by Kate Rockland

I am the mother to a very boisterous 11-month old. Before giving birth to my son, I was pregnant one other time which ended in miscarriage. With that pregnancy, I followed all the rules: I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol, stopped getting the light brown highlights I favor, didn’t even use nail polish on my toes lest the chemicals seep into my skin. I used all-natural shampoo and conditioner, stopped jogging, and took up prenatal yoga. I took my prenatal vitamins religiously, and avoided all the reccomended foods such as tuna fish, unpasteurized cheeses, and sliced deli meat. I miscarried at thirteen weeks, and felt devastated. I’d followed every rule my midwife recommended, and still, tragedy struck.

When I got pregnant for the second time with my son, I started out by again following all the rules. But everything changed when I booked a trip with my husband to California. The area surrounding Sonoma is wine country, and I found myself staying in a very quirky b&b by the ocean in the small town of Carmel. I was seven months pregnant, and enchanted by all the local vineyards and small, independent labels I read on the bar menu in our lobby. The name of the bed and breakfast was the Cypress Inn, run by the actress Doris Day. One is allowed to bring one’s dog, and the lobby bar, which has an open patio section with pretty white lights strung in the trees, showcases several of the inn’s dogs, as well as big Great Danes resting on beds by the roaring outdoor fireplace. A surreal, eartheal and beautiful scene, set by the ocean.

I guiltily fingered the bar menu, as my husband smiled at me. There was a quote by Humphrey Bogart on the cover, which read: “The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.” My gaze lingered over a local 2009 Chardonnay from the Heller Estate, a vineyard which we would later visit down the road from the hotel. “Why don’t you order a glass?” my husband asked. “One glass of wine would be fine for the baby, I know women who drink one a day while pregnant!”

“I guess I’ll play a game of hide the belly under the table,” I answered sardonically when the waiter approached our table. I glanced furtively around, sure any moment someone from the Mom Police, aka our society in general would haul me away in handcuffs. My nervousness was unwarranted however, when I spotted a very famous and very pregnant actress three tables over. I gasped. She appeared to be drinking a glass of Pinot Noir, and looked relaxed and happy, laughing with friends. I’d just seen a movie she was in the week before we left on our trip. “Did you see?” I asked my husband. “I did!” he replied. Well. If a woman nominated for an Oscar could enjoy a glass of grape, so could I.

I just had the one glass of Chardonnay, but because it was one glass I enjoyed it more than I’d ever enjoyed wine before. Before the pregnancies, I was known to drink an entire bottle alone. This time, I learned to sip, and my one glass lasted the hour spent in that courtyard, trying not to ogle the actress. I tried a different glass from a different local vineyard each night of our vacation, and it turned out to be one of my favorite trips ever taken in my lifetime. After dealing with the heartache of miscarriage, I realized that I had to stop beating myself up. I’d followed all the rules doctors ask of pregnant women, and ended up without a baby. Part of me feels asking pregnant women not to drink a sip of wine throughout their entire nine months is another way of controlling women, which is what our society likes to do. There is definitely a very scary term called fetal alcohol syndrome, but I don’t believe one glass of wine enjoyed from time to time with dinner results in that sad diagnosis. I think my own miscarriage happened because not every pregnancy is meant to be, and I have to accept that we are human and therefore part of nature.

My son was born on a whip-cold night last winter, and he came out perfectly healthy at 7 pounds, 4 ounces. I’d never seen such a beautiful baby in my life. I hope our society eases up a little on the restraints for pregnant women, and that my fellow sisters no longer feel they have to play “hide the bump under the table” while out enjoying themselves at a restaurant or neighborhood bar. There’s always people who overdo it and I don’t condone that. But a nice, full-bodied glass of Chardonnay after a day filled with backaches, sore breasts, and bloated feet? That surely, we deserve.

Kate Rockland is the author of  150 Pounds, and Falling Is Like This. Kate lives in Hoboken, NJ with her husband, son, and cat, Elizabeth Taylor. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. She weighs 150 pounds.

