one last night at the Grapes

Today will mark an end to an era! Well, okay, not really and era, pre se, but an end to a brief stage in my life where I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen financially and career wise. Just about eight months ago I started a second job at a small boutique wine shop in the West Loop. I often worked two to three days during the week and Saturdays. The first four weeks were considered an internship, which gave the owner a window of opportunity to see whether or not I was going to work out or not. After the four weeks were up, I was offered a permanent part-time position as a retail assistant; that basically meant that I did all of the grunt work. The trade-off, of course, was that I was making $10 an hour, got to attend all the classes, and had online courses from Wine Spectator available to me, plus a really nice discount on the wine. For a while there, as I got deeper and deeper into the industry, I was convinced that a career change into the wine industry just might be the way to go for me, and I still feel that way. I loved learning about all of the different regions in some of my favourite wine-producing areas such as Spain, Argentina and California. I loved exploring each new wine and writing about them. I loved visiting Sonoma and Napa and all the wine tastings and the industry treatment wasn’t to bad either. But, as I said, today marks the end of that, for now. Since I received my promotion I’ve had to cut out my weekday shifts and tonight will be my last one. It’s our First Wednesday tasting and it’s on the eve of my 40^th birthday. I will miss working there on such a regular basis and I’ve tried to keep a few Saturday shifts but I’ll be missing all the classes. I’ve learned so much while working there and will never regret having to work so hard just to keep a roof over my family’s head. I plan on continuing my wine education on my own and still plan on gaining at least certificate level sommelier by the time I’m 45! I’ll, without a doubt, continue tasting new wines and writing about them here. My next big installment will be the wine list I’m working on for my bbq coming up in a week and a half, but I’m sure I’ll have a few bottles here there before then! If there is any Iron Horse Cab left I’m going to grab one of those for my birthday dinner tomorrow night!

Till then…………….keep tasting