Although we’ve featured quite a few young sommeliers in Wine of the Week, none got their start quite as early as Rebecca Wiffin, a New Zealand winemaker.
“I guess you could say I’ve been involved in the New Zealand wine industry since I was 3 years old,” she tells Grok Nation. “That’s when our family planted our first grapes.”
And even though the wine runs in the family, so to speak, it wasn’t until she was 19, working at the Lincoln University in Canterbury, NZ (an agricultural school that teaches wine-making) that she decided to get into the business herself. Since that time she’s worked on vines around the world (California, France, Australia) before completing a post-graduate degree in oenology and settling back home. Decades later, she’s a winemaker for three New Zealand brands: Lawson’s Dry Hills, Blind River and The Sisters.
Read all about Wiffin and her Wine of the Week selection on groknation.com.