The Life of a Wine Explorer

Nov 23

For almost anyone that works in the US in the wine industry, calling 2024 as a rocky road is an understatement. Wine sales are down this year, compared to a previous year which was also down y/y. It’s a time of reckoning begging many questions for those that either run a wine related business or work in wine.

As our founder, Sheila Donohue ponders the challenges being faced, she was at a wine tasting dinner with fellow wine explorers in New York City. It was an evening filled with fun and tasty exploration of different types of wines and olive oils among a group of wine loving friends that hadn’t seen each other in a while. While some were life long friends, it was wine, as the magnet that brought the group together. Wine has that effect: it brings people together. This wine tasting in her hometown is what inspired Sheila to tell her story. How wine has brought meaning and joy to her life.

Sheila Donohue in her hometown during her year of sabbatical in 2017 when she contemplated a move from banking & technology to wine.

New York is Where The Story Starts

New York was where Sheila first got into wine. That’s where she grew up, and it was thanks to some friends she met while in her 30’s that got her to start appreciating wine.

Sheila comes from a 2nd generation 100% Irish family that did not have wine as part of its culture. Her first introductory to wine was wine coolers although she got tired of the sweet taste and switched to beer as her main drink of choice in her 20’s, with an occasional cocktail, and, yes, a shot or two here and there.

It wasn’t until she turned 30 and started to date a guy from a 2nd generation 100% Italian family that she started to learn about wine. Not surprisingly, he grew up with wine around the house and lived at the time with his brother, a foodie and wine afficionado. Living in a family and household with wine as part of their daily meals allowed him to assimilate a culture of wine, which Sheila was influenced by as well.

Then she got invited on a trip to Napa with her sister and friends and had a ball. She then got to know some of the main producers making primarily Chardonnay and Cabernet, and started to look for them afterwards in New York area stores.

Moving to New York City in her mid 30’s, she started to get invited to social gatherings with wine tastings as a theme. She remembers asking her friend Marianna who frequented many wine tastings “what’s a Super Tuscan”?…. (Funny, Sheila continues to ask herself that question to this day...) Nevertheless, she enjoyed the combination of meeting and engaging with others while tasting and learning about wine all at the same time.

At this point, Sheila was super curious about wine, and started to read about wine when the opportunity presented itself. But, Sheila was in need of a crutch: having almost no exposure to wine until her 30’s, and almost no wine knowledge, she clung to almost anything that could help her to learn more. She knew quite well that the world of wine is vast and complex whereby what should be a simple decision of “what wine to buy” could actually be quite complicated.

This was the late 90’s when there was not a lot of wine resources out there. The de facto standard resource at the time for a novice to learn about wine was the Windows of the World Wine book; then those who were super serious to learn would take the course on top of the infamous Twin Towers at the World Trade Center.

She became a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal wine column, and similar sources, clipping out articles about wine regions, types of wine, wine vintages, wine reviews, etc. Then she would bring the clippings with her to the local wine store and try to find the specific wine cited in the article. Once or twice she lucked out finding it, but 99% of the time the store would not have the wine, and she was back to having to somehow decide what wine to buy.

Then that fateful day, September 11th 2001 came. She was downtown on Wall Street, 1 block away from the World Trade Center, when the terrorist attacks happened. Thankfully, she made it home safely to her apartment in the Upper West Side that night, only to find out that her roommate’s dad, who was responsible for evacuations in the World Trade Center, was missing. That night was the worst ever, with the sounds of army trucks going up and down Broadway keeping her awake most of the night.

She awoke the next day to a phone call from Italy. It was the hiring manager of a company in Bologna Italy with whom she interviewed for a job in her area of expertise, credit risk management technology. The manager trepidly spoke, asking if she was OK. Then, he offered her a job to work with his firm, which required transferring to Bologna. Not knowing at that time the future of the world as she knew it, she asked for some time to assess and made a decision.

A month later, she accepted the job and packed up and moved to Italy.

