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It is with great pleasure that I write to welcome Christy Frank to the ranks of WRO wine columnists. As you’ll learn, Christy is an outstanding writer – quick, clear, and funny, but also deeply knowledgeable.
The attributes on either side of that last comma – funny and deeply
knowledgeable – don’t often go together. Lots and lots of serious
education tends to “beat the funny” out of many people, and those who
dodge that beating often just start taking themselves too seriously to
stay funny. There’s no doubting the depth and extent  of
Christy’s education, which has yielded a B.A. from Cornell, a Master of
Economics in Accounting and Finance from the London School of
Economics, and an MBA from Columbia, plus a Diploma from WSET and
certification as an Advanced Sommelier from the Court of Master
Sommeliers.
Yikes.
Book learnin’ is what my old friends on pipeline crews back in Chicago
would have called all of that, but they wouldn’t have been able to
dismiss Christy on that score, as her education has been leavened by
lots of practical experience in the wine trade. She started in retail
in a wine shop in Boston, then shifted to high-level work as a senior
brand manager with Möet Hennessy USA and one of its superb earlier
incarnations, Schieffelin & Somerset, which was a phenomenal company
when I was breaking into wine writing. She worked on both wine and
spirits brands in those years…some of the world’s most famous and
successful.
Enviable as that job was, Christy had been envisioning a wine shop in
her mind for years, refining the concept during visits to vast numbers
of shops as a trade member and avid consumer and learner. The evolved
idea took shape in Frankly Wines, a shop in lower Manhattan that she
opened in 2007 with a strong focus on wines from the Southern
Hemisphere. It earned recognition as one of New York’s best shops by
publications including the Financial Times, GrubStreet, Wine-Searcher and the New York Times.
Christy sold that shop in 2017, shifting to work on behalf of DNS wines,
an importing company focused predominantly on European wines while also
devoting time to her own consulting venture, Glass Half Full
Consulting. She undertook a wide range of tasks in this latter
capacity, assisting wine shops during their launch phase or revivifying
established ones, but also working for restaurants on their wine lists
and staff training. Christy also developed marketing plans for entities
as dissimilar as a luxury goods company and a natural wine newsletter,
and somehow found time to launch a canned cocktail brand, Hamlet Hound,
during all of this. Oh, and she worked for Wine Australia for three
years as Education Development Manager, which shows how comprehensively
she has been engaged with almost every facet of the global wine trade
from production through importation, distribution and sales (both on-
and off-premise), and extending to the cultivation and education of
consumers.
But there’s more. Christy was writing and tasting during all of this,
contributing pieces for multiple outlets as and participating on the
tasting panels for the New York Times and Wine & Spirits Magazine.
She also began work back in 2015 (before she sold Frankly Wines) as the
consulting wine buyer and marketing director for yet another retail
shop, Copake Wine Works up in the Hudson Valley / Berkshires area, and
remains heavily engaged in that venture though she still lives in New
York City, while raising three kids.
Sheer exhaustion can “beat the funny” out of someone just as surely as
loads of serious education or the pretentiousness that often accompanies
accomplishment. For these reasons, it isn’t easy to understand how
Christy has maintained the humor you’ll find in her first column for WRO
this week, or how she manages to interweave so much information with so
much fun.
Those who know me on the professor side of my life are aware that I’ve
got a theory about everything, at least provisionally, so let me try
this one on you: I know lots of really smart people who aren’t funny,
but I don’t know anybody who is really funny who isn’t also smart. My
guess about Christy is that her light and funny side is part of her
foundation, a part that has simply proved too resilient for any of her
educational or occupational attainments to weigh down.
I believe her first column will corroborate my hypothesis, but please
have a look for yourself. Roughly half of her future columns will offer
insights for consumers into the workings of the wine trade, with the
other half likely being dispersed across her very wide range of
interests.
Welcome aboard, Christy…all of us at WRO look forward to the ride ahead!
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