My Personal Experience With Wine Thus Far In My Life

    Hello Everyone! My name is Chase Ackerman and I'm currently in my final semester at Virginia Tech studying computational modeling and data analytics with minors in math and statistics. After hearing that mouthful, you may be wondering how in the world I ended up in a class about wine. Although a lot of what I do in my classes involves crunching numbers and typing thousands of lines of code, I have a ton of interests completely separate from that classwork.

    I grew up in a household where my parents would indulge in the occasional glass of wine during dinner and they always served bottles of wine whenever we had guests over. When I was younger, I never paid much attention to anything pertaining to wine and kept a mindset that it was just something that all adults drank mostly at dinner parties. My parents weren't overly strict about letting me try a taste of their glasses of wine whenever I wanted, but the taste definitely didn't appeal to my undeveloped senses. That changed slightly in recent years, and now I'm able to appreciate about any glass of wine with a meal at a restaurant.

    Going into this class, I really knew nothing about the variety of wine produced, the way you're supposed to drink it, or even the proper way to open or store a bottle. I had zero preference of which wine to order, and I would almost always order whatever my girlfriend was getting. I decided to take this class to fulfill my final free elective credit requirements, as well as to set myself up for my adult life whenever I need to talk the talk at work or family events. The same way people emphasize that most business is done on the golf course, I feel like there's a ton to say about business done over a meal and a glass of wine. Just in the first two weeks of the course, I feel like I've learned a ton of things that I'll carry with me for life! If I leave this class learning anything, I hope to at least find out my favorite variety of wine.