Words from Francesca Marie Fontana’s interview with Jacki Zykan for the Wall Street Journal’s series ‘How’d You Get That Job?’.
"We do a single barrel program with Old Forester and I manage that inventory. So I’ll spend half the day drilling into barrels in the warehouse and the other half of the day doing an interview or a cocktail class or working on our drink strategy.
I’d say I can taste (and spit) up to hundreds of sample tastes per month, but it fluctuates depending on what releases and expressions we’re working on.
We do multiple steps of quality control with all of our products at Brown-Forman, so I’ll taste our bourbon right off the still, at six months maturation, at three and a half years maturation. New product development, also falls under my umbrella: deciding what that product will taste like, writing out tasting notes, things like that.
I also spend half my time on the road doing all kinds of trainings and events like trade shows and festivals. It’s so fun when you see someone who had this idea of what bourbon was or what whiskey was. Then they go, “wait a minute, I like this.””