Photo source 1

Photo source 2

There is an answer to this question, but you’ll have to read on to find the answer (don’t cheat)…

Needless to say, the glass wine bottle reigns supreme. There has, however, been an increase in the types of containers storing wine in recent years. And it keeps on evolving.

For a long time, boxed wine has been looked down upon. But the quality of the wine has recently risen. Eric Asimov of the NYT explains the reasons in his piece, ”Reconsidering Boxed Wine.” Greater acceptance of the boxed wine notion is also good news if you’re counting carbon footprints–according to the Journal of Wine Research, shipping boxed wine produces half as many gas emissions as transporting heavier glass bottles.

Along with boxes, came the can. In a recent article on nytimes.com, “Cans of Wine Join the Boxed Set,” Bonnie Tsui provides great information on some of the newer, and finer, wines–drinkable not from a Bordeaux or Burgundy-shaped bottle, but rather from a specially-lined aluminum can.

Wine in a can isn’t entirely new, Tsui points out, and was “first sold by Barokes Wines, an Australian winemaker that invented a patented process called Vinsafe, which lines the aluminum to prevent any reaction that would impart flavors to the wine or degrade the container. The techniques are similar to what some craft brewers have been using, but wine’s high acidity and alcohol levels require a thicker lining.”

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Francis Ford Coppola was the first American winemaker to sell wine in a can–small, pink ones housing Sofia Blanc de Blancs, named for his daughter.

Wines on tap at Colicchio & Sons

I was surprised, however, when I ate recently at the latest of chef Tom Colicchio’s New York restaurants, Colicchio & Sons. The bar had an extensive selection of craft beers, as well as five “eco-friendly” wines…on tap. That’s right. On tap.

I’ve since learned that there are several advantages for serving wine on tap:

-Better for the environment. While bottles are recycled, wine served on tap is stored in environmentally friendly, air tight mini tanks that are reused.

-Cost-effective. Producers aren’t adding on the cost of the bottle, the cork, the carton and the transportation it comes in, so the restaurant owner pays less and so does the consumer.

-Freshness. Wine left over in a bottle used to pour wines by the glass is often discarded as it doesn’t last for more than a couple of days at most. Wine served on tap always tastes fresh, lasting for up to 60 days.

So I guess that’s what’s next…

Photo source 1

Photo source 2

I don’t know about you, but I’m not the most creative when it comes to making crafts. So I was pretty impressed when I came across a post from Bottlenotes titled “Eat, Drink And Make Decorations.”

With Hanukkah and Christmas only weeks ago, it’s time to start saving the corks and the bottles. Break out the glue gun and then follow their instructions. Before you know it, you’ll “be able to turn these wine recyclables into menorahs, wreaths, and place holders for your holiday dinner tables.”

Photo source

Not sure about you, but I’ve been frisked going into concerts and football stadiums and it’s not fun. Why would anyone sneak booze in when you can buy it inside, right?

Well, it seems that enough people would to demand a new sort of product on the market–an alternative route for women–and it’s called the WineRack.

This is no joke–the website selling the WineRack ($30) boasts that that “the advantages are obvious.” It is actually a black sports bra (fits sizes 34C-D, 36A-D and 38A-C) that lets you carryup to 750ml (equal to the contents of one bottle of wine, or 25 oz.) of any beverage. The bra sports a polyurethane  bladder and a drinking tube long enough to route as you wish, along with an easy-to-use on/off valve to control the flow.

The big question: If the frisker feels the tube, what will she ask you to do–spill out its contents or remove your bra?

Photo source

On November 1, the Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA) released a new study, “Alcohol Consumption Over a Woman’s Lifetime Associated with Risk of Breast Cancer.” The study looked at the cumulative effect of low to moderate alcohol consumption among more than 100,000 women, ages 30 to 55, who were followed for 28 years.

