ABOUT
I’ve been in the fine wine business for 19 years.
For me, wine is not just a beverage, and this is not just a job but an all-consuming obsession.
My career has involved working for wine companies, some, very large and some, very small, in many different capacities. My focus has been in sales, both to restaurants and to boutique wine shops with lots of travel up and down the East Coast as well as in the Bay Area.
I’ve also sold to consumers on the winery side, or “Direct- to-Consumer” and for years have organized trade as well as consumer wine events.
For 10 years, I've been a Certified Wine Educator from the Society of Wine Educators.
This is the ultimate job for me.
I am also recognized as a Certified Sommelier from the Court of Master Sommeliers, and I passed the WSET Advanced Level, "With Distinction" from the Wine & Spirits Education Trust.
I grew up in West Texas where there was a shortage of oenophiles and a regional preference for beer and Tequila!
But I inherited my mother's passion for food and for cooking. And ever since I was a teenager, I've been fascinated with wine.
My yearning for discovery of what the world outside of Texas had to offer led to spending one of my college years in France.
Probably not too coincidentally, one of my roommates was a French chef.
Trust me when I say there was no shortage of great food and cheap wine flowing every night. But what did I know? I was enjoying every minute of it and I'm sure, unbeknownst to me, my inner wine geek was brewing. But it would be many years before I got into the wine industry.
Once my interest was piqued of all things "un-Texan", I decided to move to New York City when I was 23....I don't need to say that it's one of the greatest food cities in the world. All I needed was a city like New York to sink me once and for all with the food and wine bug....it was more like an infestation, really.
After years of trying everything from retail to publishing to television acting, I finally found my calling in the wine industry. After living the dream for a couple of decades, I'd had my fill of the crazy hordes of New Yorkers and waiting in endless lines for absolutely everything, so I decided to head out to the Bay Area for a kinder, gentler lifestyle. And what better place than Wine Country? Where practically everyone is a foodie... and, of course, San Francisco is the best contender, albeit a touch smaller, to New York, as far as food towns go.