Italian Seeps Into the DNA of this Irish Girl

While settling in her new job and life in Bologna, Sheila was fortunate to have made friends quickly, most of whom were Italian. That would seem obvious, but, often, when a native English speaker moves to a city in a foreign country they gravitate towards expat, native English speaking groups of friends. With Bologna being a secondary city in Italy with, at least at that time, very few foreign tourists, 90% of her friends were native Italians.

Sheila Donohue with friends enjoying one another’s company at a get together in the beautiful countryside of Umbria Italy.

While getting to know her Italian friends, she was like a sponge, picking up on all sorts of tips, tricks and traditions, many of which involved wine, food and cooking. She also traveled to different parts of Italy, often as a guest of her Italian friends visiting their families around Italy. Her fascination with the people, sights, architecture, history and varied culture of Italy grew and grew.

Slowly Sheila starting to pick up on “real Italian” cooking habits, like:

instead of following a recipe “to the tee” when cooking, leaning on her instincts to improvise a dish,
using olive oil instead of butter in her cooking,
learning the difference between a “just OK” extra virgin olive oil and a really good extra virgin olive oil and then keeping a really good one on hand at all times to use as a finishing touch on top of dishes, like fish, vegetables, pasta, as well as on pizza,
when cooking pasta, to never serve it right after draining but instead to mix it in with the sauce and have it further simmer in the pan so the pasta soaks up all the sauce before serving.

After Sheila’s first wine course at Enoteca delle Lame, Sheila got to know most of the wine shops in Bologna, like here at Enoteca Italiana.

Slowly But Surely, Mastering Wine

When it came to wine, she was initially bowled over by finding decent wine for less than 2 euros in the supermarkets in Italy… (Mind you, this was 2001-2002. Don’t assume this now - high inflation, especially recently, has also hit Italy.)

Nevertheless, for the quality of the wine she was getting for the inexpensive price, it was easy to get accustomed to having wine with every evening meal, as well the big, drawn out lunches which Italians often have on the weekends. After a while, though, she found her palate getting tired of her usual go-to supermarket wines and was getting more and more curious about other wines she’d see out and about socializing, and at wine bars and restaurants.

Her boss suggested a new wine store at the time, Enoteca delle Lame, near their office in downtown Bologna. They were known for having an interesting array of different types of Italian wines, a curated selection of their own, while also at reasonable prices. Sheila remembers the first time she walked into the store and being warmly greeted by the 2 sisters, Daniela and Romana Lugli, that owned the wine store. They became inquisitive about Sheila’s interest in Italian wine and found an opportunity to help Sheila learn and discover the vast world of Italian wines, with over 500 native grapes and thousands of appellations, all with rich histories and traditions behind them.

Every time that Sheila would go to the store, she would walk out with a different type of wine. After Sheila became a regular, it seemed that the sisters would acquire wines thinking of Sheila specifically. Then, the moment Sheila would enter the store, Daniela would jump to her feet, and excitedly share the news about the latest wine they added to their portfolio. As Sheila started to taste these different grapes and types of wine, she shared her finds with some of her fellow expat friends in Bologna who also were interested in learning more about Italian wine. Then, they too started to frequent the store.

At one point, an idea came to Sheila and Daniela, a certified sommelier: why not organize a wine tasting course on how to evaluate and taste a wine? Daniela liked the idea and Sheila and her friends were her first students. Sheila not only learned a lot, taking copious notes and understanding the basic methodology and technique for wine tasting, but she also had a lot of fun with her friends (to this day, her and her friends still laugh about discovering cat pee aroma in wine.)

This woman, Daniela, didn’t know that she was influencing a woman who would ultimately change her career and life to center around wine.

Sheila Donohue with her Association of Italian Sommelier (AIS) outfit and tastevin.

