Born and bred on Long Island, New York, I spent a lot of my time being schlepped into New York and Brooklyn by my parents in their desire to ensure I got the best of both the city and burbs worlds growing up.
I first started to love wine (and really delicious food) while studying abroad in Italy for a year during college at Wesleyan University (CT.) With a degree in international politics in hand and a lack of my awesome accent thanks to enough teasing by my classmates, I started my career in high-tech in Boston.
During that portion of my career I attended a lot of wine tastings, bought a lot of bad wine, and felt pretty bad about myself for what I didn’t know despite still loving wine. Trips to the wine shop often yielded awesomely poor (but hilarious) results, so my sister and I finally took a course at the Boston Center for Adult Education to learn how to taste and appreciate wine. It was awesome and made me want to inspire others to learn about and love wine.
That led to me spending eight months living in St. John in the Caribbean to wait tables and learn about how people order wine off a wine list. After that I returned to the US to get my MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I met M.C. Ice, my podcast partner and husband.
Following graduation I worked at a gigantic wine producer doing marketing and learning how wine really shouldn’t be made.
This led me to explore how it really SHOULD be made and started talking about it in a non-obnoxious way into a microphone to educate other non-wine snobs like myself on what I’d been learning about great wine. And so the Wine for Normal People podcast was born!
I don’t think wine credentials mean much but I’m Certified Sommelier, Certified Specialist of Wine, I run an online wine school, and I have spoken for top CEOs and executives around the world. My podcast and book have been written up in all sorts of great publications and I’ve even been on TV a bunch.
Now I live in Raleigh, North Carolina — away from wine industry people and among normal wine drinkers — with M.C. Ice, our two daughters, and Ellie, the best and most spoiled Welsh terrier in the world.
Since starting WFNP, my goal has been and continues to be to share everything I know about wine and to foster great critical thinking and conversations with my dedicated community of fellow wine dorks.
Wine For Normal People® translates wine into normal terms that you can relate to through an award-winning podcast, acclaimed book, awesome live online classes, and in popular public corporate and association speaking events.
Catch up on recent episodes (or the whole back catalog) on any of these podcast players, or the player of your choice — we’re everywhere!