I arrived in New York on the ides of October, a few months after graduating from college. In another life, I’d have arrived in early summer and, like most of my peers, I’d have come to work as a consultant or a banker. But instead I arrived late, latently creative and unabashedly green, moving into a small apartment with slanted floor boards on Orchard Street. 

The apartment had few merits, but its location just above Wildair, one of New York’s most beloved wine bars, was enough to make it perfect. And in the year that Wildair was my downstairs neighbor, it took on more of the feeling of home than where I lived. On my first night in the city, with most of my boxes still unpacked and scattered across the uneven living room, I went downstairs for a drink. A man named Jon, Wildair’s head wine buyer, informed me that they had just closed for the evening. When I told him, with an obvious eagerness, that I had just moved in upstairs, he offered me a drink on the patio. It was the first of what would be many experiences of feeling cared for there. But if this tells you anything about the point from which my wine education started, that first time I went to Wildair I ordered a gin and tonic. 

By late winter, when it was ruthlessly cold and leaving the house was incredibly arduous, I was going downstairs most nights, reading and writing and drinking whatever wine was poured for me by whomever was working. There quickly emerged an unspoken understanding among us that I would try any wine once, and that an empty glass was fair game to be filled. This understanding endures to this day. Over the years, I’ve probably tasted hundreds of wines there. And although I couldn’t tell you the names of those early pours—much less their grapes—they are the cornerstones of what eventually became my sensibility.

I remember the wines I didn’t like more than the wines I loved, and my approach to developing taste quickly became a process of elimination. I did not like red wines that took on a sort of briny quality, like Castelvetrano olives that’d been forgotten in the fridge. And I did not like orange wines that tasted of bruised apples. But I came to love most chilled reds, and any Gamay. I loved an orange wine with proper tannins—anything with at least two weeks of maceration. And the first time I had a wine like this was on a Friday in late December. I was wearing a black cardigan sweater that once belonged to my mother and I was sitting at a corner of the bar that looked into the open kitchen next to my oldest friend. And I remember this so clearly because I had this feeling that, if this was the rest of my life, I would be the happiest person in the world. 

Wine became inextricably tied to moments and my memory of them. But memory works in funny ways. In a recent article for Digest Magazine, Eliza Dumais writes, “If there is a secret to Wine-Speak, I believe it has something to do with taking notes. Not on wine, exactly—on anything at all. Remember what you are wearing and what you are reading when you drink something remarkable.” Jon is an excellent storyteller. The way he talks about wine is the way one speaks of the person they love. And more than the wines themselves, I remember the stories he told about them. I remember the wine that was produced by the couple in Anjou, the British expats who lived on a sheep farm. I remember the name of California winemaker, Rosalind, who Jon finds intimidatingly cool. And I remember the wine that was made somewhere in Italy by a son who’d taken over part of his father’s land and was then disowned for employing new ways of winemaking. 

When your understanding of wine is shaped first by its people, as it was for me, what follows is an inherently different wine education. Mine was not an education that happened between the crisp and clean pages of a textbook, nor under the fluorescent lighting of an office building somewhere. It has had a familiar warmth which makes the matter more approachable, like the slow and patient process of getting to know oneself.

In the late spring of this year, I spent some months in Burgundy to continue learning about wine in the place it’s made from the people who make it. The night before I left, I went to Wildair to say goodbye. Nearly three years had passed, and it was easy to see now, from this familiar vantage, how much of my life had sprung from the early roots I’d planted there. I was going to Burgundy to pursue my love of wine, and there was no one I wished to tell more than the people who had nurtured this love in the first place. 

In Burgundy, I spent evenings at the bar in town reading and writing and drinking the local red wine, bringing with me the familiar patterns of my life in New York. On multiple occasions, I met with producers to learn about their paths to and philosophies around wine. Their stories invariably echoed the ones I’d heard told at Wildair. Frédéric of Domaine de Vernus was an insurance broker for many years before fulfilling a lifelong dream of owning a vineyard in Beaujolais. Lothar of Chaume des Lies grew up on a potato farm; the transition to grapes felt like a natural one. Pierre of the esteemed Maison en Belles Lies turned to wine after a long and successful career in fashion. His approach to natural wine is informed by Steiner’s theories on the spirit, soul, and body: “Through his body, the human being is able to place himself in connection with things; through his soul, he retains in himself the impressions which they make on him; through his spirit, he gains an understanding of what the things retain for themselves.” 

There was this sense amongst all of the winemakers I spoke to that their path to wine was something preordained, a sort of destiny that they would, in time, inevitably fulfill. A few months ago, I was going through old notes I’d once typed on my phone and discovered that, at some point in college, I had made a list of restaurants I wanted to try when I moved to New York. There were only two names on the list, a café on Ludlow and Wildair. I cannot remember when I’d written the list. But there is something about its existence that is as eerie as it is comforting.

Before I worked in wine, I was a barista and a baker. I have changed jobs, I have changed careers, and I have changed apartments. But I think this has helped me only to appreciate wine more—that wine, too, is this living thing which evolves and changes and begs to be reconsidered. And as is true both for wine and for life—the more you come to know, the more you realize how little you know. On days when this feels particularly daunting, well, you know where I’ll be.