About Reggie Solomon (a.k.a., “reggieCasual”)

I came to wine quite by accident.

Growing up in South Georgia, my only experience with wine was from the annual sip my father would allow me and my sister to sneak from his New Year’s Eve glass of White Zinfandel or Korbel.

I can’t really say I ever enjoyed the taste of wine, but it was something I allowed myself the opportunity to try every few years or so from my father’s New Year’s glass.

It wasn’t until my senior year at Yale College, that I took another real look at wine.

This time the impetus came from the headmaster of my residential college dormitory, Paul Fry, who decided to offer a wine tasting class to all the graduating college seniors that met twice a week for two hours at a stretch in the evenings.

No other residential college headmaster on campus offered such a course at the time, so I figured this must be worth checking out, especially since participation was optional, non-graded and had the fringe benefit of giving me time to hangout with my friends (a non-inconsequential motivation for a second-semester senior.)

As it turned out, I discovered I really enjoyed learning about and tasting wine with friends.

Our class instructor Elliot Brause was terrific at creating an open environment where we all felt comfortable asking any questions (yes, even the allegedly “dumb” ones). He (rightfully) assumed we knew nothing, and let me and friends ask, and ask away until we had a solid foundation of wine basics like knowing the names of major wine grapes.

I carried this casual and open approach towards wine with me to grad school at Harvard University but quickly discovered the majority of books and articles aimed at teaching people about wine to be overwhelmingly aimed at people with deeper pockets and larger wine vocabularies than I had.

Since learning about wine from experts was too intimidating I decided to learn about wine from other people with little to no basic knowledge, but who were curious — my friends.

As a grad student on financial aid, my wine budget ceiling was (and still is) about $10 a bottle.

The same was true for most of my friends for whom Trader Joe’s served as volume discounter of choice. We’d open a bottle together on a weekend, and try to figure out what we tasted.

After grad school I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area only hours away from the Sonoma and Napa wine country.

I knew this was my opportunity to learn about wine from its source. Nearly every other weekend during the summer I’d drive up to wine country with friends and learn about wine first hand from the people who made it.

Because staying in hotels in wine country is so expensive we’d always camp, so weekend camping and visiting wineries with friends formed the major parts of my summers. I spent most of my time tasting wine in northern Sonoma because wineries still don’t charge for tastings (they will one day when tourist traffic discovers it more).

Being taught about wine from the woman or man who made it is one of the best ways to learn about wine!

I’m now back on the east coast, and live in New Haven, Connecticut where I work for Yale University.

I still discover, learn about, and share wine with friends and mostly on a wine budget of around $10 (ideally under).

Friends and I rarely get dressed up to learn about wine since for us, “how” we come to wine (casually) is as almost as important as “what” we learn about wine.

Wine Casual is a way to share a casual love of wine in a way that is fun, relaxed and most importantly affordable.

Take off your shoes, put up your feet, relax, grab a glass and join me on a stroll to learning about wine the way it should be enjoyed – Wine Casual.com!

-Reggie Solomon
(a.k.a., “reggieCasual”)