I'm a pretty young kid (born in 1985) and I look especially young for my age (I have been carded getting into clubs where I am trying to sell my wine). This picture is of me at 21. Yikes, right?
So when people ask me where I learned to make wine, I think they're more asking "How did you learn to make wine?" The timeline just doesn't add up for a variety of reasons.
- In the US, you can't drink until you're 21.
- Typically, school takes four years, five-eight for a masters in oenology
- Grapes take a year to grow
- Maceration, vinification and crush take a few months
- Then you're gonna age for at least a year
- Even bottling and shipping adds a few months to the timeline
- A 22 year-old American had to make the wine when he was 19-20
I learned by doing.
We read a lot of books. I'll get a bibliography up some time soon.
Also, we get a lot of advice. The neighborhood is full of winemakers. Every one of them says he knows exactly what to do. Every one of them says something totally different. It's like so many things in life where you just have to listen to all the definite authorities and come to your own conclusions.
There are ways to filter all this advice. If a friend says, "Oh don't bother doing that. It's a lot of work and it didn't make the wine much better," I know to disregard the value judgement in that sentence. What the person is actually saying is "This made the wine better, it is a lot of work, and I don't do it." Ah, nuance.
August 2002 - I start college at Tulane University. I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life, but I know that New Orleans and I are fun-loving and interesting characters. Fall 2003 - My dad, who has always sort of mumbled that he's going to get a vineyard one day and work the land, mentions that mom and he have been visiting vineyards seriously. They ended up buying the vineyard. December 2004 - The vineyard is mine. I am a winemaker in name. Spring 2005 - I go to school and tell Tulane I'm gonna skip the fall semester. June 2005 - I have my first professional contact with a vine. A lot of hard work ensues. August 2005 - I stay in France to do the first harvest. My schooltown is hit by Hurricane Katrina. I feel really bad about not being there, but I have to truck through the first harvest before returning to help out. October 2005 - The first harvest, vinification and crush ends. December 2005 - I return to New Orleans. The city rolls on. May 2006 - I graduate and return to the vineyard. Summer/Fall 2006 - Another great year at the vineyard. February 2007 - I do my first commercial wine tasting. This is when it sort of sinks in that somewhere along the line I learned a lot about winemaking.