In its aftermath, the study results were all over the press with headlines causing a frenzy among women who consume only a couple of glasses of a wine a week. They read:

“Women who drink three to six glasses of alcohol per week have a 15 percent higher risk of getting breast cancer than women who do not drink”

“A Few Drinks a Week Raises Breast Cancer Risk”

“Women: Even a Little Alcohol Ups Breast Cancer Risk, Research Finds”

“Even Small Amount of Alcohol Increases Risk of Breast Cancer”

Although the headlines are not inaccurate, they may be provoking unnecessary alarm. Ten days after the study results were released, the AARP posted an article titled: “Alcohol and Breast Cancer Link: Is Wine Really Bad for Women?” With a subtitle that reads, “The Risk May Not Be As Bad As You Think–or Fear,” the article calls on readers to take a closer look at the study’s statistics before adopting a lifestyle akin to the days of Prohibition.

Taking a different angle than prior research, this new AMA study looked at the cumulative effect of consuming low to moderate amounts of alcohol. Previous studies linking alcohol and breast cancer risk focused mainly on binge or heavy drinking.

The researchers found that those who drank as few as three to six alcoholic drinks a week during those years had a 15 percent increased risk of breast cancer, compared with those who didn’t drink. And women who regularly drank two or more drinks a day had a 51 percent higher risk than women who never drank.

As the AARP piece explains, “Those numbers — 15 percent increase and 51 percent increase — sound high until you do the math. The average woman’s risk of getting breast cancer in her lifetime is one in eight, or 12 percent. A 15 percent increase over that means her lifetime risk rises to 13.8 percent. For a woman age 50 to 59, whose risk of getting breast cancer while in her 50s is one in 42 or 2.4 percent, according to the National Cancer Institute, her risk rises to 2.76 percent,” the article continues.

So in other words, as Steven A. Narod, M.D., director of familial breast cancer research at the Women’s College Research Institute in Toronto, further clarified in an editorial accompanying the study, for women who had one drink per day, “their 10-year risk increased by 0.7 percent (from 2.8 percent to 3.5 percent).”

Although the risk is real and women need to weigh the risks and benefits of drinking, the ensuing panic may be premature. As reported by the AARP, the study’s authors pointed out in their conclusion: “We did find increased risk at low levels of [alcohol consumption], but the risk was quite small.”

photo source 1

photo source 2

There’s no doubt that grapes have the monopoly on the moniker, “fruit of the vine.” Once they are picked, crushed, fermented and aged, they are bottled and enjoyed in a myriad of flavors and colors–pink and red, white and orange.

Well, speaking of orange–today, on Halloween, when pumpkins represent all things autumn and we enjoy them in foods like soup and pie, why not try some pumpkin wine?

In fact, you can take this giant orange squash, roll up your sleeves and make some wine yourself. Needing only eight ingredients, pumpkin wine can turn out dry or sweet depending on your preference and some added ingredients like ginger, clove and cinnamon sticks. Here’s a recipe from the blog, Washington Winemaker.

If your focus today, however, is costumes and candy and you’d rather not be the winemaker, you can go to Wisconsin’s Three Lakes Winery website, where a bottle of pumpkin wine will only set you back $10.

Who knows–you may really like it, and then perhaps it’ll be an add-on to your Thanksgiving menu.

Photo source 1

Photo source 2 

A few times a month, we invite friends to our house for dinner. The hours pass as we linger over the meal, sometimes followed by a game of Scrabble or a moonlit walk. By the end of the night, clean up often involves picking up the collection of empty bottles. At least two, sometimes more.

Although we recycle the bottles, I’d feel a whole lot better if I knew that my drinking their contents was somehow contributing to a greater purpose–other than as an accompaniment to the food or a lovely buzz. Well, now I’ve discovered a way to do that.

