My wine blogger origin story
Thank you so much for visiting Wine in VA! I’m really excited that you are here. I want to devote my first blog post to explaining to you my vision for Wine in VA, while also sharing a little bit about who I am.
I was set on dominating the advertising industry for most of my life, but once I landed my first full time job I worked so hard towards, I realized it didn’t quite align with the life I wanted to live. Well, first I realized that I didn’t even know what kind of life outside of work I wanted to live, and that was a pretty startling realization for me at 25 with a new-found grad school loan floating over my head. Calling it a quarter life crisis is pretty accurate.
So, I made the point to make time for me to do more things outside of work and create some healthy adult hobbies. Yoga has definitely been a huge hobby that has helped me stay grounded during some of the most stressful times in my life. I’m also obsessed with my dog Mr. Butters, and started taking lots of photos of him for his Instagram, which was something simple, but fun to do. I’ve always been fond of eating out and trying new dishes, so cooking became an important new hobby as well. Naturally, wine did too.
But not just drinking wine. The whole lifestyle surrounding it seemed very appealing to me: enjoying time outside with a beautiful view (but not like in the woods), the unique flavors of each wine and imagining how someone comes up with that, the autonomy of having your own business that manages to be dynamic and sophisticated at the same time, all the tie ins to delicious food pairings, event planning to enhance the customer experience… it all spoke to the different layers of my personality. The more I realized how much I loved wine, the more the idea of getting a wine job in marketing came to mind. But I had no idea how to start, and I still kind of don’t.
Most entry-level wine jobs have to do with sales and customer service, and all the marketing wine jobs (at least in Virginia) that I’ve seen pop up require 2+, 3+, etc years of experience in the wine industry, or a WSET certification, or something else wine-related that’s really obscure. Again, with that grad school loan floating over my head, as much as I’d love to start a new career from scratch, I literally cannot afford to do so. And it’s not like at 29 years old I have the capital to go off and buy a few acres of land and start a vineyard all by myself.
Well, then what’s a girl to do?
That’s where the idea of creating Wine in VA came to me. I can channel all the marketing and business skills that I’ve been fine-tuning my entire life, and use those skills to create my own opportunity in the wine industry. Also through a blog, I can keep myself committed to learn about all the technical things I need to learn about wine to maybe one day be able to land a job in the industry, or start my own wine shop or winery. It’s also a great way to create a portfolio of my wine knowledge, and network with other wine professionals to learn more about how they found their success, and hopefully inspire my own.
So that’s it folks. I’m not here to sell you wine. I’m not here to bombard you with sponsored posts. I’m here to keep myself accountable to learn about wine in Virginia, and genuinely create content that could be helpful for someone with similar aspirations as me, but have no idea how to start. Who knows if this experiment will be successful or not, but I’m here to try.
If you read this far thank you, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the content I have planned! Stay tuned!
Cheers winos!