It’s always funny to me how I ended up here. For someone who was never really into wine, I have gone down quite the rabbit hole. Generally speaking, the love of wine typically comes first. What often starts off as an interest or passion leads to eventually pursuing a career as a sommelier or winemaker. Instead, through a mixture of curiosity and luck, I somehow ended up at Joseph Phelps Vineyards for my first day of work without having ever visited a winery. But let’s rewind.

While studying biology as an undergrad, I spent a semester in Costa Rica, studying a fungus infecting coffee farms in the Los Santos region. I loved the daily routine of walking through the coffee plants, visiting different farms, and working in agriculture dedicated to a specialty product. However, at the end of the semester, I returned to the U.S. for a landscape architecture internship at Cal Berkeley, convinced this was the perfect solution to combining my love of science and art.

*View from a coffee farm in Llano Bonito, Costa Rica*

One week in I hated it. Hoping to escape the studio, I spent the weekend with a friend’s family in Sonoma, when her mom off-handedly suggested I might like working in the wine industry. Months later back in my college’s library in Colorado, I started sending out resumés to a handful of wineries and asked our career center for any alumni connections, she passed along the email of the owner of Joseph Phelps. A few weeks later, I had the job. At this point, you would assume I would have done some research into my future workplace, winemaking in general, or even swapped out beer for wine during the graduation festivities. But instead, I went off to the wilderness to be a backpacking guide for the summer before driving out to Napa.

In hindsight, I am a bit embarrassed I hadn’t researched more upon arrival. I showed up the first day in inappropriate shoe-wear, completely ignorant of my job description. And the first week I was constantly running to the bathroom to google what basic terms like ‘brix’ meant. I’ll never forget the day one of the full-time cellar guys, Ricardo, a former professional soccer player, asked me how I even got this job, after watching me struggle to operate a pump. I responded that I emailed the owner and we both laughed. Later, I knocked over a stack of picking bins (empty, at least) while learning to drive the forklift.

But eventually harvest started to really pick up and I got a pair of waterproof boots and into the flow. While I was undoubtedly the least experienced intern, I was eager to learn and always willing to do the more menial/dirty tasks. Mostly because it meant I wouldn’t run the risk of messing up anything important (I still did). The other boys, with more experience and enology degrees, weren’t thrilled about shoveling in the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Shit’, which became my official spot on the crush pad. That harvest I fell in love with shoveling pomace, squeegeeing grape skins on the crush pad, and washing the lab equipment.

Since then, I have worked several more harvests around the world; making large-scale sauvignon blanc in Marlborough (Wither Hills), learning the processes of biodynamic viticulture in Napa Valley (Rudd Oakville Estate), working with small batches of Pinot Noir and Syrah in both Chile and Colorado (Kingston Family Vineyards and Buckel Family Wine) and completing a Master’s in Enology and Viticulture, studying in Montpellier, France (L’institute de Agro Montpellier) and Madrid, Spain (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). And my favorite part about harvest is still cleaning the floor of the crush pad at the end of the day with music and a beer.

down the rabbit hole

the ‘aha’ moment