“I wanted to know more. It was not my intentional path, and I just remember tasting this burgundy and thinking: what is this? How is this possible? Who are the people behind it? What are the stories behind it?” ~ Alicia Towns Franken

It’s a curiosity pairing!

Alicia Towns Franken embodies a tantalizing combination: wine —as another in my periodic series on curiosity and our senses–and an actual boots-on-the-ground effort to encourage and enable curiosity where barriers have long existed.

Alicia is a sommelier and wine consultant who serves as executive director of Wine Unify, a nonprofit organization that has set out to level the playing field when it comes to wine. They foster wine education for underrepresented minority groups and amplify the voices of the people of color who are already thriving within the wine industry.

What if we make wine more accessible by encouraging curiosity more inclusively?

What if we give more people more ways to express what they are discovering through all of their senses?

We talked about balancing curiosity and comfort, getting to know the language of wine, appreciating that most of taste is smell, overcoming barriers to entry for people of color and younger generations, building a curiosity community, tasting your way through a whole case of wine over time, embracing curiosity rooted in possibility — and pairing champagne with French fries.

What I would love for people to do is go to wine tastings… When you put your nose in a glass of wine, just take a moment: smell it. What does it smell like before you even taste it? And then taste it. And then taste it with food. And how has it changed? Just ask yourself some questions. It does not have to be so highbrow.

Listen to Ep. 310: Wine & a Taste for Curiosity, with Alicia Towns Franken

Alicia Towns Franken is executive director at Wine Unify and has her own enterprise, Towns Wine Co., dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices in the wine industry.

Check out these other women in wine whom Alicia mentions: Nathalie Vaché Scargle at Peter Michael Winery and Dini Rao at Life in Vino. And don’t miss DLynn Proctor whose reference to the forest floor was so memorable to me.

If you enjoyed this sensational conversation, you might enjoy these C2BC Classics: Making Sense: Curiosity & Smell, with Venkatesh Murthy; Curiosity & the Sensational Museum, with Alison Eardley; & Cultivating a Curious Palate, with Jack Zhang.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Down by the Bank” by Barstool, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.