I took the last year of my life and turned it into what I call an “adult internship”. This might sound funny to some, but after a 15 year career finding others their dream opportunities I took the leap of pure faith and said to myself “Well, if you really want to make wine you might as well go for it”. I took a deep breath and called a winemaker I have known for years and said what are you doing the next couple of weeks and can I shadow you? He said yes!

This is not a new concept for me. I was an executive recruiter with a pretty healthy track record of placing some of the top manufacturing talent with the best companies in the world. And I used to tell my candidates during the interview process to ask if they could shadow one of the players on the leadership team they would be working on. I did this for two reasons, if the company was painting a “happier” picture of the situation the candidate would know it and for the company they would be able to tell if the candidate was going to “fit in” with the current team culture. So everybody knew what they would be getting into before committing to anything.

Over the past year I volunteered at 14 different wineries and did everything from running a bottling line, working in a tasting room, working directly for the winemaker helping to blend and create the next great release. I sat in marketing and sales meetings, attended winemakers dinners, poured wines at fundraisers, drove a fork truck, cleaned barrels, tanks and manually worked harder than most would imagine. Many nights I left the place with shriveled toes from having wet feet from hosing the place down, my back was sore from stacking cases of wine manually and sometimes my tongue would be purple from sampling.

I left happy and a little more educated. The most challenging days were the days where we where doing things like figuring out alcohol by volume, acid levels and percentages of the blends. All this fortified that I wanted to do this full time. I owe so many folks for their generous gift of time and knowledge shared with me. I am thrilled to say each job was great and the day I can open my doors and welcome you to come into my tasting room and you say what are you doing next week? I can say we are pruning or bottling or pressing or topping off barrels, you wanna help? When you want to hang out, watch, learn and listen I will give you a big YES come on over!

One thing that might make the cellar at TJR Select different from the other 90% of the cellars I worked at is the ear splitting volume of the country music or really crazy rock music….I am into old R & B, so if you love old Motown we will get along just fine. BTW the best job in the winery is being the winemaker, they get to do everything!

Much Love and wine!
Tammi

Tasting with Merry Edwards Pinot Noir