WINES: How Wine Mentoring Is Building Careers in Both Directions
A national six-month program pairs wine professionals one-on-one, and the people who have lived it say the learning never flows in only one direction.
Careers in wine rarely follow a straight line. People arrive from restaurant floors, cellar doors, marketing departments, classrooms and vineyards, and many of them reach a point where the next step is hard to see. A national mentoring initiative in Australia was built for exactly that moment, and after several years of steady growth, it offers a useful model for any hospitality or beverage community that wants to keep talent engaged and moving forward.
The Wine Industry Mentoring Program is run by Wine Communicators of Australia (WCA), and each year it places roughly fifty people in structured, one-on-one relationships with peers who share their interest in wine communication. The format is a six-month commitment designed to build confidence, sharpen skills and help participants imagine a bigger version of their professional future. To understand why it works, we spoke to WCA National Chair Lynda Schenk, who helped found the scheme, along with a mentor and a mentee from the current intake.
WCA itself has deep roots. Schenk explains that it grew out of the old Wine Press Club, which later merged with another body to form the organization that exists today. It is a member-based group with an active presence in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and its definition of a wine communicator is deliberately generous.
Winery owners, marketers, salespeople, retailers, sommeliers, restaurateurs, front of
house teams, maitre d's and educators all qualify, because anyone who talks to others about wine is part of the conversation. Alongside networking events, webinars, lunches held in conjunction with the major capital city wine shows, a communicators award and the Legend of the Vine honour for an industry elder, the mentoring programme has become one of its flagship offerings.
The scheme launched in 2019 with seed funding from Adelaide University, support Schenk says the team could not have started without. The first year proved so successful that Wine Australia joined as a major partner. A few years later the organizers widened the programme by bringing in the Australian Society of Viticulture and Enology and the Wine Industry Suppliers Association. Schenk believes it may be the first time all four bodies have collaborated on a whole of industry initiative, and she is open about her enthusiasm for that achievement.
Demand has certainly followed. More than one hundred people apply every year, yet funding stretches to only about fifty places, which this year means fifty two. Disappointed applicants are encouraged to try again the following year.
One of the smartest design changes came when the programme moved to three tiers of participant: early, mid and later career. Mid career professionals can now sit in the middle of a chain, mentoring someone newer to the industry while being mentored by someone more senior. Schenk says this has given the programme longevity, because people remain connected to it for longer, and it is common for former mentees to return as mentors. The structure quietly teaches a lesson that every healthy industry understands: expertise is meant to be passed along.
The matching process is thoughtful without being complicated. Applicants receive the list of available mentors for the year and nominate three preferences, and organizers try to honour a first choice wherever they can. Sessions take place online through the Mentorcloud platform, which comes with a suite of purpose built educational tools, and pairs who live near each other are free to meet in person.
Responsibility sits with the mentee, who arranges a monthly meeting across the six months. Schenk notes that many pairs stay in touch long after the formal period ends. Over seven years she has mentored four people herself, and she remains in contact with all of them.
Emily Hay knows the programme from both directions. She joined in its very first year as a mentee, paired with Gill Gordon-Smith, an artisan producer in McLaren Vale who is closely involved in educator training and coordinates the Wine and Spirit School at TAFE SA. At the time Hay had drifted into wine marketing and was uncertain how to progress. Gordon-Smith helped her see that the winding path behind her was not a liability. Each earlier role had given her a distinctive perspective and skill set, and recognizing that, Hay says, gave her the confidence to build on it. She credits WCA with a large share of her professional development.
Now in her third year as a mentor, Hay admits that stepping into the role was daunting at first. The reward has been watching someone else take bold steps in a safe and honest space. She is currently working with Ann McKenzie, who, like Hay is based in the Barossa, and their conversations range across professional development, future planning and the skills McKenzie already holds. The pair alternate between face-to-face catch-ups and video calls depending on how busy life becomes, and they usually meet about every three weeks, which is more often than the programme requires. Hay lets McKenzie set the direction and responds to whatever is happening in her world.
What surprised Hay most is how similar the benefits feel from either chair. A mentor offers a perspective from outside a mentee's friendship circle and outside their workplace, someone present only for them. Having been well mentored herself, she found that she had absorbed how to do it, and that the role pushes her to reflect on her own experience. In her view, both people learn throughout, and the best relationships are simply two honest humans talking.
For Callum Strong, one of this year's mentees, the programme arrived at a turning point. He left school at eighteen and worked his way through a variety of hospitality jobs, front and back of house. A growing fascination with wine led him toward winemaking, until he realized that wine is made in the countryside and that he preferred city life. He returned to Melbourne, rebuilt his hospitality career and rose to become restaurant manager and sommelier at Farmer's Daughters. Then, about two and a half years ago, an injury brought that career to an end.
Strong now teaches hospitality and wine education at William Angliss Institute in Melbourne, but the transition was not easy. His expertise lived on the restaurant floor and in wineries, which made job hunting a confusing exercise, and he recognized that he needed guidance on how to reposition himself and open new doors. The mentoring programme seemed a sensible place to start.
His mentor is Rob Hirst OAM, Chairman of wine and spirits distributor Tucker Seabrook Australia and co-founder of Australia's Wine List of the Year Awards. Strong describes the experience as brilliant. Hirst is generous with his time, available by text or phone outside scheduled sessions, and willing to look at everything from the job search to personal considerations, both the big picture and the fine detail.
Because Hirst has worn so many hats himself, he understands what a career change involves. Strong points out that his own network, though strong, had little relevance to the direction he wanted to take, and Hirst has helped him build a new one inside the industry far faster than he could have managed alone.
Having benefited so much, Strong expects to become a mentor himself once he is more established. He has already done grassroots hospitality mentoring through a social enterprise and saw first hand what it can offer others, which was part of what drew him to the programme in the first place.
Hospitality remains his passion, and he is candid about his sadness at no longer working a dining room. At Farmer's Daughters he thought of the space as his own dining room and of the people who walked in as guests rather than customers.
Teaching lets him pass that philosophy on, and it gives him a renewed sense of purpose and reward. If he can deepen his involvement in hospitality education, he says, that is a future he would welcome.
The stories of Schenk, Hay and Strong point to the same conclusion. A well-designed mentoring scheme does more than help one person find a job or a promotion. It builds relationships that outlast the formal programme, turns today's mentees into tomorrow's mentors and keeps knowledge circulating through an industry rather than leaving with the people who hold it. For anyone in wine, hospitality or the wider beverage trade wondering how to support their people, the lesson is simple: create the structure, make the matches thoughtfully and let honest conversation do the rest.
