The Wine Princess Bride

A précis of Tara Nurin’s Sept. 7, 2011 article, “The Wine Princess Bride,” published by Philadelphia Magazine.

Tara Nurin framed the marriage of Wine School of Philadelphia founder Keith Wallace and sommelier Alana Zerbe as something close to a wine lover’s fairy tale.

Wallace, whom Nurin called “a prince of the Philadelphia wine world,” had married Zerbe on Aug. 28, 2011. The newlyweds were already honeymooning through the vineyards of Rioja and Spain’s Basque Country, with plans for future wine travel, including China, and a national promotional campaign for the book they had written together, Corked & Forked.

But Nurin was less interested in presenting a polished society portrait than in telling the more unlikely story of how Zerbe arrived in the wine world.

Before becoming a sommelier, Zerbe had been a corporate attorney in Washington, D.C., earned a master’s degree in international human rights law, and worked in the nonprofit sector on human trafficking and slavery. Wine was initially a serious hobby: volunteering at a Virginia winery, traveling through European wine regions and developing what Wallace jokingly described as an expensive knowledge of Burgundy, Barolo and Alsace.

Their courtship revolved heavily around food. They cooked elaborate dinners, entertained friends and crossed Philadelphia and Washington in search of Vietnamese, Thai, Ethiopian and Korean restaurants.

Even their meeting had an appropriately eccentric beginning. At a party hosted by a prominent food critic, Zerbe noticed Wallace after reading an intentionally absurd response he had posted to the event invitation.

Nurin’s piece ultimately presents the couple less as polished wine-industry insiders than as two obsessive food-and-wine people who happened to turn those interests into a shared life, career and business.

The article: https://www.phillymag.com/restaurants/2011/09/07/the-wine-princess-bride/