A Week in the Life of a Wine Consultant
-universal language, wine tastings, wine buying, & more
This is a busy time of year in the wine world.
In the northern hemisphere, harvest is top of mind for wine producers. With summer holidays being over, importers, export managers, and retailers are meeting again. Wine drinkers are hunkering back into the routine, and they want to replenish their supplies.
And aren’t you taking possession of a new house this week.
Yes, I feel like a bit of a headless chicken this week.
I still don’t understand what you do. When I pop in the store you are often not there?
Oh, this will be fun! Let me walk you through my week.
Monday
For Cork, the store I consult for, order day is Monday, and we receive delivery on Wednesday. We populate the order as things come up all week, but we spend several hours finalizing the order on Monday. I work on the order from home in the morning and arrive at the store a couple hours before the submission deadline.
This week we ordered 130 cases of 6 to 12 bottles each. Some of these include spirits and beer flats but most of it is wine. Our record in December 2024 was about 300 cases.
The order submission was immediately followed by two appointments with two different importers. Both happened to have French export managers with them. We tasted about six wines per meeting.
Of course the store is open at this time, and customers are walking in. Engaging with them is always our priority.
Tuesday
First thing Tuesday morning I had a phone meeting with my colleague about certain events, business improvements, and store layout projects.
Like what?
Twenty items relating to continuous improvements baby! You assume those signs (as show in headline picture) littered all over downtown Calgary miraculously appear? Someone needs to design and order them (me), place them, and regularly check on them (I am quite proud of the business generated by those signs).
At 11 a.m. I attended two back-to-back tastings with agents. Then Matt, Cork’s GM, and I rushed off to a local restaurant for an event featuring Lingua Franca, a winery from Oregon. We met Larry Stone, who co-founded the winery with France’s Dominique Lafon in 2015. I visited Lingua Franca last year, so this was very near and dear to my heart.
They are located in the Willamette Valley near Salem. They grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, Oregon’s two key grapes - the same as Burgundy. During my winery visit last year, I was fooled with both varieties when compared blind against Burgundy wines. These wines are very special, and as a result not cheap.
I assume one of these are the featured wine?
Unfortunately there are none currently available at Cork, although an email offer will be sent to email subscribers shortly. Some of these wines have now sold out since Tuesday on the Alberta market. Larry later commented that he loved the Albertan enthusiasm!
When we left the Lingua Franca event, we rushed back to the store to have two more tastings with agents.
That is a lot of tasting! You must have been liquored!
I spit. You have to have all your capacities to taste. It is actually very cerebral.
Not sure I believe you. Regardless, I feel like I missed something. Why all these tastings?
One of my roles is being part of a team of 3 who make the wine buying decisions for Cork. My title is Wine Consultant, which is vague I know, but that is the point. I assist with everything to do with the business of wine. For me this includes using my engineering background, which also includes optimization of people, places, and things. I guide decisions by weighing quality, time, and cost.
I heard this before: anyone can build a bridge but an engineer can build a safe bridge on time and on budget while fulfilling its purpose of getting you to the other side!
Exactly.
But back to tastings. For many wines that enter the store, we focus on getting the best quality wine for the money. Some wine industry people dislike the term “quality for money.” I do not know if they feel there is no sex appeal to this concept, but I think that is just smart business. (And that has sex appeal to me!)
But if you taste the wine once, don’t you just reorder it?
Wines go out of stock, vintages change, and new product comes into the province. All that, plus the fact that wine evolves in the bottle.
The only constant is change.
Yes, not to mention that there are many thousands of wines on the Alberta market. Frequent tasting is required to stay current!
Wednesday
Wednesday is Show Day at Cork. A day full of logistics. Think 130 cases moved from loading dock at parkade level to the ground level retail store via humans, carts, and service elevators. My upper body strength has improved, let me tell you!
Some wine never hits the shelf, but rather gets re-packed and/or re-labeled for pick up, or for delivery in late afternoon. This was a 9-hour day, and the wine did not all get on the shelf. Shelving would continue Thursday.
Lots of wine bottles to be manhandled!
Exactly. Over a thousand bottles…!
Thursday
I opened the store and an agent came in for their tasting appointment within minutes. This time it was wines from Loire and Rhône in France, as well as a couple of wines from Portugal and South Africa.
In the afternoon, I worked on my weekly writing while staying in communication with the store remotely. It is common for me to write on Thursdays, although usually not until the evening.
I am stuck on the Oregon winery; can we go back to it? What does Lingua Franca mean anyway?
Lingua Franca means a common language used by people of diverse backgrounds to communicate. It could be any language. One could say English is a global lingua franca of business and travel.
Larry Stone, who is a Master Sommelier (fewer than 300 MS worldwide), was wonderful to listen to. The highlight for me was his lingua franca explanation and why this was relevant to him.
The Lingua Franca winery website states: “Our name represents a fine tradition of universal language, bringing people of different backgrounds to common ground – shared conversation, shared enjoyment.”
Larry paraphrased something similar and emphasised how we humans are all from the same race. The human race. And how wine has the ability to join us together.
This is my goal with Shades of Grape too. Wine is our common language – the love of which is something we share.
Wine as a universal language!
Exactly not only does wine “neutralize” procrastination, as the sign says, it elevates humanity!
The whole human race even!
Cheers to that!
Yay wine!
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SOURCES:
Lingua franca (no date). https://www.linguafranca.wine/.
Willamette Valley - Oregon Wine Board (2022). https://www.oregonwine.org/regions/willamette-valley/.
Love to see this behind the scenes into your day as a wine consultant!
It's the "wash, rinse, repeat" cycle we all know in the wine business. Moving boxes is not glamorous, it's labor - not work. Fronting bottles, making sure customers are picking up wine in a timely fashion, tasting appointments (even if they don't book ahead), all of it. If you extended into "Week Two" much would be the same, much would be different, or shall we say, unexpected.