Interview with Kelli A. White

Kelli A. White is the Director of Education for the Wine Center at Meadowood in Napa Valley. Prior to that, her work as a sommelier, first at New York City’s Veritas and then at PRESS in St. Helena, has been covered by many of the wine industry’s top publications, and in 2013 she was named one of Food & Wine’s top sommeliers in the country. Her writing has appeared in World of Fine Wine, GuildSomm, Robb Report, Sommelier Journal, Le Pan, and Vinous, among others. At Vinous, Kelli was a key member of the maps team, and worked with famed Italian cartographer Alessandro Masnaghetti to map many of the appellations of Napa Valley. In 2011, she co-founded a small wine brand called Houndstooth and she also made a brief appearance in 2015's documentary Somm II: Into the Bottle. Her book, Napa Valley, Then & Now, was released in November of 2015 and has received enormous critical acclaim, winning both the IACP award for Best New Wine, Beer, or Spirits Book and a Graphis design award. In October of 2016, Kelli led a wine tasting seminar at Fortune Magazine's Most Powerful Women's Summit in Laguna Niguel, CA. Between 2017 and 2019 she worked as Senior Staff Writer at the educational nonprofit GuildSomm, where her writing won her two coveted Roederer Awards. She was nominated for Sommelier/Wine Director of the Year (2017) by Wine Enthusiast magazine, who then named her a top 40 Under 40 wine influencer in 2018. On the book front, she contributed to the most recent additions of the World Atlas of Wine and the Oxford Companion to Wine, as well as the Academie d… Read More