When I was 17 I landed my first ever job, serving over-extracted, over-priced coffee at a drive-thru franchise in Perth. It was my first taste of early mornings, observing the merit many people seem to bring to the phrase ‘don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee’, with conversations cut short in open yawning mouths. It was fumbling my way through barista basics, learning the choreography to espresso brewing with the customers in cars idling outside, and on several occasions sending the wrong drink to the wrong person when I (often) found myself out of rhythm with the dance.

After a calamitous 2 months of work I was sat down on a stepladder mid-shift, where my manager fired me on account of being ‘too slow’ and was promptly sent home 4 hours early. Though my younger self was crushed at the time, it’s a funny story almost 10 years later. With my debut to the working world swiftly cut short at the drive-thru, I was determined to bounce back and prove myself as a capable, competent, efficient employee.

Somehow this was the beginning of 9 years in coffee, moving slowly but surely from Sunday brunch cafes in Perth suburbs, to the heaving specialty shops in the heart of Perth city. By the time I decided (somewhat impulsively) Melbourne was the place for me, my barista skills were well established, and I felt ready to put them to the test in the world’s coffee capital. I jumped in with nothing but a gut feeling that this city is where I am supposed to be, and when I found myself working behind the bar at Market Lane within my first month of moving, I couldn’t have asked for a softer landing.

It’s funny, I never saw myself working in coffee for long enough to just about qualify for cumulative long service leave, the years just passed on by. Without realising, the barista role I so desperately craved to prove myself in was somehow the only thing I was fully qualified to do.

It was a sunny Sunday morning at the Queen Vic Market last year when I decided it was finally time for barista work and I to part ways.

Picture it with me:
There’s an everlasting line out the door.
The EFTPOS reader is broken.
We’re training a new staff member.
The main espresso grinder insists on giving us inconsistent shots despite our best efforts.
A customer has gladly accepted a coffee that wasn’t for them.
There are coffees sitting waiting to be run, the table number has been left at the counter, no one can recall who placed the order.
There are dishes piling up.
There are tourists taking aesthetic photos of us for Instagram.
There’s someone coming up to the coffee machine asking if the coffee beans that list hazelnut as a tasting note have added hazelnut, telling us they can’t have hazelnut because they’re allergic.

The average mildly annoying hallmarks of a busy weekend service. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then it happens.

I’m clearing up dirty dishes, I’m resetting the table layout the customers insisted on moving themselves to fit their party of 8, all that remains on the table is a half-drunk latte, it slips off the plate when I pick it up and the cold milky leftover liquid falls perfectly onto my foot. Having recently rediscovered the Merrell Hydromocs in my shoe collection (for those unfamiliar, think the Inner North’s answer to Crocs) and insisting they’re a suitable work shoe, my sock is immediately saturated. It’s so busy I have no choice but to squelch through the rest of the shift.

And that was all it took.

I’d decided definitively that it was time to look for the next thing, but where to start?

Of course I’d previously thought about moving on from barista work. Seeing my peers graduate their degrees and getting their “grown up” jobs, the feeling of being left behind in the big race of life starts creeping in. It felt like I’d spent my early twenties wistfully meandering through life I’d forgotten to pick something “career worthy” to wholly apply myself to. No one talks about how daunting it feels to leave hospitality after committing so many years of your life to it. The barrier to entry in the hospitality industry is so comparatively low, which is a fabulous thing, but it makes applying for anything outside of the niche you’ve carved out for yourself feel impossible.

The voice of your inner saboteur can be boisterous and convincing.

It’s easy to picture your job application being read by a room of big meanies all saying:
“You don’t have the right skills, you don’t know the right people, you don’t have any qualifications, why would we take you seriously?” That’s if they even give you the time of day at all, we all know how looking for a job can feel like screaming into an endless well of nothingness.

This easily could’ve been my experience stepping from coffee into wine, and I’m so glad it was nothing of the sort.

When I applied for this job, my wine experience could be pretty well summarised into knowing I love a pet-nat in the summertime and a pinot noir in winter, and how sick it was growing up in Perth’s Swan Valley wine region. I arrived at my interview with the search “wine knowledge for beginners” still open in my phone browser, hoping a quick read on the tram would compensate for all I was yet to know.

What I did know is how coffee and wine are two sides of the same coin. Both tell intricate stories of place through taste, serving as means to foster community and genuinely connect with people we would never otherwise cross paths with, all made possible through a devotion to agricultural practice. I knew, as a Gemini, I could comfortably yap to anyone and this would be an asset working at a shop like Crooked, and hoped my willingness to learn could outweigh the inconvenience of training someone so green to the industry.

Evidently, this would be enough to secure me the job and successfully move out of full-time hospitality to full-time ‘doing whatever we need to assist operating a wine store’. Playing records and pouring our signature latte glasses of wine on Friday nights, I often get comments of ‘you must have the best time at this job’. I always confirm it’s true, it is as fun as it looks and I love that I get to do this.

Now it’s been a few months into my barista retirement, 5am alarms are a distant memory and my socks are entirely milkless.

As I suspected there are endless things to learn about wine, it’s evident I’ll be a student indefinitely with our sensational shop manager Jordi as my mentor. By industry standards I’m still far from qualified to sell wine full time and I doubt I’ll ever have what it takes to forge a career as a sommelier. But by Crooked standards, I can confidently tell you which orange wine will taste the best when shared at Edi Gardens, and what it means when something tastes like ‘cool girl energy’ or ‘botox’.

And you know what? To me that is a far greater accomplishment.

Claire Daley (she/her) is the personality hire at Crooked Drinks, a little wine store on Smith Street in Collingwood on the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung poeple of the Kulin nation.