Hello Everyone!

When I studied abroad in Europe, I would consistently pick up a bottle of sparkling water instead of still water. I was always confused as to why they put sparkling and still water in the same bottle, with the most minuscule fine print to indicate what type of water I was getting myself into. Unfortunately, I am here to say that I have made the opposite mistake this week. I walked into a store and grabbed the most elegant bottle of water I could find, only to get back home to find that I got still water instead of sparkling. Why do they make a beautifully crafted bottle and put still water in it? Why do they then put that bottle right next to the rest of the sparkling water?

Am I the problem here? Because I think humanity needs to be better at labeling its water bottles.

Anyway, with that said, let’s find out What’s Up With Will…

For this week’s public speaking class I am teaching, the first day was a final workshop to finish up any loose ends for the persuasive speech and provide time to practice. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect! Alongside this assignment, I required them to make an appointment with the Tutoring and Academic Support Center (TASC) so that they can get in a few extra repetitions of their speeches, as well as showcase one of the many resources available to them as students.

The second day of class this week kicked off the start of persuasive speech presentations! Since these speeches are about 3-5 minutes, there was no way to get everyone on the same day, so when I sent out the sign-up list, I gave out extra credit for going on Day 1. This was a means of incentivizing students not to all sign up for the last day of presentations, and give those students who presented on the first day a bonus for their time, effort, and courage to go first. I was impressed by the first round of these speeches. The students used strong evidence and examples to appeal to Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. I was persuaded, but I am an easily persuadable person. If you were to tell me that gullible was written on the ceiling, I would probably believe you.

As we are approaching the end of the semester, the faculty in charge of the GTAs decided to host an end-of-semester meeting to chat about the semester. We are all in the thick of things, as students sometimes stop showing up, or those who have not shown up for the entire semester decide to make a reappearance. It was useful to chat about our problems in the classroom, which turned out to be shared by the other GTAs across the board, and the faculty told us that these are issues known to the entry-level public speaking class. It turns out that we are all in this together. GTA Solidarity!

In spite of all the less-than-good things, we also talked about a lot of the great moments that occurred over the semester.  We all talked about individual lesson plans that were a hit (a school scavenger hunt sounded like a great idea) and different speeches that the students really got into (I could really get behind a Bay Area History Speech). We often tend to focus on the negatives, but there have been a lot of positives too. It has me ecstatic about next semester! 

For the past couple of weeks in methods, I was struggling to wrap my head around thematic analysis.  I did not see themes that lined up in the examples we used in class. I was worried that this mental barrier would continue into my own research. However, as I sat down and started the process of thematic analysis (primarily step 1 of familiarizing myself with my data), I had my A-Ha moment! 

I began to analytically notice a few repeating patterns surrounding customer apprehension and the actual strategies wine bartenders use to educate. My increasing familiarity with the topic helped me formulate codes and notable segments to use for the paper. So, over this week, I completely reworked my research question, changing it to focus more on wine education and look at the specific strategies, whether it be presentational, communicative, or experiential, to engage with and broaden customers’ wine knowledge and confidence in stating their preferences. Thematic Analysis actually works! Who would have guessed????

We started class with an exercise on turning our transcripts into quotations that can be used in an academic paper. Despite verbal communication’s essentiality to how we interact and communicate with one another on a day-to-day basis, it is inherently messy. It is filled with repetitions, filler words, silences, and interjections from others. Therefore, these transcripts need to be cleaned up.

The professor used one of my interview segments as an in-class example for turning a chaotic transcript into a publishable quotation. I was honored that my transcript was chosen, but then I realized that it meant that I might have had the messiest transcript in the class. So, thanks, I guess? The first issue was mostly formatting, emphasizing the use of hanging indents as well as spacing in the transcript segments. Then, while the Ums and uh-huhs are important to discourse analysis, it is less so for thematic analysis, where one is analyzing what is actually being said, so we removed the interjections from the interviewer (yours truly 😉). What was left was a beautiful quotation to use in my paper!

We also discussed researching sources a bit more, because a bunch of us have hit a brick wall. We looked at how to research sources, as well as talk more broadly about how to incorporate literature into our papers, looking at how researchers use literature in their works. Literature can set the stage for your research question, introduce key terminology, or cover previous research related to your study. It can also act as a justification for your study as well. The literature that you use does not have to be 100% related to your research, either. For instance, I found a lot of wine tourism research, but not much qualitative research on wine education, so I am going to include some of that literature to bolster my final paper.

Finally, for long-time readers, I think you can tell how stressed I am in a given week based on whether or not I stop at an ice cream parlor. This week was ice cream week. On my way into school, I made a pitstop at Curbside Creamery, which has the honor of being the first-ever ice cream shop I ate at in the Bay Area. I remember pulling up to this spot when we first visited Oakland to go apartment hunting with Rylee’s parents, and becoming instantly enamored because of the option of a chocolate waffle cone. Fast forward to this week, I got a vegan peanut butter fudge ice cream in the same chocolate waffle cone. The main thing that changed here is my acceptance of non-dairy ice creams, as that was unheard of in Georgia.

Rylee was talking to one of her work colleagues about my graduate project in wine education, and got us both invites to an ENT conference in Napa hosted by UC Davis Health. One of the headline sessions would be a guided olfactory wine tasting hosted by an ENT who moonlights as a sommelier, so we made a trek up to Napa Valley during the work week. We have some of the craziest side quests…

The session first dived into how our sense of smell (olfaction) works. Olfaction occurs because of a specialized system of nerves. The olfactory nerve transmits odor information from the nose to the olfactory bulb in the brain. The trigeminal nerve fills in the rest, from textures to temperatures, and even the burn of alcohol. It is the culmination of these two inputs that creates our sense of smell. The tongue, while seemingly the most important part of taste, is actually surprisingly limited. It encompasses sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Everything else, like fruity or earthy aromas, comes from our olfaction.

