Vine to vintage: A sommelier’s journey.

By Keely Savoie

Every bottle of wine touched by Clara Kann ’12 is rooted in her experience of growing, harvesting, and making wine in vineyards around the world. She brings the rare background of winemaking to the rarified world of fine wines.

The 25-year-old from Miami is the sommelier at Upholstery Store: Food and Wine, a restaurant and wine bar in New York City’s West Village. Upholstery comes with a Michelin star pedigree courtesy of its founders, chef-owner Kurt Gutenbrunner and general manager Leo Schneemann from the next-door Wallsé. But Kann, who majored in theatre, credits her career directly to the graduation requirements at Mount Holyoke—though at the time she was not keen on them.

“I never wanted to take a science class after high school,” she said. Nevertheless, to fulfill the science requirement, she took a botany class and found to her surprise that it awakened a new interest in her. “I enjoyed the material and seemed to encode it differently at the college level.”

That unexpected spark would lead her around the word in pursuit of her passion for learning and wine, which had been a part of her world from childhood, said Kann, whose father is a wine collector.

“I grew up flipping through books about Bordeaux and its capacity to make exceptional wine,” she remembered. “So I figured, why not do something with my summer that fused these two things I enjoyed?”

She applied for internships at a dozen wineries between her junior and senior year, and landed a spot at Hermann J. Wiemer, a producer of Riesling wines in a traditional European style.

There, she worked in the vineyards, the tasting room, the cellar, and—on her very last day—the blending room, where she learned that even single-grape wines such as Rieslings are a blend of different production methods—different oaks, ages, and fermentation methods.

The experience at Wiemer gave her insight into every part of the winemaking process.

“It was the coolest thing, like a big puzzle,” she said. “That’s when I really caught the bug.”

After graduation, Kann decided to experience four vintages in four countries in two years. Building on connections she made at Wiemer, she travelled around the world—from the Finger Lakes to New Zealand to Austria to Australia—before going back to New York City. She developed a deep appreciation for the complexity of winemaking and the countless variables that go into determining a wine’s characteristics.

Kann now sees her role as a sommelier as demystifying the concept of wine for people. Because of her experiences, she can offer unique insights to customers that they would normally never get.

“There were times that I actually stomped on grapes in Austria. I am trying to bring that knowledge back to the table,” she said. “I am trying to bring back the fact that it’s just a grape, and that winemakers are essentially farmers.”