There’s a reason wine can feel so hard to learn: no one agrees on where the story begins.
Ask ten people to explain what matters most in understanding a bottle, and you’ll get ten completely different answers—soil, vintage, producer, variety, style, aesthetics, politics. Each answer reflects a partial system, a fragment of a much larger whole. And because wine culture has evolved as a patchwork of trade language, folk wisdom, and marketing copy, there’s rarely a shared foundation that allows conversations to build coherently.
That’s why learning about wine can feel disorienting. You’re either dropped into the middle of Burgundy with no map, expected to already grasp centuries of classification and subtlety—or handed a flashcard that flattens complexity into “Pinot Noir: light-bodied, red fruit.” Most education lives at one of those extremes: gatekept trade knowledge or generic consumer fluff. Neither equips you to think fluently.
When I started working in restaurants, the real education happened informally. You absorbed knowledge through proximity: half-heard tasting notes during lineup, a manager making you blind taste something on a slow night, a distributor explaining soil types at 10:30 a.m. with a cigarette in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. It was apprenticeship by osmosis. Romantic, yes—but fundamentally unstructured, and inaccessible to anyone outside the inner circle.
For everyone else, “wine education” tends to mean piecing together scattered articles, recycled tasting notes, or paying thousands for certification programs designed for people chasing credentials, not understanding. The result is a landscape where genuine fluency—the ability to connect viticulture, winemaking, place, and style into a meaningful mental map—remains rare, even among professionals.
That’s what Wine School is designed to change.
It’s a structured framework for understanding wine that brings everyone onto the same page: viticulture, winemaking, regions, varieties, styles—the stuff that professionals rely on, but presented with clarity, context, and a contemporary voice. It’s for curious drinkers who want to get past the buzzwords, for industry people who never got a proper foundation, and for anyone tired of pretending they know what “minerality” means at a dinner party.
All this week, I’m giving you a taste of what that looks like.
Each day, I’ll post a short lesson covering one essential piece of the puzzle—the way I wish someone had explained it to me: clearly, without condescension, and with enough cultural and historical texture to actually stick.
If you’ve ever wished wine felt less like a secret language and more like a shared conversation, the Wine School course is built for you. Founding Members will get full access to the complete digital version: structured, sequenced, and designed to make you not just familiar with wine, but fluent.
Tomorrow, we begin where everything does: the vineyard.
That’s the plan. Over the next few days, I’ll give you a taste of what Wine School will cover—real, structured wine knowledge, as clear and fun as I can possibly make it. If you’re excited to learn hit reply or leave a comment and tell me what parts of wine still feel fuzzy for you. And if you want the full digital course—organized, sequenced, and packed with everything I’ve never seen taught clearly—you can become a Founding Member today and get access as it rolls out.