New Year, New Program, New Continent
2026, WSET Diploma, Indonesia and Singapore
I’m at the very beginning of a new chapter in my wine education (starting the wine diploma program) and I’m also very far from home.
Which feels… appropriate.
I’m writing this from Bali, where we’re kicking off 2026, meeting up with dear friends we’ve now visited multiple continents with (including Antarctica). When Barb says, “Want to go to [anywhere]?” the answer is always yes.
It also happens to be a moment of change in other parts of my life. I’m at a crossroads in my career in technology, I’m starting this program, and it feels like one of those times where you tug on a single thread and everything else starts to shift. You know the feeling.
What feels different about starting the diploma, compared to when I began WSET Level 3, is confidence. I loved Level 3. Not just because it took me deeper into appreciating wine, but because of the shared experience with my classmates. There’s something powerful about learning alongside people who are just as curious and nerdy and invested as you are.
This time, though, I’m walking in knowing I belong here.
The goal hasn’t changed: I want to enjoy wine more. And honestly, wine education has wildly over-delivered on that front. The more I learn, the more alive wine becomes. And somewhere down the line, I hope my career leads me into the wine industry itself—so this feels foundational in a very real way.
Yesterday, all of that theory collided beautifully with real life.
We walked into a grocery store in Seminyak (Bali), and I stopped short because I swear it smelled like someone had smashed a bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. That unmistakable aroma profile was everywhere. Bright. Zippy. Grapefruit. The kind of smell that snaps your attention to full alert.
Naturally, we walked past the wine section first. Nothing there explained it.
Then we turned the corner into produce.
Dragonfruit everywhere—lemon, pink, white, and deep magenta. Rambutans in big bunches. Citrus in more shapes and varieties than I knew existed. And suddenly it clicked. That aroma that first cracked white wine open for me all those years ago was standing right in front of me.
The first time I ever had that experience was with a glass of Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc, nearly eighteen years ago. At the time, I thought white wine wasn’t for me. Too sweet. Headache-inducing. Hard pass. That glass changed my mind entirely. It smelled like grapefruit juice and tasted impossibly refreshing. Standing in that produce aisle yesterday, I could almost feel the acidity on my tongue.
That’s why I love wine. It’s not just flavors and aromas—it’s memory, sensation, thought, and feeling all tangled together. A full mind–body–spirit experience. And the deeper I go, the more often these moments happen, where the world starts quietly explaining wine back to me.
This is also why I built MySipNotes.
Like everyone else, I take photos to remember moments (usually terrible but occasionally awesome ones). You look at them years later and you’re instantly transported—not just to what something looked like, but to how it felt to be there. I want to remember wine that way. Labels help, but they’re just the surface. I want to capture the experience: what I noticed, what it reminded me of, how my understanding was shifting in real time.
This blog is part of that practice. Notes from a journey that’s still very much in motion through wine, through place, through paying attention.
This is one stop on a longer journey, and I’m glad you’re here at the beginning.