It’s tempting to think that, as we enter the holiday season, winemakers get to take it easy. After all, the harvest is over, fermentation is likely finished and, for the time being, it’s mostly a matter of waiting for wines to settle and mature, a process that doesn’t require a ton of intervention. So now it’s just a matter of jetting off to somewhere warm or gathering with family to celebrate the season, yeah?
Not quite, at least for many smaller winemakers. Right about the time that fermentations are finishing, they typically have to switch from winemaker to marketer, which means in-store appearances at wine retailers, wine dinners at restaurants and many other promotional activities. While that doesn’t sound like the worst fate, it’s fascinating the number of great winemakers who genuinely struggle with that aspect of their job.
That’s not surprising, as making wine and selling wine require very different skills. The kind of attention to detail and organization that are essential for making wine may be more optional in sales, while people skills are nice to have as a winemaker but far from mandatory.
Working retail, I saw brilliant winemakers who simply couldn’t talk to average people: any time they got asked about their wines — they ended up down a rabbit hole of technical minutia and clonal selections — while the person who wanted to buy their wine was now desperately trying to exit the conversation.
In the restaurant trade, there was the one winemaker who got so drunk at the dinner we were putting on that they basically couldn’t stand up by the time the final course came out. Maybe surprisingly, they actually sold a lot of wine that evening — I guess the guests saw it as a sort of endorsement in the end!
Yet in the same way that the celebrity chef craze created the expectation that the person who made your meal could then eloquently talk to you about it, we have perhaps unrealistic expectations of winemakers. Some are indeed charismatic and love to talk about their wines and, perhaps unsurprisingly, those people tend to sell a lot of wine. Others though are more inclined to spend their “off-season” cleaning the winery or traveling to a Southern Hemisphere region to try and learn a bit more, and I’m thankful for that. After all, if every winemaker could tell their own story… I wouldn’t have much of a job!
Zach Geballe is a sommelier at the Dahlia Lounge, the owner of Vine Trainings where he teaches wine classes, and a writer. He lives in Seattle, where he owns more wine than he can reasonably drink, but loves to share. You can find him at @zgeballe or vinetrainings.com.
