Why Wine Knowledge Is a Valuable Business Skill for Young Professionals

You Learned the Job. But Not This.

You’ve just finished—or will shortly—the classroom aspect of your education and are now out in the business, marketing, professional, creative or tech worlds. During the course of your formal education, you’ve developed tools and skills to help you do whatever task you’ll be assigned. Think how lost you would feel as a new associate at a law firm if you didn’t know how to do legal research or structure a transaction. You went to school so you wouldn’t be lost.

An Overlooked Skill in Professional Life

But I’d wager that there is one skill that has been neglected. If you’ve read the title of this post, you know where we’re headed. Being at ease when choosing a bottle might not seem to be particularly relevant to what you get paid to do, but it is, in its way, an important aspect of corporate culture, regardless of whether you are at a three-person startup trying to raise venture capital, working at a trading desk or fine-tuning marketing campaigns.

Why Wine Shows Up in Business Settings

Make no mistake, there will come a time when someone will look to you to see what you’re sipping at that client function or casual, team-building event.

Yes, I know that your generation consumes far less wine than every generation before it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Taste, after all, is in the mouth of the beholder! But know that there will always be wine at events, lunches, dinners and happy hours. Why not feel confident dealing with it?

A Lesson from the First Day on the Job

I tell this story each time I do a tasting for young professionals, regardless of the space they are in, and each time the crowd hears it, I can see the proverbial lightbulbs go off. My experience was as a lawyer, but it translates to any sector of the business world.

On my first official day at the firm, I was summoned to the office of the first name on the letterhead. He told me that in addition to being a good lawyer, I needed to know how to be competent at two other things: golf and handling a wine list. The reason for both was that our practice focused on representing insurance companies in litigation matters.

As a consequence, we did a fair amount of relationship building on golf courses and in restaurants. I was expected to be able to handle a golf club. And confidently select bottles that worked with whatever those at the table were having, without resorting to simply choosing the most expensive bottle on the assumption that it would be great.

Wine Confidence Is a Professional Tool

Wine confidence is no less a tool than a spreadsheet or piece of code designed to do a specific task. Yes, the contexts are very different, and I would even concede that your wine tool won’t be used by you nearly as often as your other tools. But you’ll need it just the same.

Choosing a bottle, especially in a restaurant setting is angst inducing for most people. Sure, you can defer to others at your table or the somm, but by doing so, you are passing on the opportunity to appear at ease and confident.

Why a Little Knowledge Goes a Long Way

Having a little basic Wine 101 goes a long way, both in the business context and your outside-of-work life. Who hasn’t taken a bottle to a dinner party or purchased one as a gift without really knowing why you picked it or even if it’s any good? Happens all the time. I’m not suggesting that you need to be an expert, but you would feel much more at ease if you at least knew the two or three questions to ask the somm or retailer so that they can then give you guidance.

A Practical Skill You’ll Use for Life

I’ll leave you with this. I neither played golf or drank wine until I started at my firm. While my golf game was never great, I quickly warmed to the wine thing. That’s not to say that you need to delve in as deeply as I did. Only that if you just dipped a few toes in, you’d eliminate any anxiety posed by choosing a bottle, and you’d have another tool at your disposal, one that you’ll be able to leverage for the rest of your life.

Future posts will touch on various Wine 101 topics.