After nearly two years of attending what many consider to be the most prestigious culinary schools around, I am now in my final week. Looking at the whole experience, it has seemed to whiz by, truly letting me know that, yes time does fly, and one should never take any experience for granted. While I am eagerly ready to get my career going, I can admit that I will miss the school, the friends I've made and the genuinely good human beings I've had the pleasure to come across. While there are certainly a number of individuals I will absolutely not miss, the bad ones have not ruined the bunch, and the positives have far outweighed the negatives.
As with any good experience, I am leaving this place a different person that when I began. If you told me two years ago that I would have great aspirations to work front of house I would have told you that you were crazy. But here I am, and that is the direction I am going into and I don't regret it at all. I am incredibly excited in fact. It's the beginning of what I could consider my Sommelier story.
My final weeks of culinary school have entailed me waiting tables. This has been the best training I could ask for before beginning work outside the school in FOH. It has enabled me to gain experience in both, how to interact with customers and to know what to expect. You can meet wonderful people working in a dining room, you can also meet crazy, creepy nut jobs as well. But that's what makes the work exciting. If you love people in general, you have to take the good with the bad... And at some core level, maybe we love meeting those nut jobs. It lets you know hey.... maybe I'm not that crazy after all....
Wine of the year: I have had the pleasure of tasting many wonderful wines this year however one has stood out in my memory. This is a wine that when I tasted it, I had to tell everyone about it. This wine is the 2007 Bodegas Casajus Splendore Ribera del Duero. It was rated 91 pts by Robert Parker, and being 15.99 I had to try it. This wine had a lot of jammy notes, with oak, spice, leather, serious earth, but at the same time still possessed that warm fruit. It was full with nice tannins. This was a complex wine for a great price. I have yet to find a wine that has intrigued me this much. While the year is not up and I still have time to find another... As of right now, this is and has been my wine of the year...
