Liz Barrett and I go way back to our PR days at Ketchum, when she was in the Chicago office and I was in San Francisco. Neither of us could have predicted where we’d end up today: me talking travel every week, her becoming an expert voice in the wine industry.
Today Liz is a Certified Specialist of Wine (passed on her first try, which anyone who’s studied for that exam will tell you is no small feat!), a Chicago-based wine writer, and the voice behind What’s In That Bottle. She travels the world covering wine regions, from Sicily to New Zealand to the Finger Lakes, and she has a gift for making wine feel like an open door instead of a locked club.
This conversation made me want to book a trip and sign up for a certification course, in that order. Here’s what we got into.
🎧 Click the audio link above to listen to our full conversation, or find The Gomes Guide Travel Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Her wine education started with a confession in a job interview
Liz was interviewing to be head of communications for a large luxury wine company when she told the CEO, in her words: “I can communicate and PR my way out of a paper bag, blindfolded, with my hands tied behind my back. And I like wine. But I do not know wine.” He told her they could teach her that. What he really meant, she says, was that she could teach herself.
So Liz, surrounded by colleagues who held Master of Wine and Master Sommelier credentials, gave herself a five-year plan: learn everything, get certified, build a network, then launch her own adventure. That’s exactly what happened. She even co-hosted a YouTube wine tasting show with her friend Rob, whose quirky wine blog had been named one of Lettie Teague’s favorites in The Wall Street Journal, until COVID made side-by-side tasting impossible.
On the state of the wine industry: she’s not worried
We talked honestly about the post-pandemic dip. Consumption spiked during COVID, then people found themselves with full cellars and a new interest in moderation. Add legalized cannabis and GLP-1s to the mix, and the industry is hurting.
But Liz is confident it will bounce back, and her reasoning is the same reason I love wine in the first place. Wine puts people around a dinner table for meaningful conversations. In a world where everyone has earbuds in and nobody talks to strangers, that matters more than ever. “It’s so valuable,” she told me. And she’s seeing dinner parties come back. (I’m so excited about this too, as dinner parties are one of my favorite things.)
Wine travel starts months in advance
When Liz plans a wine trip, the work begins in the planning phase. For her recent trip to Sicily, that meant starting in January: plane tickets, maps out, and deep research through regional wine consortiums (nearly every destination has one — she points to sites like Wines of Sicily and the Etna wine association as starting points).
Her biggest shift over the years: she used to reach out to wineries as a wine writer and arrange special tastings. Now she only writes about experiences anyone can book. She suggesting looking for “Visit Us,” “Hospitality,” or “Experiences” on a winery’s website. That tasting with the winemaker is more available than you think. She even stayed two nights at a luxury wine resort on Mount Etna, complete with pool, spa, and all the wine you could want. Sounds so dreamy, doesn’t it?
The bucket-list winery that taught her a lesson in confusion
In Vittoria, in southern Sicily, Liz visited Occhipinti, the winery founded by Arianna Occhipinti — “a force,” in Liz’s words, and something of a celebrity in her world. Down the road is COS, the family winery famous for aging wine in underground amphorae, the giant ceramic urns used in the country of Georgia.
It’s also where she permanently sorted out one of wine’s great trick questions: Cerasuolo. Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo is a rosé made from Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grapes on the mainland. Cerasuolo di Vittoria, in Sicily, is a red blend of Frappato and Nero d’Avola. Completely different wines, nearly identical names. “When you’re in the place, and you learn the things, you tend to hang on to them,” she said. That’s the whole case for wine travel in one sentence.
The reality of wine travel is less sunset-in-the-vineyard than you think
Her best travel-gone-sideways story: getting off a train in Beaujolais in November, in the pouring rain, onto what was essentially a cement platform with a sign. No station. No taxis. No Ubers. She and her friends walked a mile in the rain to the winery and arrived soaked.
And then there’s her confessed habit of collecting bottles along the way. Her system: reusable bottle-shaped bubble wrap bags, in checked luggage only, and a hard limit of eight bottles — a rule enforced less by airline weight limits than by the third-floor walkup she comes home to in Chicago.
For everyone who freezes at the wine list: there are no dumb questions
This is the part of the conversation I most want my readers to hear. So many of us — smart, curious, well-traveled women — go quiet in a tasting room or panic at a restaurant wine list. Liz’s advice:
Ask questions. Real wine professionals love an interested guest. “What makes this wine special?” and “Can you tell me the story behind this wine?” are always welcome.
Start with what you like. Tell the sommelier or wine shop owner the brand or style you already enjoy, and they can build from there. Love Chardonnay? They might steer you to a Chablis, or a white from the northern Rhône.
