The National Wine UnClub
October 1999
The Genesis of The Home Wine Course
Hello friends! I wanted to write a few lines here to discuss my background and the reason I created The Home Wine Course program. My work with the world of wine came to me quite by what I call "Divine Accident". In late 1978, I had just finished a four-year stint in Ontario, Canada as a staff member of an avant garde high school for juvenile delinquents. Social work was my chosen field at the time but, due to work visa problems because I'm an American citizen, I had to leave that novel project to go back to work in my native land.
Finding a job in San Antonio, Texas, my new stateside home, in the social work field wouldn't have been difficult, but I didn't want to start over again after being part of one of the most successful sociological/ educational programs available to anyone anywhere in an otherwise unexciting profession. So, at the "mature" age of 25, I went out and found a job waiting tables. And, you know what? I loved the work...simply serving people their meals in a restaurant, seeing their pleasure in being served, was a genuine high that I'd never known in social work. And the pay wasn't that bad!
Before long I became a "specialty" waiter in a fine dining establishment, preparing some of the dishes tableside for our patrons. This was a challenge to perform this task well, but I proved to be quite good at it; the flair of first-class dining had captivated my imagination. I was working for love, not money.
Obviously wine was offered in our restaurant but my knowledge of the subject was limited to Mateus Rose and Lake Country Red. Diners who knew wine would ask for strange-sounding French wines like Chateauneuf-du-Pape or Pouilly-Fuisse. I became an expert at opening these bottles of wine, but the whole subject remained a mystery to me.
However, all this changed rapidly. In 1980, I was working in arguably the finest wine-oriented restaurant in the city, called Arthur's, when the owner asked me to take over the wine steward role he was performing. I was dumbfounded by the seeming magnitude of the task, but the honor of working with this magical liquid was too alluring to turn the offer down.
At that time in San Antonio, I was one of the only designated "sommeliers" (wine stewards) in the city. I received training OJT (on the job training), but took every opportunity to read up on the subject of wine as well as to taste this delicious fruit of the vine. In those heady days, a number of my dinner guests were more familiar with the world of wine than I was, so I also listened to them carefully.
Within a year, I was considered an "expert", although I knew I still had a lot to learn. I knew my restaurant's wine list reasonably well though and my career as a sommelier was flourishing. I still loved the work, even when we put on wine tastings at the restaurant that necessitated my opening several dozen bottles in rapid-fire succession!
I began to notice a curious phenomenon after my first year as a fancy wine waiter: grown men twice my age behaving nervously when I handed them our rather extensive California-only wine list. I realized they hadn't been introduced to fine California wines yet (remember, this is 1981!) and they fumbled through the book looking for a wine they could recognize. It became clear to me that I, still a fledgling sommelier, would have to help educate these frightened executives about this relatively new wine region. My work as a wine educator thus came into being!
I eventually left the restaurant world after another three years of sommelier work to follow my new mission as a wine educator. I took a position as a manager/ creative director of a small fine wine and spirits shop that had just lost its local wine legend manager to a protracted illness. I knew nothing about retail but I was happy to be in a place where the clientele expected knowledgeable advice regarding their wine choices.
I had great fun with this new business venture; the "absentee" owner was happy to let me create a wine club (the first Wine UnClub), a quarterly educational wine newsletter, a restaurant-based series of instructional "blind" wine tastings, and more. I continued to offer wine appreciation classes for a wide variety of groups on the side. Most of these class participants shopped in our store and became members of the Wine UnClub.
Why the Wine UnClub? Simply put, I had found that most of the people who were into wine in those days when the "cocktail" was still king were rather exclusive about their limited knowledge of the subject. This exclusive knowledge might be shared with others of "the IN Crowd", but everyone else seemed to be somehow left out. I wanted to open the door to other people like myself to this most glorious of adult beverages, so I created a club for those of us who weren't necessarily country club members.
The fascinating thing about this new wine club concept was that it attracted a wide variety of new people to the world of wine, including some of those folks who thought they knew all there was to know about wine. It became apparent that these more wealthy members of the Wine UnClub were just as frightened as the rest of us about all there is to know about wine but, because of their wealth and high-profile station in life, they felt obliged to take on the limited knowledge of a "snob" just to show their friends that they knew certain important facts about this subject.
The need for a self-explanatory, essentialized, to-the-point wine course that covered an overview of the world of affordable, yet premium-quality wines now readily available to most Americans was the next step for me. I wanted this course to feel more like a travelogue, or to sound like the description a top waiter might give of menu items in a fine restaurant. The whole point of the The Home Wine Course is to give people a little context for the wide variety of wines they might want to explore. In other words, the text is worth 10% while tasting represents the other 90% of the value of this wine education program.
The study of wine is, and should be, a lifetime affair. Wine is an essential part of the culinary experience so vital to the well-being of human life. We can subsist on a laboratory mix of nutrients that provides for basic maintenance of the human body, but our soul yearns for foods and drink that are natural, prepared with love, and served with passion. Let's enjoy the ongoing process of discovering the endless bounty of God's blessing here on earth.
En vino veritas....
~ Don