About us
Wine Girl Online
Wine Girl Online is dedicated to no-pretense information about wine. It’s created by a woman and, unlike most media about wine, it’s truly geared toward women and men who love wine. It’s Wine Girl’s goal to add to our readers’ enjoyment of wine by giving them smart, practical, and never-jargony information about different types of wine, pairings, storage, labeling, service, events, health, and travel. We’re serious about wine, but we also believe that wine is about pleasure: hence the quizzes, bargain alerts, and oddball news stories. And because we have a passion for European wines and feel strongly that if only they didn’t seem so esoteric, more people would love them too, we try to cover wines from all over the world, not just California.
What you won’t find on Wine Girl Online are: flame sessions, vintage charts, obsessive attention to 95+ scores, name dropping, “the newest cult winery,” snobbery, or comprehensive reviews of recent releases (although we love to share what’s on our table tonight). Not that we have a problem with any of that; the day, in fact, that “The Wine Advocate” hits our mailboxes is like a national holiday. It’s just that lots of other media have that beat down. As for Wine Girl, we’re dedicated to an informal exchange of knowledge among people passionate about wine.
Wine Girl
Heather Findlay fell prey to the wine bug in 1998 after she was love-bit by a bottle of 1994 Groth Reserve Cabernet. Soon she noticed that whenever the wine list appeared at a restaurant, everyone at the table would point toward her. Friends would call her from a wine store, asking for guidance. One day her walk-in closet was gutted, insulated, equipped with a cooler, and filled with bottles. Finally, everyone just started calling her Wine Girl, and an alter ego was born.
Heather lives in San Francisco and spends weekends in Sonoma, California, on 16 acres near the Carneros appellation (no vineyards, sorry). She runs a small publishing company and wrote monthly wine columns for “Girlfriends” magazine. Please feel free to write her with tips, questions, and comments; clearly, she lives to talk about wine.
The Ladies Tasting Society
The Ladies Tasting Society is Heather’s tasting group, which she co-founded in 2003 with the object of educating herself and a handful of other like-minded ladies about wine. Ideally, we meet monthly and taste blind a line-up of wines cohering to a particular theme, for example Chilean reds, Bordeaux 2000, viognier, sparkling wines under $20, or the like. We take turns hosting, and the host names the theme and provides dinner. It’s been a great, no-pressure way for us to increase our enjoyment of our favorite beverage, and in many ways the Ladies Tasting Society gave rise to this web site.
