I taste wines for a living—around 3,000 a year, in fact. While my mom suspects this may not be a real career, I enjoy it, often, without a second thought. Then I read Pete Wells’s column in The New York Times announcing he was stepping down as the newspaper’s restaurant critic.
Suddenly, I started having doubts about my chosen career path. The “come-to-Jesus” health moment Wells described sounded familiar.
Wells wrote about the doctor’s appointment where he learned he was technically obese, with cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure numbers that were, to put it mildly, suboptimal. Former New York Magazine food critic Adam Platt told Wells, “It’s the least healthy job in America, probably.”
Hyperbole aside, if reviewing restaurants is the least healthy job out there, is wine reviewing a close second?
People look at me funny when I tell them I put 3,000 wines in my mouth each year as part of my newspaper and magazine work. I get it. Wine reviewing at this level is a surreal extreme sport with more spitting than a season’s worth of New York Yankees games.
The problem is that while I jokingly describe my job as an extreme sport, I sure haven’t been training like an athlete.
I taste wines for work approximately 310 days a year. My routine on those days is to get up at 6 a.m., eat breakfast and go for a walk. After that, it’s showtime.
My mornings are spent doing newspaper work, which involves a
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
