Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible

You know, at some point you end up in California.

Roughly, when did you get out there? Yeah,

I mean, by the time I left New York, I mean, I was a pretty successful writer at that point.

And I've always had my own business.

So I left New York in the mid-90s because...

I believed that being closer to grapevines would actually make me a better writer than I even was at that time.

That even though I wasn't going to become a winemaker, that something about the osmosis of living in agriculture, living around viticulture would would, uh, would be inspirational.

And I think it has been.

Yeah.

One of the, you know, I had a guest about a month ago in Kelly White said one of the reasons she moved out there is because you were out there.

So there is definitely an American, there's definitely an American sense of, of, of the wine community coming together in NAP in a way that's a little different than the industry gets together in New York, for example.

Well, your listeners can't see Kelly White, but whenever we're together here in the Napa Valley, I always love to say, what is the likelihood that two New York women, both of whom are writers and who have red hair, would arrive in the Napa Valley within a few years of one another and become fast friends.

So it's really, and she, as you know, is an extraordinary writer.

She's terrific.

So Rudd Center.

Culinary Institute of America.

This is kind of the Harvard of wine education.

So talk to me a little bit about wine education.

What is it that you wanted to change when you were designing that and working through how to train this kind of next group, which now is being trained, right? So what was the difference in philosophy from the way that you went through it?

Yeah, one of the, I guess I will say problems right now in wine education is that a lot of it has become so standardized that it has influenced how we think about wine.

You know, there are all kinds of rules.

There's, as you know, there's a grid.

You're supposed to think about X first color, then you're supposed to smell in this certain way.

And then, you know, you're supposed to delineate where wine could be from and all of these things, which has produced a culture of wine in America of knowledgeable people, which has been good, but it has also not always produced people who are what I think of as good wine thinkers.

They're good in a very standardized way.