Launched three years ago by a group of eight friends, ONEHOPE began initially as a personal mission for the group to help a friend who was waging a fight against cancer. Working from their living rooms and selling wine out of the back of their trunks, the friends turned their efforts into a thriving business which is founded on a basic, but compelling principle: giving back is good business. Since its inception in June 2007, the company has grown from 0 to well over 20,000 cases sold. To

date, ONEHOPE  Wine has raised over $400,000 for a wide range of charity organizations, and donates 50% of its profits to partner charities benefiting a variety of causes, including autism, cancer, the environment and AIDS (causes are listed here).

Another organization, Greater Purpose, sells a selection of wines from which  55% of profits give back to a greater cause. The current mission of Greater Purpose is to build and sustain villages for orphaned and abandoned children–providing food, water, shelter, clothing, and education. Check out their award-winning wines here.

Photo source 1

Photo source 2

I’ve heard about offering tea, coffee, and bottled water to clients at hair salons. But a glass of wine?

Apparently, regardless of New York City liquor laws, many a salon serves booze to women spending their afternoons getting a cut and color. I’d read about “Girls Nights Out” at Dashing Divas and their complimentary Cosmos during a Thursday and Friday evening mani/pedi, but never knew about the post 3 pm coctkail offerings at hair salons.

After reading “A Blowout Made Me Blotto! The Illegal Scourge of Salon Drinking” on the New York Observer website, I’m wondering if I’ve been getting my hair cut at the wrong salon for all these years. And on the flip side, what if you’d rather not be faced with a drink offer when going to have your hair done. Do the salons keep it discreet?

Photo source

Miss Louisa Belle, a gigantic seven-year-old bloodhound, is more than just a pet to Australian winemakers Michelle Edwards and Daniel Fischl of Linnaea Vineyards. Inspired by bloodhounds who are trained to sniff out bombs, the winemakers decided to use the olfactory sense of this canine–dogs have 200 million olfactory receptors, while humans have 12 million– to detect the odors of any tainted batches of their wine.

TCA, or trichloranisole, is a chemical compound found in some corks that leaves a “musty” (read: corked) flavor in wine–white, red, and sparkling. Estimates of how many wines suffer from “cork taint” range from less than one percent up to five percent of wines.

“Most wineries rely on the human nose,” said Fischl, “but that is time-consuming, costly and nowhere near as reliable as Belle, whose nose is 2000 times more sensitive than ours.”

Photo source

It’s amazing how inventive some people are. Where would we be without windshield wipers? Sticky notes? Bubble bath?

Well now, some creative minds have come up with a few interesting wine accessories—the type that make drinking and sharing it just a little more interesting.

Designed with gift giving in mind, WINEnot stickers are a tongue-in-cheek way to personalize the wine drinking experience. Messages like “Wine: Cheaper than Therapy” and “Love the Wine You’re With” and my personal favorite, “Wine improves with age. I improve with wine,” can adorn any bottle, and bring the importance not to what’s inside, but to whom you’re sharing it with.

Ever suffered from wine teeth? Well if you drink red wine, regularly, it’s not unusual to have that lovely purple tint develop on those once pearly whites. Wine Erase to the rescue. These individually packed, towlette-like wipes leave teeth clean—that is, after the strangely salty flavor fades (which it quickly does). Ahhhh, the price for beauty.

We already know that wine and chocolate make beautiful harmony. But Cheryl Sher decided not only to pair the two, but also to dip the bottles of wine themselves in chocolate. With their rich, creamy Belgian chocolate recipe—used for three generations of her family—Sher literally produces “Bliss in a Bottle.”

One of Sher’s favorite pairings: Dashe Cellars Late Harvest Zinfandel covered in milk chocolate with dried cherries, or Côtes du Rhône red wine dipped in dark chocolate. Yum.

Photo source 1

Photo source 2

Photo source 3

It seems there’s an app for everything these days. So it’s no big surprise that there’s a growing number of iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for wine lovers–both novices and experts–and those who simply like to eat and drink.

