Not many sommeliers have a stage as large as Emily Wines does. Overseeing a wine club with more than 650,000 members and directing wine lists at 55 Cooper’s Hawk restaurants and counting, the Master Sommelier has incredible influence over how many Americans experience wine.
Wines serves as vice president of wine experience for Cooper’s Hawk Winery & Restaurants, a U.S. company that sources wines from producers around the globe to create its own Cooper’s Hawk-labeled portfolio, served at its collection of dining establishments. Wines is tasked with selecting which wine regions and producers to work with to create the bottlings that will help grow the Cooper’s Hawk fanbase.
These days, Wines splits her time between Chicago, where Cooper’s Hawk is based, and Oakland, Calif., which she calls home. The flexibility allows her to have one foot in wine country (she is just an hour from Napa) and to have a better understanding of her customers.
Wines began her career in fine dining at 19 years old working in Seattle and the Bay Area. She was immediately surrounded by the great wines of the world, opening the likes of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti on a regular basis. That’s not a typical sommelier experience, and Wines is well aware of that.
“I started my career very ‘high’ in the world of wine. We were dealing with wine as a luxury commodity or wine for the 1 percent,” explains Wines, who joined the Cooper’s Hawk team in 2017. “What I've always loved about being a sommelier was the opportunity to make people feel comfortable with wine. Cooper’s Hawk is democratizing wine: It’s wine for everyone and that’s something that really appealed to me.”
Cooper’s Hawk is currently in a stage of reinvention. In 2019, the company opened Esquire by Cooper’s Hawk restaurant in downtown Chicago, earning a Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence for its list of over 1,000 labels; the Cooper’s Hawk’s line was presented alongside the great wines of the world, from Château Lafite Rothschild to Dominus Estate. The company closed Esquire in July 2023 to focus on more casual wine concepts, including a new line of Roman-style pizzerias called Piccolo Buco. “We can replicate that a lot easier and bring it to more markets,” explains Wines. (Get more details here.)
Wines made headlines in 2020 when she was named chair of the Court of Master Sommeliers, an educational and certification program for wine professionals, during a tumultuous, scandal-plagued time for the organization. (Wines earned her own M.S. title in 2008). She has been a key player in restructuring and rehabbing the Court over the past three years, increasing outreach for diversity. Her core belief is that the Court serves to “help people drink better. It supports grape growers, it supports the industry, it keeps innovation and exploration alive for consumers. So it’s much bigger than just those of us working in the industry.”
Wines spoke with Wine Spectator editorial assistant Julia Larson about the challenges of being a high-profile queer woman in the wine industry, her predictions for the next big wine cities in the U.S., and what she means by “Lady Gaga Oreos” wines.
Wine Spectator: Cooper’s Hawk operates in a way that, once a month, wine club members receive their wine at a restaurant and have the opportunity to try all of the wines available. What is it like developing a wine program for 650,000 different palates?
It’s not easy—the scale at which we operate is really different. Sometimes I think it’d be really fun to show our restaurant guests something like a Finger Lakes Cabernet Franc. Well, that’s impossible because there’s no way we could ever find enough wine in the Finger Lakes to do a one-off offering of that. But there are certain things that are doable; for example, we had a new wine from Slovenia that was awesome.
I always have to think about wines that are right down the center and crowd-pleasing, like Cabernet. And then there are a couple of wines per year that I refer to as “Lady Gaga Oreos.” Those are the wines that are kind of quirky, where people will say things like “I've never heard of wine from Slovenia!” With those, we get to take people out on a journey, because they can always taste the wine—every bottle that we sell in the restaurants is open. It costs them nothing. If they’re saying, I want my Cabernet or I want my sweet red, that’s okay. We've got to accommodate those who want to expand their knowledge and those who really want to stay in their comfort zone.
Was there any wine that you thought could be a curveball that ended up being a home run?
That Slovenian white! I thought: “Oh no, this is going to be Lady Gaga Oreos.” In other words, I thought people would be saying, “That's interesting, but no.” But it blew out the door. Our guests loved it. It was really great to see that “strange” is not always a deterrent. The wine is a blend of Furmint, Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Yellow Muscat—a lot of kind of wacky, aromatic white grapes—so it was fresh, just slightly off-dry and super zippy. Perfect summertime wine. Next year, we’ve slated a red blend of Bonarda and Malbec from Argentina as well as a white blend from the Baden region of Germany, and other more unique wines.
You came out at a young age. What has it been like to establish yourself as a queer woman in this industry?
Pretty easy considering I was living in Seattle and the Bay Area—very gay-friendly places. It’s trickier stepping outside of the bubble of those urban areas. Even moving to Cooper’s Hawk, at first I didn’t know how comfortable I would feel being out. I still have moments where I just don't want to be judged. But it is important to me to be out, because I think it’s such a good example for the younger folks that are out there who feel invisible or unrepresented. It’s good for them to think, “Okay, here’s somebody who’s successful in their profession. I could see myself being like that. If there’s a place for her, there’s a place for me.”
What do you think are the next up-and-coming wine cities?
We have a lot of locations in Florida. That’s been a very successful place for us because there are a lot of retirees and they like to drink wine. They love happy hours! I’m really excited for us to go into the Atlanta area. That is another very thirsty community that’s enthusiastic about wines, and I’ve discovered they’re more open to unique wines than I originally had thought. I also can’t wait for Cooper’s Hawk to get to the Minneapolis area. It’s a very big wine-drinking community and they love their Cabernet.
What’s an underrated wine region right now?
I’ve been pushing really hard for Sicily. I know that it’s hardly off the radar anymore and there are a lot of sommeliers who love it as well. Southern Italy in general is still underrated by most of the general public, not just Sicily but Calabria. There are some interesting wines coming out of that part of the world that are really accessible and delicious.
The majority of Cooper’s Hawk restaurants are located in the Midwest, for now. What wines are Midwest consumers excited about right now?
We meet people where they’re at, and at Cooper’s Hawk, some people are at the very beginning. So we offer a lot of sweet wines! We’re Midwest-based, so we’ve got some fruit wine. Currently I’m working on creating more sweet offerings, but with a twist. I’m really looking at the trend of bottled cocktails and thinking about how we can apply that. I like the idea of offering sweeter options that aren’t just satisfying the sweet tooth, but also have more sophisticated flavors.
We’re also expanding our international offerings. We feature a “wine of the month,” which is an opportunity to tell cool stories about unique wines. We’re offering a dry Zibibbo from Sicily, and I’m super excited to see how people respond. It’s a great opportunity to educate our members about how a familiar grape (it’s the same grape as Moscato, which they know well) can be made in other styles. We have this incredible audience of 650,000 people—they’re leaning in. Our restaurants are primarily in the suburbs, where people drink a lot of wine but are overlooked. So we’re creating a wine culture in those places. We want to bring some more high-end wines to our members, and just seeing the way they’re already leaning into that is exciting.
