We’ve always enjoyed having a glass of wine with dinner – our first date ended with a bottle of white out on the back deck of what later became our home, and another of our earlier dates involved a series of half-off Living Social deals that included complimentary wine tastings at local wineries. We didn’t over-imbibe, per se, didn’t often overdo it, but we enjoyed wine with nearly every meal, and sometimes by itself. With that in mind, it didn’t surprise anyone who knows us well when we skipped the more traditional Caribbean honeymoon and spent the days immediately after our wedding in the Sonoma and Napa valleys. We had a wonderful time, learned a ton, and it was a great start to married life (we even went so far as to skip the spa services available at our hotel in order to free up time for more tastings), but we also learned something important about ourselves. Somewhere along the line, wine had transition from being a hobby to being a passion.

We began with no formal training and, frankly, no time to become certified sommeliers. We just liked wine. And we still do. Time passed, and we moved to a new house, took different jobs, and had baby Titus in the fall of 2015, right around the time that Mark passed his WSET I course. In the spring of 2017, our second child, Zooey, was born, and that following summer, Mark passed his Level II exam with merit. Titus tasted his first wine at the age of 72 hours, a touch of the Moet and Chandon Imperial that we were using to celebrate his birth. For her part, Zooey was treated to some vintage Dom at around the same age. Today, Titus often joins Mark at wine tastings on Saturday afternoons.  It seems that as our family grows, our love of wine grows with it.