For wine collectors and buyers, there are apps like  Cor.kz, Vintage Cart and Wine Searcher. Cooks and gourmands who want to pair wine with food can turn to Pair It!, Hello Vino, and Natalie MacLean’s Wine Picks & Pairings. (Drinking Diaries was proud to feature Natalie’s essay, The Making of a Wine Lover, in 2009.)

But apps are not simply popping up for pairing and buying wines, there are also apps for wine tastings and festivals, such as LocalWineEvents.com. And for the music and wine lover, there’s the WineDJ app. As the description reads: “The perfect wine deserves the perfect playlist. Discover music to match your mood and spirits with the Wine DJ app by Liberty School Wines…”

At this rate, smart phone users now have one more reason to break out their handheld in the liquor store, at the wine auction, with the restaurant wine list, and most certainly when opening up Itunes.

A votre santé!

Photo source

Last weekend, I spent the evening with extended family on the pristine grounds at Tanglewood, the summer residence of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the Berkshire mountains. While children tossed balls and frisbees along the edge of the sprawling lawn, picnickers sat on blankets and chairs enjoying the summer night before the 8:30 concert–a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem–began.

In need of a match to light a bug-repelling candle, I wandered around in search, veering toward a table that had four votives twinkling. When I arrived in front of the table–covered in a white cloth–and asked for a light, I couldn’t help but notice that the couple who sat in front of the table was sipping their sparkling wine from crystal flutes, the bottle of bubbly was sitting in a silver ice bucket amid the votives, and there was even a candle snuffer waiting to do its job.

I went back to our much less formal spread, sat on a cozy blanket and sipped an Alexander Valley cabernet sauvignon. I’m not particularly a great fan of choral music, but as the concert went on, I became increasingly focused on the voices and truly enjoyed the music to my ears. It was a nearly perfect night (my kids’ presence would have made it completely perfect), and it made me wonder about the connection of drinking wine and listening to music. Can music actually influence how we taste wine?

According to some sources, yes it can. A joint study conducted by Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University and wine company Montes claims that music can alter the taste of wine.

The research was conducted with 250 adults. In return for a glass of wine, a group of five people were played the four pieces of music and asked to try to match each of these to one of the four perceptions investigated by the research, namely ‘powerful and heavy’, ‘subtle and refined’, ‘zingy and refreshing’, and ‘mellow and soft’

The study’s conclusion reads: Background music influences the taste of wine. The specific taste of the wine was influenced in a manner consistent with the mood evoked by the music. If the background music was powerful and heavy then the wine was perceived as more powerful and heavy than when no background music was played. If the background music was subtle and refined then the wine was perceived as more subtle and refined than when no background music was played. If the background music was zingy and refreshing then the wine was perceived as more zingy and refreshing than when no background music was played. If the background music was mellow and soft then the wine was perceived as more mellow and soft than when no background music was played. The magnitude of these effects was not insubstantial, and they were stronger for red wine than for white.

Next time you are listening to music and sipping wine, perhaps you’ll give some extra thought to the musical notes and whether or not they enhancing the taste of what’s in your glass…

photo source 1

photo source 2

When wet spring days begin to morph into warm summer ones, there’s nothing quite as refreshing as a glass of rosé wine. I’m not referring to the sugared liquid once consumed in great volume in the 1980s–aka white zinfandel–but rather the drier version, crisp and with a hint of berry.

Rosé wine has always been a staple in France’s Provence region, but delicious roses now stem from Italy and Spain, Long Island and Napa. People are sometimes confused with the method of making rosé, assuming it’s the skin that produces the color, or perhaps a blend of both white and red to produce the result. Well…it turns out that depending on the vineyard and region, both may be right.

In a recent article titled “Think Pink,” the Bottlenotes blog explains how rosé wine is made–the methods, the grapes, and the styles. I’m looking forward to the next few months, when I can toast the long-awaited warm weather, accompanied by a glass of pink.

A votre santé!

