Swell Roundtable
@roundtable · 2:42
Swell Roundtable: Women in Wine
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Well, actually, I don't want to start there because I want to talk a little bit about you and your connection to this industry and how you got into it, I guess my first question before we drop into your life to me and how you've connected to the public, can you tell us a little bit about you and your beginnings of understanding what wine is and take us back to your childhood, because I know that you have a really interesting background, and I want to understand your first tastings of wine and what it means to you and then bring us into the present day
Jessica Vangrieken
@JessicaVanG · 1:53
But I'm excited to have women from different aspects of the industry on with us, and I'll be inviting them everything from production to marketing to retail to farming. So looking forward to hearing from all these incredible women. Cheers
Swell Roundtable
@roundtable · 0:48
Hey, Jessica, thanks so much for sharing with us, letting us into your world a little bit. I'm excited for the other women to join. And while we're waiting for them to come over the next 24 hours, I wanted to sneak in another question for you specifically about growing up in Belgium. I know every country has their own ceremony and ritual around wine. And I wanted to know when you sort of were connected to what's the wine culture like there
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Jessica Vangrieken
@JessicaVanG · 0:54
But the country has produced some grapes wine over the years, mostly cold climate, Rieslings, Greece, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay. But in the past ten years there's been a big increase due to climate change. So that's been interesting to watch
Swell Roundtable
@roundtable · 0:48
Have you seen that you really were witnessing at the time they were happening where you said, wow, this is changing. Oh, my God. I can't believe it's happening. It's happening in front of me. This is a change. Is there anything that specifically comes for you? I'm really curious about that
Jessica Vangrieken
@JessicaVanG · 2:09
She is the executive director of the Anderson Valley Wine Growers Association, and I'd love to hear from you, Courtney, how you got into the wine industry, what drew you to wine and any cool perspectives you have on what it's like to be a woman in wine. Welcome. Bye
Courtney DeGraff
@CourtneyDe · 3:49
I got involved with some wine tasting groups, and eventually I did a wine business management certification program all for fun and focused my coursework and my master's program on the wine industry. And I just had the bug and I couldn't really shake it. I worked for some financial services companies for about 14 years, doing project management and product development. And in 2017 I had the opportunity to make a life change
Swell Roundtable
@roundtable · 2:05
What are you doing as an Association and as a community to provide some new infrastructure to make things seem like there might be better in the future, or is this sort of something we have to really worry about from the perspective of growing wine and the wineries and the whole sustaining the whole industry. So kind of take us back to when water started becoming a problem and what's really going on and what might we see in the future and you could take a couple of swells if you need to do this
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