Life as a Wine Professional

Sheila started to meet Italians who had deep knowledge and passion of wine outside of the Enotecas, wine stores and restaurants in Italy. They were colleagues at work, friends of friends, etc. Several had attended sommelier school to become certified sommelier / wine experts. The Association of Italian Sommelier (AIS) came most highly recommended, so in 2006 she started to pursue the certification.

She enjoyed learning more about wine, wine and food pairing, Italian geography, history, traditions, wines around the world, winegrowing, winemaking, giving scores to wine, even olive oil, beer and spirit knowledge and tasting. One big challenge though was that the course was in Italian.

Let’s say that she did not catch everything being said. To become an AIS Sommelier is like taking a mini-Masters with the courses lasting about the length of a semester in college. It was at the beginning of the 3rd “semester” course that she found out there will be a comprehensive test at the end, from multiple choice, to written explanations, to verbal exams and wine tasting exam… all in Italian!

When she started to study and went through her notes over the past 2 years or so, she would come across words in Italian she didn’t know. Then she’d ask her Italian friends what they meant and sometimes they didn’t eve know themselves the meaning of a word. That’s when she knew she was in trouble! At this point, she knew she was going to have to cram hard for several months.

These Italians who attended this Wine Mingle in Bologna in 2009 were delighted to discover the American tradition of wine glass charms.

This was in 2008. Thankfully the Google Search engine had just become main stream. Let’s say that Sheila was a loyal beta tester of it while trying to make heads or tails of her copious notes and all that she learned over the past 2 years in the intense sommelier course. The exam was very difficult, especially the written portion during which she ran out of time (hey, what do you expect from someone new to Italian taking an exam in Italian?...) She was pleasantly surprised and super excited to have passed on the first try!

While still working in banking and technology, she started to organize wine tasting events in Bologna, Wine Mingles as she called them. Her impression was that Italians were a little too serious about wine and needed an event that mixed socializing with wine appreciation and tasting. The events were a hit, although with a full time job and career in credit risk management, Sheila realized that if she were to seriously pursue a career in wine, that she would need to re-arrange her job and life to have more time to dedicate to it.

Then, unbeknownst to her, the opportunity would fall in her lap in 2017. She started that year without a job and her life being a “blank sheet of paper.” While she did not explicitly immediately choose to change her career to wine, she started to put together a puzzle: she wanted to

help small businesses
innovate
have a job and life where she could start coming back to the US without leaving her new adopted home in Italy
most importantly, provide value add to the US market leveraging her experiences and knowledge she gained in Italy.

Realizing that most of the wine producers that she knows who are small, people farming their own land and driven by passion and tradition, were not yet present in the US market, she would start a company that would be focusing on new wines and foods to discover, while also allowing a platform and service to facilitate learning and discovery.

Think of her idea as a portable version of Enoteca delle Lame which brings hard to find wines all across America AND combines that with the hands-on approach to lead you to wines you will enjoy, just like sisters Daniela and Romana did with Sheila in Bologna 20+ years ago.

So, Sheila went on to start Vero in January of 2018.

Let Us Lead You On the Road to Discovery

Since Sheila started Vero, we have continued our focus on authentic, sustainably made, wild and scarce wines and foods. Consider us like the farmers market of wine: a safe place to get to know who made the farm-to-glass wine and olive oil that you see, where it is from, how it was made and what makes it special.

We sell to businesses and consumers around the US, from distributors, to licensed retail, wine stores and on premise, restaurants in certain states.

For those wine explorers and corporates who do not have our products at their local store, we sell online and ship across the US

We don’t want you to struggle with wine discovery like Sheila did. We have a free Somm at your Service whereby a sommelier / wine expert is just a Zoom or phone call away.
Also, we love helping you to organize wine tasting events, and olive oil too. We help you pick the theme and we take it from there. Virtual events work well also, especially with your clients and colleagues are spread around the country. We do the heavy lifting and ship the wine individually to each person.
And you can always contact us with any inquiry.

We look forward to continuing this road to discovery together for years to come.