Photo source

by Margot Magowan

I love sleeping. Everything about it. I love my bed with its firm, square pillows and its silky, indigo bedding. I love anticipating sleep, knowing its hours or minutes before I become so relaxed that I actually slip into another state of consciousness.

But recently, I had to make a choice between two of my great loves: sleeping and drinking.

These days, if I drink a glass of wine, invariably, I wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling asleep again. And let’s just say those waking hours aren’t the most peaceful for my brain.

If I drink two glasses of wine before bed, forget it. I’ll toss and turn the entire second half of the night. When it’s finally time for me to stumble out of bed, I feel tired and depressed. There are circles under my eyes and my skin isn’t exactly glowy. I’m likely to yell at my kids for tiny infractions that don’t get on my nerves when I’m well rested.

This reaction to alcohol is annoying, because like I said, I love sleeping. I love the moment when my husband comes into bed, usually about an hour or so after me, and I feel his warm body is resting next to mine. No matter how much my family is irritating me, I’m easily reminded of how much I love them all unconditionally when they’re sleeping. If any of my kids are driving me crazy, I make a point to go take a look at their sweet, little faces while they’re peacefully slumbering, and instantly, I feel overwhelmed with adoration.

I didn’t always fetishize sleep. To the contrary, I didn’t understand the point of it. When I was just out of college, I remember reading somewhere that humans spent a third of their lives in bed. I was shocked.  What a waste of time! One third of our short lives. The article went on to state that no one, not doctors or scientists, really understood what the point of all that sleep was. They still don’t.

But things changed for me. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I fell in love with sleep when sleep abandoned me. I had a baby. A colicky baby who slept, at most, in three hour blocks. After months of nursing her 24/ 7, being exhausted, cranky and miserable (following months of restless nights of pregnancy, waking up to pee on the hour) all I could think about, all I wanted, all I craved, was sleep. I couldn’t believe I had taken something so glorious for granted. I would look around, envious, as strangers, thinking: “Most humans got to sleep every single night!” I promised myself that if ever I got the chance to sleep again, I’d appreciate it.

Then I had two more kids.

Now my youngest is one and a half years old and finally, all five of us are sleeping through the night. And like I wrote, I’m in bliss.

Except when I drink at night. Then my sleeping becomes so disrupted, I may as well be nine months pregnant or have a nursing baby at my bedside.

My sensitivity to alcohol while sleeping may seem extreme, but apparently, it’s not just me. An article about a new study published in Science Magazine and titled, “Alcohol Disrupts Women’s Sleep More than Men’s” found that: “Women who consumed alcohol had fewer hours of sleep, woke more frequently and for more minutes during the night, and had more disrupted sleep compared to men who drank alcohol.”

The study doesn’t say that missing sleep can turn your life or your face into a mess, but here’s the thing: If the point of wine is to relax me and give me some pleasure, which is why I drink it, at this time in my life, alcohol isn’t accomplishing that goal. In fact, it’s getting in the way. At some future date, I may enjoy wine again. But for tonight, I choose sleep.

Margot Magowan‘s blog ReelGirl is supposed to rate media and products for girl empowerment, but she often gets sidetracked into writing commentary on politics and culture. Her articles have also been published in Salon, Glamour, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous other newspapers and online sites. She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” CNN, Fox News, and other TV and radio programs. Margot is the Director of the Fellows Program at the Woodhull Institute, providing media training and placement to extraordinary women leaders. Margot also worked as a talk radio producer creating top-rated programs. Her short story, “Light Me Up,” is featured in an anthology coming out in June 2011. She is currently writing a chapter book about the fairyworld. Margot lives with her husband and their three daughters in San Francisco.

Photo Source

By Stella Hayes

What in the world would compel a 40-year-old woman with a 9-month-old child to reinvent herself and blaze a new career path?  The answer is wine, but more about that later.  At 40, I was not only a second-time mother but also a successful businesswoman who decided to enroll in a graduate wine program at the International Wine Center in NYC, where the WSET, the top British wine program in the world, has a graduate program.

