“I did not grow up with wine,” New York-based wine professional Vanessa Price said. “My mom [Renae Chastain] and dad drink now, but they didn’t when I was growing up. Back then, alcohol was a no-no under any circumstances.”
Price, a Louisville native, had her first sampling of vino when she was 20. She and her father, Gene—an attorney and retired United States Navy rear admiral—had traveled to Atlanta with the rest of the family for a Navy event. A colleague of her father’s, a Navy captain of Italian heritage, invited the Prices to her home for dinner, and after they arrived, she poured Vanessa a glass of wine. “My eyes got really, really big, and Dad’s eyes got really, really big,” Vanessa recalled, “and she just sort of looked at Dad and said, ‘Lighten up, Gene!’
“I definitely had a great first memory. It was pretty cool.” But it wasn’t a life-defining moment that immediately led to Price’s interest in and passion for wine.
“Life is a bit circuitous,” she said.
Price’s interest in acting led her to the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. After she graduated, Price returned to Kentucky intent on getting a bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville. She took the fast track to that degree. “I just wanted to be in and out,” she recalled. “I was a freshman in the spring of ’06, and I graduated in the second summer semester of ’07.”
While at UofL, Price needed some walking-around money and ended up waiting tables at River Bend Winery in downtown Louisville. Located on the corner of 9th and Main streets, the now-defunct winery was named for its location at a bend in the Ohio River. “Something happened there,” she said. “I just started to become enamored with the culture of wine. There was a thing around it. You go to a wine bar or a good restaurant, and there’s just a way that people behave; there’s like this je ne sais quoi.
“Then I started to learn more about it, and there’s so much that’s based in history and art and science. I love that it was a mix of all different walks of life, like the tasting of a diverse landscape of human beings … And I just sort of fell in love with it.”
It was a turning point. “I moved back to New York, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m not going to be an actor; maybe I’m going to be a wine person, a sommelier.’ At the time, I didn’t quite know what a sommelier was.”
Price soon discovered that a sommelier (pronounced “suh-muhl-YAY”) manages a restaurant’s wine program, and she achieved that goal. She worked as a sommelier on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and obtained her Level 4 Diploma in Wines from the London-based Wine & Spirit Education Trust, which she described as similar to getting a master’s degree in another field. She went on to teach wine classes at Columbia University and for the Wine & Spirit Education Trust; manage wine-related public relations for clients; write about wine for New York magazine; work as a distributer and importer; and consult with bars, restaurants and private collectors.
To manage her varied projects, Price founded The Vinum Collective, an all-things-wine entity. “Basically, it is an overarching umbrella that I’ve created under which all the things I do go. So, whether it’s writing, education, hospitality, art—because I create art in the spectrum of wine,” she said. “I’m working on several hospitality projects in New York. I’m working to democratize wine without losing the art or the essence of what wine is.”
To that end, Price penned a book on wine basics and wine pairings titled Big Macs & Burgundy: Wine Pairings for the Real World. Released in October 2020 and co-written with Adam Laukuf, the book serves to make wine more approachable. “I think this thing has exceeded my wildest dreams,” Price said with a laugh of the book’s success. “I remember the day I woke up and Page Six had done a piece on how my book was beating Obama’s [the former president’s memoir A Promised Land, published in November 2020]. And I thought, ‘This is just silly. How did we get to this place?’ So, it’s been good.”
Price’s most recent project is serving as managing partner in developing a restaurant and boutique hotel in Montauk, Long Island. While construction was delayed for about a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was slated to begin in April, with an opening planned for the spring of 2022.
Price also is partnering with Dan Abrams of ABC News and Live PD on a winery Abrams purchased on the North Fork of Long Island. He brought Price on board as managing partner to develop a new iteration of the vineyard and bring the winery back to life. “Lots of fingers in lots of pots” is how Price described her life these days.
“One of the things that drove me crazy when I first got into wine was that I had to choose either the really fancy snobbiness or the sort of remedial, silly ‘wine for dummies’—the coffee mugs that say, ‘This could have wine in it,’ ” she said. “There’s probably a world somewhere in between those two where we can presume that folks are smart, but they maybe don’t know that much about wine … So, with all the things that I do, I try to hit that mark.”
For more about Vanessa Price and The Vinum Collective, and to purchase Big Macs & Burgundy: Wine Pairings for the Real World, visit vinumco.com.