Why Devin Kelsey Enrolled In This Class

To preface, I apologize for the admittedly on the nose title for the blog post - I was struggling to come up with anything wittier and I found it funnier to simply steer into the skid and give the least imaginative title possible rather than give a mediocre title which might make you think I actually tried and ask yourself, "Does Devin actually think that's a good title for a blog post?" With this title, we all know that I didn't try to come up with a creative title and that keeps us all on the same page.

Regarding the answer to that question, however, I tentatively must admit that I'm genuinely not (currently) a wine nerd, yet I've often wondered what it might take to become one - And have joked with many friends that it was a key goal of business school. I'm very much the type of person who enjoys things like wine where you can obsessively follow a given industry and have a niche community with which the passion for the industry is unbounded - I currently follow cinema, craft beer, and college football all with that level of zeal that many in the course likely have for wine. Yet, despite enjoying wine, I have struggled to become a wine nerd.

I think a huge part of this issue stems from something I spoke about the other day in class - My inability to contextualize the world of wine in the way I seem to so easily be able to do for my other huge passion areas. For these areas, the world has always made sense in very clean and discrete terms. There seems to be an excess of information such that nobody knows everything and yet it's clear how any new information fits into the system of other information that you already have mapped in your head - I'd love to get to this point in wine at some point.

So, admittedly, I signed up for the class largely as a consumer wanting to gain a more formal understanding of the industry. I doubt I'll ever start a winery, though I do enjoy the sexier industries for which I believe in the product (the film industry being my biggest passion) so I was quite confident I would at least enjoy this course from the business side paradigm more than I might enjoy most other classes at the GSB.