About Grand Cru Experience
I was a writer long before I was a wine professional.
When I began working in wine in 2011, I was already filling pages with literary fiction, essays, dark academia inspired stories as well as co-produced courts métrages based on my screenplays. The more my passion for wine grew, the more it found its way into my stories. What had begun as a wine blog, created to accompany my first steps in the industry, quickly became a place where literary stories and wine intertwined.
For the first two or three years it worked, but as my career in wine grew, so did the readers’ expectations and the prevailing norms of wine writing. Self-proclaimed wine experts and wine writers were sprouting like young vine shoots, constantly competing for social media attention, where following mattered more than whether one had actually tasted the wine. The emphasis seemed to shift towards a recognisable format: tasting notes, technical language, interviews with winemakers, winery visits, vintage reports and the performance of expertise.
Although I had moved to the outskirts of Saint-Émilion and was travelling to wine regions across the world, readers’ requests for articles about my travels and wines I tasted seemed to make sense to everyone but me. My idea of wine storytelling was somewhat different and that approach was often overlooked.
So I compromised in the most elaborate way possible: I kept writing my literary fiction stories and then I wove the wine journalism into them like threads in the tartan pattern. My fiction was still somewhere there, between the lines, but the writing was filled with technical details and practical wine tips. Readers were happy and for the first few years I had been telling myself I was too.
By the end of 2020, I realised I no longer enjoyed writing nor did I like the writer I had become. My passion for wine had faded away, somewhere between Bordelaise working environment and what felt like the thousandth tasting note, so I deleted all the stories, along with years of notes and wine articles. I fully moved toward children’s books and personal development writing; wine was gone, so was Wine Lady.
I thought that chapter was over.
Then I received a reminder from my hosting company about the overdue domain payment. I drafted the email to cancel, but before sending it, I pulled out my printed wine stories to reread a few of them as a form of closure and it is in them that I found a version of myself that I had lost. Up until that moment I was unaware of how much I missed her.
I didn’t send the email. I renewed the domain instead.
Today Grand Cru Experience showcases a collection of my old writings, stripped of the industry conventions that never belonged to them and restored to what they were always meant to be: literary fiction stories. Some of the older works will have to undergo a deeper (and more time-consuming) editing, so I will be releasing them gradually.
Each story has been inspired by my personal experiences and unfolds with wine in mind; the writing, however, belongs fully to literature.
The collection expands as old stories evolve and further stories are added.
thematic presence
Wine has long played a role in my narratives. It often shapes the atmosphere within my stories; however, it is also a conscious literary choice: it acts as a force that moves through my characters.
I use wine as a medium to explore deeper emotional states and to confront the illusions and idealisations we tell ourselves.
I have always admired the literary aesthetics of writers such as Poe, Baudelaire and Rilke, who used wine as both symbol and emotional exploration, and through my stories I enter into dialogue with them.
It is my personal homage to literary writing.
I would like to think that the Wine Lady I once was would appreciate me keeping the trace of this literary journey through the wine world I once loved so dearly.
This collection is dedicated to readers who seek a deeper connection to wine and to the sublime art of storytelling itself.
Ela