TCNJ

38 The College of New Jersey Magazine A music major at TCNJ, she played the piccolo in classical ensembles and continued on to New York University for a master's degree in music performance. She taught music at Princeton Day School and Mercer County Community College, married her high school sweetheart, and settled into "living in the 'burbs." It was a special bottle on her first wedding anniversary, a 1995 Château La Nerthe Chateauneuf-du-Pape, that changed her trajectory. "That bottle was the 'aha' wine moment for me." It was then, she says, that wine turned from something that was nice to have at a meal to something she started thinking deeply about and had to know more. Around the same time, her husband was offered a job on the West Coast, and the couple moved to San Francisco. Sekhar had a hard time finding work teaching music in California and auditioned, unsuccessfully, for a spot in a symphony. "There are like 50 piccolo jobs in the world to be had," she says. "The odds are poor, regardless of skill level." Channeling her love of wine, Sekhar instead took a part-time job in a tasting room at Rosenblum Cellars in Alameda. She was quickly promoted to tasting room manager, but, about two years in, decided she wanted to make wine. She left her office job and became an hourly harvest intern at Rosenblum. "The harvest is totally grunt labor," she says. For years, she worked 14-hour days, seven days a week, for months without a break. She walked up and down steep slopes in the vineyard and sorted grape clusters by hand. She lifted 60-gallon barrels onto racks. She climbed into open-top tanks to shovel out skins and pulp from the fermenting juice of the grapes. "And I loved it," she says. " California's got no shortage of boutique wine labels producing single-vineyard pinot noir. But Shalini Sekhar's pinots stand out." — San Francisco Chronicle

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