Why I Gave Up Everything to Move to New Zealand and Study Wine

Diana Hawkins

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Sommelier Diana Hawkins is no stranger to making big moves—the former engineer quit the corporate world a few years ago to follow her passion for wine, which led to completing her Level 2 Certification through the Court of Master Sommeliers and working at top Chicago restaurants including Lula Café and Alinea. She took her latest leap about six months ago, moving to New Zealand to enroll as a wine science masters student at the University of Auckland. She’s tracking her experiences living in New Zealand, studying wine, and learning to make wine in this blog for Plate and on Instagram (@vinenoir).

I first became interested in learning how to make wine right after college. I went to a small tech school in California and majored in engineering, and during college, my friends and I would pool our money and buy wine together. We had no concept of what was good or bad wine or what we liked or didn’t; we just wanted to try new things and explore what our local wine store had to offer. That curiosity is what led me to eventually leave corporate America and pursue a career as a sommelier. Since then, I’ve built wine lists from scratch, run full beverage programs and worked under some amazing mentors. The confidence and comfort I feel on a restaurant floor is the exact opposite of how I felt during college.

My mother was the one who gave me the idea to learn about winemaking—she’d probably cringe to hear that, but it’s true. I was working 50+ hours a week for 50 weeks a year as a sommelier in Chicago, and was talking to her (yet again) about how I wanted to go back to school and travel and change my career path. She told me, “You should travel now, before you have kids. And just go to wine grad school. You’ve been talking about it for years.” She was right; I had been talking about it for years. I loved learning about wine as a sommelier, but I felt like something was missing. Everything I learned left me with more questions, and I started to realize that the questions I had were beyond the scope of what a sommelier needs to know to do the job. I was curious about things like fermentation kinetics and whether wild yeast were major drivers of terroir. I wanted to know specifically what was going on during cold soaking and about the chemical processes that drive a wine’s bottle development. I was looking for a level of detail that I knew I wasn’t going to find on GuildSomm. It was time to go back to school.

I typed “wine, grad school, English” into Google. I knew about U.C. Davis and all the usual suspects, but was hoping to find something else, and discovered there was a whole host of masters level oenology and viticulture programs abroad; New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa each had several. I’d always been jealous of my peers who spent a year abroad during college, so I decided to seriously look into those programs. I learned that not only were they accredited, but U.S. financial aid would also cover some of them.

I applied to and was accepted at the University of Auckland, and decided to enroll for a two-year program, which included one year of winemaking classes and one year of research. The university had been given a winery that was founded in 1972 on Waiheke Island—a “wine island” that focused on Bordeaux varieties and syrah. I’d never been to New Zealand, but I’d heard good things and their international student department was beyond helpful. So, I figured, what the hell?

Moving your entire life is hard. Moving to another country is much more so. My fiancé and I could only bring six bags between the two of us. We had to get FBI checks, medical exams, and visas and prove that we were in a legit relationship. In all, it took a full year of planning and two very intense months of packing and finalizing everything.

Onetangi Beach on Waiheke Island, where Hawkins livesPhoto: Diana Hawkins

It was also challenging to change our entire lifestyle. We swapped Chicago for an island off of an island with a year-round population of 10,000 people, reclaimed rainwater and a dining scene that was almost non-existent. Waiheke Island is a bit smaller than San Francisco, mostly undeveloped, and a 40-minute ferry ride east of Auckland. Imagine if Napa Valley happened to be right next to Venice Beach. That’s Waiheke Island. It’s a sleepy beach town surrounded by 30+ wineries and vineyards. Only a couple of wineries export to other countries; the rest sell what they make in their tasting rooms to the tourists who flock to the island every summer. We ended up snagging a studio apartment a block from a beach. Besides Kiwis, we met a lot of expats from Canada, France, Argentina and the U.S. Hitchhiking is common here, because everyone knows each other and is like-minded. It isn’t Chicago, but it’s a cool spot nonetheless, to live and start school.