So, you may be wondering… who exactly is the girl behind the wine glass?

To put it simply, my name is Yesse and I’m an aerospace engineer by day and a wine consultant by night. (That sort of makes me sound like a superhero… ohh, I like that.) Maybe that’s all you care to know about me, and if so, that’s totally fine. Boom, done, good day to you.

But, I’m guessing if you made the effort to click on my “About Me” tab, that you likely want to know a little more. You may already know my tagline, so you want to know how I became the girl behind the glass. For that, we need to go back a little bit. Buckle in, folks, it’s story time! Like many kids, in elementary school, I proudly told my teacher I wanted to be an astronaut and then I never fully outgrew that stage in life. I always have had an interest in all things airplanes, space, and flight from a very young age, thanks, in large part to my absolutely incredible Marine Pilot grandfather who was one heck of a storyteller. On my father’s side of the family I was the first female born in quite a few generations. So, whenever holidays would come around, there I would be sitting on the arm of my grandfather’s recliner, with my boy cousins all crowded in around me as we’d listen to him read us books every morning. Fairy tales in the morning turned into learning how to play chess in his den. It was a sacred space that smelled of sweet pipe tobacco, leather, and wood (…. hmmm, I wonder what delicious beverage transports me back to this nostalgic space with aroma notes likes these). As we played chess my grandfather would regale me with his (likely, slightly age inappropriate) adventures as a Corsair pilot—he so loved to fly.

Those stories led this San Diego girl to take a giant leap of faith, follow her dreams, and study Aerospace Engineering at The University of Alabama (Roll Tide!). Yes, the tagline is true. After four years of college, I was very lucky to accept a job that brought me back home to sunny San Diego to happily work as an Aerospace Engineer designing airplanes. Now, a tiny bit of time has passed since I graduated college (please, don’t actually ask me how many years) and my career within the aerospace industry progressed and changed. I now manage a truly incredible team of engineers that blow my socks off with their ingenuity. I’m lucky that I get to work with some really amazing people. But, work isn’t always great, and I definitely had a rough patch, a really rough patch if I’m being completely honest. I’m lucky that I have an incredibly supportive family to come home to. Mr. Cork Copilot is seriously the best. So, when I came home from work one day and told him that I wanted to “go back to school” to study something I had always been interested in, he smiled and told me to go for it. Maybe it was the hormones that finally made me take the leap of faith (I had just given birth to my incredibly adorable son a few months before), but whatever it was, I’m so glad I finally got the courage to start my journey to study wine, because, as they say, the rest is Cork Copilot history.