While growing up in the small town of West Newton, Pennsylvania, Alan Uchrinscko soon became disenchanted and realized there must be more to the world. He applied to several big city schools and wound up at the University of Chicago where he studied Medieval History. While in school, he took a job as a bartender at the University of Chicago Pub, which featured 36 taps and 350 bottles of beer from around the world, peaking his interest in the world of Food & Beverage. He progressively gravitated toward wine, and began moonlighting at a wine store in Chicago where he was Beer Manager but it was the wine that held his interest most strongly. A year later he moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in wine.
Alan’s first job in the Manhattan wine business was working in the warehouse of a wine auction house for just above minimum wage. He soon moved on to the Burgundy Wine Company, where he studied wine for several years under one of the world’s leading Burgundy experts, the late Albert Hotchkin. While at the Burgundy Wine Company, the three person sales team placed #1 in Zagat’s New York City Marketplace for Customer Service each year. Alan later became Assistant Vice-President of Christie’s North American Wine Department giving him further access to the world’s finest and rarest wines.
After returning home to Western Pennsylvania, he found a fellow Pennsylvanian who had returned home from New York, and became sommelier at Mio Kitchen & Wine Bar in Aspinwall to much acclaim, culminating in Mio being awarded “Best New Restaurant in Pittsburgh 2008″.
He then joined Nemacolin Woodlands Resort as Sommelier at the AAA Five-Daimond, Mobil Five -Star award-winning Lautrec Restaurant. He was quickly promoted to Wine & Spirits Manager for the entire resort and directed the largest wine cellar in the state of Pennsylvania as well as Nemacolin’s inimitable Académie du Vin.
He has hosted countless tastings and seminars for institutions as varied as the New York Stock Exchange, Columbia University Law School, and Allegheny General Hospital and was described by the New York Times as “…an enthusiastic, plain-spoken fellow who talks about wine the way a Knicks fan talks about basketball…” For the past several years he has been working on a comprehensive guide to the wines of Chablis & the Yonne Valley.
