Dry Extract is Falstaff’s mini-interview feature. We ask top professionals in the world of wine, food and travel to answer thirteen deceptively simple questions in quick-fire fashion. The answers are more revealing than you think.
It was a glass of 1985 Sociando-Mallet that changed Brazilian-born Elizabeth Vanna’s career path. As biology graduate, she worked as a clinical toxicologist at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and promptly switched her studies from medicine to oenology at UC Davis on the West Coast. She started at Chimney Rock in Napa’s Stags Leap District as assistant winemaker in 2002 and has been running the winery since 2011.
The best advice I ever got
Taste with your peers.
My life motto
Seize the day.
I am currently reading
The Vixen by Francine Prose
My most played music track
This changes constantly but right now it is Already There by Joan Armatrading.
If I didn’t do my current job I would be
A writer.
Skill I don’t currently possess but would like to have
I need to learn Italian.
My favourite kind of exercise
Hiking.
I relax while
Playing the piano.
I collect
Stemware.
My essential newspaper/magazine
The New York Times
My desert island wine
I have learnt a lot from
My father
My last meal and sip will be
Dungeness crab and Bollinger.
