’s my ah-ha moment after all.

Cheers!