Some parts are exactly what you’d think: attending wine-tasting events, receiving bottles in the mail every day. I joke that one of these days the UPS worker may finally ask to come in and taste them. But there are some less glamorous parts too.The Toronto wine industry is tight-knit and exclusive: you’re expected to go to frequent social events, drink often and be an extrovert, which I’m not. It’s also stuck in the past.
in the Court of Master Sommeliers. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. I think sexism is more subtle in workplaces that aren’t corporate. The setting is also a factor—we’re meeting at what people think of as social events, with alcohol, at night.As a wine writer, I would often be invited on tours in places like Niagara or even Italy to test new products. All the wine writers went, and we’d all get the same story. They were essentially press releases in the form of a bus tour.
Your book touches on your own over-drinking. How did you navigate it while working in the wine business? I went through a lot of therapy and came up with tricks that still help me limit my drinking to this day. One is asking myself why I’m having a drink. If it’s because I had a stressful thought, I know I can make myself feel better in other ways, like going for a walk or watching a good TV show. Another trick is that, when I open a bottle of wine, I pour half of it into a second, empty bottle and stow it away. And of course, non-alcoholic wines are improving quickly.