How To Find Your Passion In Wine

For Tara Herrick, the moment she knew she wanted to have a career in the wine industry came when she was age 17 and living abroad with a French family for one year. She had a chance to learn about French food and wine pairings, and to fully appreciate the broad range of wine offerings across France. That experience later propelled her to land a series of jobs in the San Francisco wine scene – including stints at a wine bar, a Napa winery and a wine shop in downtown San Francisco. Currently, Tara Herrick is a certified sommelier and Wine Director at Dirty Water.

One important aspect of finding your passion in wine, says Herrick, is to really understand the people behind the wine, as well as the unique social and cultural factors that go into making that wine. Whether it is recommending a bottle of wine at a restaurant, or guiding a customer through the process of choosing the perfect bottle of wine at a retail wine shop, it’s important to have an in-depth knowledge of how people made the wine, as well as the unique aspects of the wine region from where it came. In part, this approach to wine has been informed by her experience studying Cultural Anthropology at San Francisco State University, where she started to connect the dots between people, wine and food.