My first embarassing wine moment 🍷

 Have you ever been at a restaurant, nodding along while someone describes a wine… but having no clue what they’re actually talking about? This week I was guilty of causing this 🤦🏼‍♀️

While pouring at Arden’s Girls of the Gorge wine takeover, I caught myself doing the exact thing I try so hard not to do: rattling off wine words without translating what they mean. The confusion in a guest’s eyes instantly reminded me how overwhelming the wine world can feel when you don’t speak the language.

The event itself was born out of the Her Way roundtable we filmed this summer with Bethany Kimmel (Color Collector), Carly Laws (Freetime), Julia Bailey (Loop de Loop), Shahnnen Elizabeth Head (Estelbrook) and Teddi Fuller (Lushington). Not only do these inspiring women make beautiful wine — they do it in one of the most extreme and unpredictable wine regions in the world.

The defining feature of the Columbia Gorge is that it is undefinable. Thanks to the prehistoric Missoula Floods, the soils here shift not just every few miles, but every few feet. Which means the wines are incredibly varied — and the 15 wines we poured at dinner proved that point beautifully. 

From bright, aromatic whites to big Bordeaux-style blends, and everything in between, there wasn’t a single throughline — except that they were all delicious and all made by incredibly hardworking women. Every wine had its own story — and our team had the challenging pleasure of telling them all.

Normally with a wine dinner, you’re focused on one producer or one cohesive region so there are many common threads. But thanks to the Gorge’s diversity, we got to talk about everything from traditional method sparkling production to carbonic maceration, amphora aging, regenerative farming… the works.

At one table, I launched into a whole spiel about a traditional method sparkling Riesling — explaining that it had rested en tirage for eight months, and that the vines were planted in the 1970’s at high elevation and still on their original rootstock. 

At the end of it, the guest fidgeted then asked me nervously, “What is tirage?”

And I realized I’d done exactly what I never want to do: thrown out a fancy wine word and then barreled on, assuming comprehension.

It’s something the wine world does all the time. We act like we’re “explaining” the wine, but really we’re speaking a totally different language–one that 99% of us were never taught!

I remember my very first restaurant job just after college — working for none other than José Andrés. He wasn’t yet the global humanitarian he is today, but he was already a major figure in the food world and his restaurant The Bazaar was no joke. I had to go through 14 full shifts of training on food, wine, cocktails, fine dining service and molecular gastronomy… which meant learning how sodium alginate and calcium could create “spherified” olives and how liquid nitrogen instantly froze the cachaça in the Caipirinhas.

Tableside liquid nitrogen caipirinha’s at The Bazaar

I also had to learn new Spanish ingredients and dishes — piquillo peppers, buñuelos, croquettes, jamón ibérico de bellota from pigs that only eat acorns — and all this before I even touched wine training!

At my very first pre-shift meeting, where all 60 front-of-house and back-of-house employees gathered to review the night’s details. (Yes, the staff was massive. It was a 5,000-square-foot restaurant that did over 500 covers a night!)

The manager turned to me in front of everyone and asked, “Kelsey, if a guest wants a light-bodied red by the glass, what would you recommend?” 

My palms started sweating. My brain froze. I fumbled through the foreign names for grapes I’d just learned: Tempranillo, Cabernet, Garnatxa… Tempranillo means early, right?

“Tempranillo?” I blurted. 

He calmly corrected me: “Pinot Noir would be the lightest.”

No one blinked — but I was mortified. Because everyone now knew that I didn’t speak wine.

But thankfully, I had great teachers. The Bazaar was an immersive crash course in not one, but multiple tongues— food, wine, science and restaurants themselves— and I became fluent over the four years I worked there. It took time and patience, but these mentors made learning not only engaging but enjoyable.

So this week was such a good reminder: you can never assume what someone knows or doesn’t know. And more importantly — you should never, ever feel guilty for not knowing. If no one’s taught you the language, how the heck are you supposed to know what en tirage or carbonic maceration mean?

Becoming fluent in wine doesn’t mean memorizing grape facts. It means knowing what you like, how to describe it, and how to order what you love without second-guessing yourself.

So the next time you feel embarrassed that you don’t know the answer, I challenge you to ask unapologetically. Because there’s no way to know what you don’t know.

Cheers and until then,
Kelsey

P.S. Next week, I’ll be finally sharing something I’ve been working on for months — a way for you to truly become fluent in wine... I can’t wait to tell you more 😉