Natalie MacLean on how she became Natalie MacLean:

Like all good Cape Bretoners I was born in Toronto where my mother and father had to go to meet each other first, before returning to Nova Scotia. We returned to Whycocamaugh and lived there a year. After my parents divorced, Mom traveled around the province teaching - we lived in Antigonish, Sheet Harbour, back to Toronto for a bit and then finally settled in Lower Sackville. Her parents were from Baddeck and so we spent all our summers there - she took teaching courses in the summer to upgrade her skills and I went to the Gaelic College where I learned to dance, say "chimera" how and pick strawberries - I excelled at strawberry picking.

Eventually I became quite serious about the dancing as there were no strawberry-picking competitions. When I was 13 through 17, we went to Scotland each year to compete in the world championships - my best showing was when I was 17 and placed fifth after three men from Scotland and one woman from the US. I also started to teach dancing in my basement when I was 15. (I Photocopied handmade notices and took them to the principals of the elementary Schools in Lower Sackville and asked to pass them out in the classes.) Before I Left for the MBA at Western, I had 300 students and five teachers working for me and was able to put myself through university without debt).

I never developed a taste for beer or hard spirits, and developed a Strong distaste for the gawd-awful glass of wine I was offered at Christmas and Easter each year. But then I started drinking wine when I met my husband Andrew (and have not found a reason to stop since). We lived in Toronto after graduating from the MBA and went out to eat almost every night since neither of us could cook. Andrew liked wine with a meal and so I started to too. We tried taking a Spanish course at night together but found that conjugating verbs at 8 PM after a long day of work didn't work. We found though that we could very easily handle a wine course and so we took the entry-level sommelier program at George Brown College. We went with our instructor on a wine tour of northern Italy and were hooked. In 1996, we moved to Ottawa for work (Andrew's in high tech) and I completed all the four levels for a sommelier certificate at Algonquin College, but not with writing in mind. Andrew and I continued to go on wine tours for vacations (the only type where you don't end up fighting).

We then went with our instructor on a group tour of northern Italy. Ever since, most of our vacations have been to wine regions. Even our business travel has always included wine: we'd dine at restaurants with good wine lists and visit any wineries in the region. In those days, both Andrew and I worked in the high technology field. My computer company was based in Mountainview, California; and I soon learned to schedule my meetings on Thursdays so that I could stay for the weekend in Napa Valley.

But the thought of writing about my hobby didn't occur to me until I hadn't slept soundly for three weeks. Shortly after our son Rian was born in November 1998, my life took on a biological beat: feed the baby, change a diaper, eat, change another diaper, sleep for twenty minutes (Rian, not me), cry for ten minutes (me, not Rian). I felt my brain starting to atrophy. One day, at the local grocery check-out, I picked up the store's food magazine. Through my haze of post-partum sleep deprivation, I saw that it was beautifully illustrated and packed with recipes, but contained no information about wine. Back home, I called the magazine's editor to ask if she'd be interested in an article about wine on the web. I figured that I knew just enough about both areas to say something intelligent. She asked if I had been published before, and I said yes (praying that she wouldn't ask me to send samples from my high school newspaper). Luckily, she didn't; instead she assigned me a half-page article due in two weeks. I struggled to write that article more than I laboured with the pregnancy since I was now operating on about six brain cells. But the editor was pleased with the result and gave me another assignment.

Now that I could say that I was a published wine writer, I developed enough confidence to call other editors. But I was still filled with self-doubt: most other wine writers had twenty or more years of experience, which counts for a lot with such an encyclopaedic topic. Despite this, or perhaps because of a very fresh perspective, I started to get assignments from newspapers and magazines [for a complete list, click here]. I couldn't believe that people would actually pay me to write and, in a sense, pay me to drink. I still feel that wonder and pleasure. Six months later, when my maternity leave was over, I decided not to return to high tech, even though I had loved my work there. Writing about wine was irresistible: it was part of an industry that was all about enjoyment and people who were passionate about what they created. Plus, I could set my own hours, work at home and be there for Rian.

However, many people seem to believe that the job entails drinking all day. It's true that I go to a lot of wine tastings, but they aren't exactly heavy drinking sessions. Often there are as many as a hundred wines, so the exercise mainly involves swishing, spitting and enamel erosion. And just about every day, I get wine delivered to my home. But it's mostly mass-market plonk from some big corporation that can afford to ship it. (Still, the FedEx guy pleads regularly to be invited in for a tasting.) I dutifully taste it all to find those hidden gems, sacrificing teeth and liver so that my readers don't have to. (When I die, I plan to donate my liver to science.) About two years ago, friends in other cities who don't get local publications for which I was writing would ask me to e-mail the articles to them. Then I thought, "Hmm, if I'm doing it for them, I may as well actively market the effort and I started my newsletter with about 200 wine nuts here in Ottawa and in other cities. I send out my published articles after they're off the newsstands (and I retain the copyright) or sometimes I write original articles for the newsletter.