Skip the grocery store aisle when you can. An independently owned wine shop puts an actual expert within asking distance.
And keep tasting. Liz has learned she loves a good Pinot Noir and isn’t a Moscato person. Knowing what you don’t like counts too. The night before we spoke, she’d had a Pinot Noir from Patagonia that tasted nothing like Pinot Noir — and it didn’t matter, because it was good and interesting. That’s the spirit!
One trip, one year, built around wine: How to Choose
Liz’s two-path answer: pick the destination first, or pick the wine first.
If you’ve always wanted to see Italy, go to Italy — there’s wine everywhere, and a Tuscan villa puts you in Chianti and Brunello country. If you want to go wine-first, she’d point you to Bourgogne (the region formerly branded to Americans as Burgundy), basing yourself in Dijon and taking trains out from there, including to the charming little city of Beaune.
Her handy wine-list decoder while you’re there: in Bourgogne, if it’s red, it’s Pinot Noir; if it’s white, it’s Chardonnay. In Bordeaux, reds are Cabernet and Merlot-based, whites are Sauvignon Blanc, sometimes with Sémillon. Simple.
And a tip I’m filing away for my next Paris trip: Champagne is a 40-minute train ride away. Two champagne houses and a long lunch make a perfect day trip.
In New Zealand, she went 17 days without a single sip of Sauvignon Blanc
On purpose. Her logic: New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc is everywhere at home, and it practically comes out of the faucets there. So across both islands she chased everything else, especially the glorious Chardonnays and sparkling wines, from a long-established winery in West Auckland down to the South Island. Her rule for any wine region: drink the things they make there that you’ll never see back home.
Underrated regions to put on your radar (and in your glass)
I asked Liz what’s overlooked right now, and she came loaded:
Portugal, beyond Vinho Verde and port. The Douro Valley producers are making fascinating table wines, and three trips to visit her best friend in Lisbon have made Liz something of an evangelist. (This one hit home — my husband’s family is from the Azores, where the island of Pico grows its own remarkable volcanic, windswept wines.)
The Languedoc, in the southwest of France. Looser rules, great blends, and seriously affordable bottles. Look for Gérard Bertrand, one of the region’s most prolific producers — and yes, the man behind Hampton Water rosé with Jesse Bongiovi.
Washington State, which makes wonderful wine without the Napa price tag. Same for Paso Robles, California.
Northern Michigan, and she will fight you on this one. Decades of dry Riesling near Traverse City, beautiful sparkling wine, and now Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, and even Nebbiolo. The catch: you mostly have to go there to drink them. Conveniently, the Traverse City Food and Wine festival returns to the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas at the end of August.
Headed east? The Finger Lakes and Virginia are both doing amazing things.
And my favorite fact of the whole episode: wine is made in all 50 states. All fifty! The University of Minnesota has developed hybrid grapes that survive in climates nobody would have believed. So cool!
Rapid Fire with Liz 🔥
Q: Champagne, Prosecco, Cava or Franciacorta?
A: Champagne.
Q: Screw cap or cork — do you secretly judge?
A: No judgment. Plenty of excellent wine lives under a screw cap.
Q: One wine word we should all stop using?
A: None. “Use whatever freaking word you want!”
Q: Deep dish and wine — what’s the pairing?
A: First, a correction from a Chicagoan: deep dish is “tourist pizza.” Locals eat tavern-style thin crust. Either way, the answer is Lambrusco — the dry, lightly frizzante red from Emilia-Romagna that cuts right through tomato and pepperoni.
Q: Next trip on the books?
A: September: Paris, then Alsace for all the wines of Alsace.
Q: Dream wine destination?
A: The country of Georgia, where wine originated 8,000 years ago. She’s aiming for 2027.
Q: Best spot to drink wine in Chicago right now?
A: Bottles Up! in Lakeview, a hand-picked wine shop run by her friend Melissa, full of tastings and pairing dinners. And Le Bouchon, the longtime French bistro where every bottle on the list is half price on Mondays.
Meet Liz Barrett
Liz Barrett is a Chicago-based wine writer and the voice behind What's In That Bottle, the site she launched in 2017 with a simple mission: better living through better wine. She came to wine after a 20+ year career in food and beverage PR and marketing, passed the Certified Specialist of Wine exam in 2016 (on her first try), and has been helping people drink smarter ever since. Her writing appears in Wine & Spirits, Food Wine Travel magazine, Vinepair, and the Beverage Testing Institute's trade newsletter The Drop, and she's the resident wine expert on two of Chicago's top TV shows, WGN's Daytime Chicago and FOX 32's Good Day Chicago. Follow her on Instagram at @lizbchicago.
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