Well, I’ve given in. After 15 years appreciating (fine) wine, after 5 years working as a copywriter (and occasional translator) mostly in the wine and spirits industry, what had to happen… just happened: I’ve started studying winemaking and viticulture.
Before everybody jumps on me (well, hopefully) and asks me when I’m planning to produce my first bottle of wine, this comes with a caveat: I’m most probably not going to become a winemaker. Well, who knows, of course (and least of all me). But I know there are many hurdles along the way, the main of which being desire. I’m really not sure that’s what I want. At the same time my technical limitations have been… glaring, to say the least, both in my professional life and as a blogger (as most of you might not know, I have a blog in French).
As I started spending most of my time around people who actually knew their stuff (or at least knew a lot more than I did), the obvious became… painfully obvious. And taking some time off to get a degree and learn things properly became a necessity.
This being said, and as I’m turning 40 in only a few weeks, I couldn’t really jump into a new adventure with as much abandon as when I was a bit younger. Proper planning was required, and I finally found a way to make it all work: I could do a 2-year degree in only one year (mostly because my college education means I can skip the general topics such as maths or english) in what we call alternance: spending roughly half of the time in a class, and the other half working at a domaine. Half theory, half practice: I liked that idea.
Setting it up was not easy but as usual I was lucky. I reached out to pretty much everybody I knew in the wine trade and saw every door close one after the next. Until, well,
Jeremy Seysses happened.
We had been chatting on and off here and on Twitter; I had been tasting at Dujac twice; and we had met every couple of years at Vinisud as he was representing Triennes, the domaine the Seysses family owns in Provence. I’ll go straight to the point: yup, I’m going to learn just as much as I can about winemaking and viticulture at Dujac. Which, as you can imagine, is like a dream inside of a dream.
I have no idea what will come out of this. But right now there’s at least one thing I can share with you in the form of a new project: 1fwa.com (One F… Wine Adventure–the F in there stands for whatever you want!)
Blogging in French is fun, but it isn’t half as much fun as blogging in English. And what could be more fun than that? Blogging in English about my everyday life as student in Burgundy (well, and Montpellier, as that’s where the academic part is going to happen). You can follow this website for your (almost) daily dose of Burgundy and wine stuff, or my new twitter account, where I’ll post only in English: @_1fwa
You can add me to the long line of people who just had a major life change to follow their dream. I’ve survived the first week; let’s drink to the next 51!
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