My love affair with wine began in my grandmother’s communal Soviet Russia kitchen in the height of the Cold War. My grandmother, a beautiful, round woman, was a great cook. It still amazes me how she conjured the sublime from a potato. This was no small feat in Russia where, at the time, in the height of food shortages that resulted from Communism, the potato, this multi-purpose root vegetable, was the thing that you could always buy in state-run food markets.

One aspect of life in the USSR always struck me: Drinking was both a national pastime and a taboo. Practically no one in my family drank. And when they did drink at celebrations, it would be straight vodka chased with something either cured or pickled.

Unlike in France and Italy, there was no tradition of pairing food with wine. Alcoholism was rampant during the Soviet regime and still is. Historically, many drinking reforms failed, in part because it was an excellent source of revenue for the government, and in part because there were few other ways of forgetting how sad life was in a closed society.

At home, my father would allow himself the pleasure of Cognac, (a French brandy made chiefly from the Ugni Blanc grape), which I have since discovered was marketed aggressively by the French across Eastern Europe and Asia.

My grandmother was my first reliable interpreter of food. When I turned to wine as my passion and business, I saw that I could play a similar role for other women, as a reliable interpreter of wine. Dinners at my grandmother’s were culinary feasts, in terms of both scope and time spent at the table. And for me, a really picky eater, it was like going to food Mecca. She made everything from scratch, and it was sumptuous.

My “nose” has its origins in her kitchen. In the summer, she had farm-picked strawberries, raspberries, apricots, cabbage, tomatoes and cucumbers. I was always a big taster, but above all I picked my food on the basis of how it smelled. I could never get enough of the foods I really loved which were and still are more sweet than savory. One of her dessert staples was baked apples with cinnamon and sugar, which caramelized on their skins.

This elevated sensory awareness that starts for all of us as children became critical when I started evaluating wine. I had a vast and rich reservoir of sensory memory to tap. I had a palate whose DNA was set in my grandmother’s kitchen and was perfect for interpreting wine.

But before my love for wine, I had an equal love for poetry, which is why I studied and wrote poetry for four years in college. Surprisingly, as I reflect on it now, I didn’t drink in college and began to enjoy drinking wine in my mid-twenties. It wasn’t a conscious decision for me whether or not to drink. I see savoring wine as a logical next step in the cultivation of one’s palate. How could I not match wine with food? They are so indispensible to one another.

Wine to me is like poetry. Poetry and winemaking are so much alike. Derived from the Greek, the word “poetry” means “the thing created.” Wine, too, is the “thing created”: from soil, place, climate, and vintage in the vineyard and cellar by devoted artisan winemakers.

Within the confines of a wine bottle, you get a bird’s eye view of a cherished, unique place—just like in poems. You can experience wine–like poetry–alone, with a friend, with a beloved or with family. A glass or a bottle of wine is finite, but always meaningful. Like poetry, it is always transporting, romantic, sensual and personal.

My evolution from poetry to wine had one more essential stopover: that of language interpreter. I was ten when my family moved from Russia to the United States. I was the only one in the family of three adults who became fluent in English within six months. I enjoyed helping my family navigate their new environment, and after college, I went on to interpret for a living. It was great training and practice for examining wine. As an interpreter, you are taught to LISTEN, THINK, ANALYZE, EDIT, TRANSLATE and SPEAK, all at the same time. I loved interpreting both language and culture for my clients.

It occurred to me recently that the skill set for interpreting foreign languages and interpreting wine are quite similar. When I launched Everyday Cellars Wine Club for Women, I went from being a language interpreter to a wine interpreter. I went from speaking Russian to speaking wine. It feels right.

My family and I left Russia so long ago. My grandparents didn’t. I think back to the rich, complex smells and preparations, to the happy times of watching my grandmother cook in her communal Soviet kitchen. And to her lovely, enduring embrace.

Stella Hayes is the founder and Chief Wine Interpreter of Everyday Cellars Wine Club for Women.