New Year, New Views

Who am I? What am I doing here?

As a wine writer and educator, I spend my days talking about wine. I hope you’ll join in the conversation.

I am a writer whose specialty is wine. Not a day passes where I am not grateful for earning a living from it.

Back in university, I went to a career fair on campus and asked the unwitting reporter from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record sent to staff the table how I could get a wine column. She stammered and deflected, with good reason. There were precious few English language wine columns in the country at the time: Tony Aspler in The Toronto Star, David Lawrason in The Globe and Mail and Tony Gismondi for The Vancouver Sun. None were written by twenty-something English majors.

During school I wrote music and concert reviews, artist profiles and features for The University of Waterloo Imprint, learning how to write competently and confidently for an audience under deadline pressure. After graduation, I took whatever paid freelance gigs I could, collecting clippings and pennies per word while continuing to learn about wine on the side.

I got my shot to write about wine with the launch of Waters & Wine in The St. Catharines Standard in May 2000. (That column was syndicated to The North Bay Nugget and other newspapers in the Southam network and other newspaper chains before evolving to become the current weekly Waters on Wine feature in The Globe and Mail.)

It took creating a wine publication, VINES Magazine, to gain access to the world of wine. Co-founder Walter Sendzik and I saw a niche for talking about Canadian wine in an engaging and personal fashion. With a $25,000 line of credit, a Mac computer and a wealth of naïveté, we published our first edition in November 1998.

Mistakes were made, but we managed to stay in business. The magazine was sold, Sendzik moved on and the editorial focus evolved, but the desire to share the stories of the places and people responsible for the wines worth knowing about never wavered.

That same passion brought me here. I am excited to share archives from my VINES Magazine days, which have no digital footprint, as well as tastings and travels that don’t fit the national scope of my work for The Globe and Mail. I hope you’ll join me.

Tune In, Turn Up

Matching newly released wines with newly released albums was one of the most popular elements in VINES Magazine. It brought a much needed lifestyle element to wine appreciation — no one drinks wine in silence. Allow me to share a playlist for these in-between days of early January, before the New Year kicks into high gear. These are songs that soar, jingle and rattle, hoping to fit in.