This system is not static, though. Our smell sensitivity changes based on age, health, our environment, and practice. More recently, with COVID-19, more research has been examining smell loss, yet it has been found that approximately 66% of individuals will experience some period of smell loss in their lifetimes. It just goes to show how this sense we often take for granted is fragile yet trainable.

We then moved on to the tasting portion of the session, where the ENT Somm provided frameworks for tasting wine. First, though, there’s some interesting history between ENT and wine. By happenstance, the Head Mirror (a landmark piece of  Otolaryngology medical equipment) was introduced in 1855, which is the same year as the formal classification of the Bordeaux wine. 

Then came the frameworks. The first was Before, During, After (BDA). Before the wine reaches your lips, there’s the sound (Cork pops and effervescence), the sight of the wine (color, viscosity, the way it clings to the glass), and the aroma. During your tasting, attention moves to taste and touch. After tasting, what lingers is just as important. We also learned about the WSET approach to tasting (Appearance, Nose, Palate, and Quality), a more formalized approach to wine tasting meant to make us truly appreciate a wine.

What I found most interesting was retronasal perception, the way in which we perceive aromas from foods and drinks while in our mouths. To showcase an example, we chewed on a jelly bean with our noses pinched closed. At first, the flavor felt muted, but then after a few chews, we opened our noses. There was such a drastic difference in the level of flavor. The nose is a powerhouse of taste, and I would recommend you all try this activity for yourself to see for yourself.

With all this information, we finally began a large group tasting of 4 wines (Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon). The speakers opened the floor to the audience for what tasting notes everyone had. It was pretty quiet until the speaker said, “It’s okay, this is wine, not surgery”. After a collective laugh, more people started giving out tasting notes. Even doctors, who are generally highly respected, well-trained, and wealthy individuals, sometimes feel scared of stating preferences and observations about wine. I think that says something about the research that I am conducting.

Then, I took a break to explore Napa a bit more before finishing up some work for the day. When I am normally here, we spend the entire day at wine tastings, so I figured I would mix things up a little bit by going to a museum.

I stopped at the Chuck Williams Culinary Arts Museum, a treasure trove of over 4,000 culinary cookware and kitchen tools throughout history, all from Chuck Williams’ personal collection(The Founder of Williams Sonoma). It highlights early innovations like rolling pins and iron cookware that improve cooking performance, to newer materials, designs, and appliances that were meant to help reduce prep time, and preservation and storage tools to keep ingredients fresh. It also showed the evolution of cooking as something that has been elevated from a basic survival skill into an art form, which extends to the culinary equipment, too. These pieces emphasized the importance of both function and form of the culinary arts.

When I got back home and looked around at my own kitchen, I noticed how much of that history lives on. We are all steeped in this culinary tradition, from old inventions like casserole dishes to newer modern devices like Air Fryers and non-stick pans that shape how we cook and eat.

There was a bit of a nip in the air this past Saturday as we stepped outside in Walnut Creek, mirroring the same chilly, partially cloudy,  weather in Louisville, Kentucky. We arrived at Rotator Taproom, a spot featuring a BART graffiti mural. While there would be no mint juleps this time around, they had an eclectic mix of local Bay Area brews, including a tropical fruited sour and a prickly pear/peach hard seltzer. As Rylee started setting up our southern inspired light bites (potato salad, pimento cheese, banana pudding, and watermelon), it was up to me to convince the bartender to tune into this year’s coverage of the 152nd Kentucky Derby.

Thankfully, they changed the channel, allowing us to view the odds. Renegade was the favorite, at 4-1, a powerful late-running closer going 5 for 5 in placing within the top 3. Further Ado (6-1) followed right behind Commandment (6-1). Other commentators pontificated about Chief Wallabee (8-1) and So Happy (15-1). With 19 horses set to race, though, anything was possible.

Our guests began to show up, some who went to last year’s Belmont Stakes Party, and some new faces, unsure of what a Derby even was. It was also a sort of mish-mash of people from all different aspects of our lives here. As the race got closer, we passed around a hat to grab a horse number to root for. I pulled out three, Intrepido, with odds of 55-1. After comparing our odds, we all gathered around the TV as the horses approached the gates.

Then, the taproom became alive as we erupted into cheers at the start of the race. Six Speed (38-1), Danon Bourbon (12-1), and So Happy (15-1) held the top three spots almost the entire race, but as the horses turned the final corner,  Golden Tempo (23-1) and Renegade weaved their way from the back of the pack to the front. It was an all-out battle for first, but as they crossed the finish line, Golden Tempo, the horse that Rachel picked, was victorious. This victory was also notable in that it was the first time in the 152 years of the Kentucky Derby that a woman trainer won.

You’ve probably heard the story by now, but here we go again for any newbies. Derby parties are very common in the Bay Area, but growing up, one of my favorite traditions was our family’s annual Kentucky Derby party. We’d gather with close friends, share great food and drinks, and draw horse names from a hat to cheer on during each race. We weren’t frequent party hosts, but that was our thing, and it always felt special. Now that I’m older, I am so happy to revive this tradition and bring this event back for the second year in a row! I already can’t wait until next year!

If you didn’t watch the Kentucky Derby, here is your chance. The race was absolutely bonkers! My write-up does not do it justice.