Wine, Work, and Passion

Wine, Work, and Passion


Episode 2 – Morgan Bailey -Quintessa Winery

April 06, 2021

Welcome to the Wine, Work & Passion Podcast where our mission is to help you turn your passion for wine into a career.
In this special episode, we’ll talk to Morgan Bailey, Hospitality Director at Quintessa Winery, about the surge in available wine jobs as wineries reopen and the busy season approaches. Morgan will share her experience and expertise and offer advice on how you can find and secure a job right now in wine hospitality.




Book a career coaching session with Karen: https://go.oncehub.com/KarenWetzel



Karen Wetzel: Today, I'll talk to Morgan Bailey. She's the hospitality director at the majestic Quintessa winery in Napa Valley. A few weeks ago when I was visiting Quintessa. Morgan. And I got to talking and we discussed this podcast. We also talked about the [00:01:00] tremendous need to fill open positions that are available right now on the hospitality side of the wine industry.
And that was the inspiration for this interview. As our wineries are reopening and our busy seasons approaching the job market here in Napa is really heating up and finding qualified candidates to fill all the positions that were lost earlier in the year because of the pandemic is a real challenge.
This means there are job opportunities for everyone to that end, Morgan will share her experience and expertise of the hospitality side of the wine industry. And she'll talk about the types of roles that you might find at a prestigious property, like when Tessa be sure and stay tuned until the end when Morgan will give us actionable insights about how you can enter the world of wine.
By working in high-end hospitality. And now let's get to our interview.
Welcome, Morgan, can you please tell the audience who you are? Where do you work? What do you do in the wine industry? 
Morgan Baily: [00:02:02] Thank you so much for having me, Karen. My name is Morgan Bailey and I'm the hospitality director at Quintessa
Karen Wetzel: [00:02:09] state. Great. So just to set the table for the audience, Morgan and I met while she and a few coworkers were taking a class for me, a WSET level two class at the Napa Valley Wine Academy.
And they were nice enough to invite me out to Quintessa for a tasting. And of course, you don't say no to the stunning reputation of Quintessa. So of course, I went and it did not disappoint the views, the wine, the hospitality, it was all just really amazing. And during that visit, Morgan and I got talking about her role and wine jobs and that light bulb went off over my head and I said, boy, this would make a great podcast.
So here we are. So Morgan, thanks for agreeing to join me today. And. To helping our audience really discover your world. So can you tell us your story? How did you get started in the wine industry? What led you [00:03:00] here? So give us the beginning from soup to nuts.
Morgan Baily: [00:03:02] Yeah. Okay, perfect. I am one of those weird people who knows.
They want to work in hospitality. A lot of people just fall into it, but it's something that I knew I wanted to do from an early age. I started working in the restaurant industry. I worked at a restaurant in mill Valley. And I did everything from hosting to running food. And then I went to college for hospitality at Boston University.
When I had finished there, I went to culinary school in Pasadena because I thought that's what I wanted to do. And I ended up while I was in school reading about a company called hospitality. So it's a boutique hotel company based out of San Fra...