The Garage in Harvard Square is known for piercing parlors and Newbury Comics. But it’s also home to the Commonwealth Wine School, run by Cambridge’s Jessica Sculley. The school offers certification-level programs from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, the Wine Scholar Guild, and the Society of Wine Educators for professionals and civilians.
Sculley, 48, reflects on her past as a teacher, artist, and wine connoisseur — and shares her favorite summertime sips. Tell me about your job. I’m the founder and director of Commonwealth Wine School.
Our physical location is in the Garage at Harvard Square — it’s in a funky building and a funky part of town. We look, I suppose, like the more serious group that’s there, but we try to have a really good time. Even though we’re called Commonwealth Wine School, we mostly teach about wine.
We also teach about beer and spirits and cocktails and sake and cider. We’re really here for either professionals in the industry who want to polish up or move their careers along and learn more, but also just enthusiasts: people who really like a glass of wine and want to know what they’re drinking. Advertisement What’s going on at The Garage, anyway? It was going to be renovated, right? COVID really did change everything, didn’t it? Trinity Property owns the garage.
We have a great relationship with them, and they’ve always been really open from the beginning, because I signed our lease moments before COVID happened. Initially, their permitting was for office space, and I think COVID changed the needs and the finance around office space completely. .
.. Over the last many months, all sorts new and exciting businesses have moved in.
There’s a new club that’s moved in; there’s a new arcade. There’s certainly a lot of exciting stuff going on there, especially for our particularly youthful population, which is what we have right in the Square. How did you come to this interesting position? I was a teacher for a long time.
My background is in the sciences, and I was a science teacher and a math teacher at mostly the middle school and elementary levels, but a little high school and college. I was also always an artist from the time I was a kid, even when I was in my twenties. Advertisement I moved back from Minnesota, where I had gone to college and grad school and where I had been teaching, and started a school not so different from Commonwealth Wine School, except it was for the book arts: printmaking, paper-making, and all that jazz.
I did all sorts of stuff that one does in their twenties, including still teaching math on the side, because all artists need to do something else — or many of them do. I moved around a little bit. Right around 2005, I met my husband, and we moved shortly thereafter to Pittsburgh.
I’d always loved wine. I come from an Italian family, and let me tell you, none of the wine on my family’s table was ever good wine. It was always lovingly called table wine, but it was always there.
It was never taboo in my in my house. But I never liked it until I was a teenager and got the taste of some really good wine and thought, ‘Actually, this is kind of interesting.’ I was a teacher and I was an artist, which necessarily meant I had no money, and so really getting into wine was cost prohibitive to me.
When we got married and moved to Pittsburgh, it was supposed to be a two-year stint that went on for seven years before I managed to get us back to Boston. At that time, when I had my daughter, I didn’t go back to teaching. I thought: ‘You know what? I have this infant who’s lovely, and I treasure being with her.
But I could really learn about wine.’ Advertisement I signed up for a class. I loved it, and at that point I just kind of went down the rabbit hole.
I geeked out. When we moved back to Boston, I had already started tasting groups back in Pittsburgh, where I would invite my friends over ..
. We would put our kids in a morning preschool program, and I would teach them about wine, and they wouldn’t spit out maybe as much as they should have. Let’s say it was a very sane way to have toddlers at least once a week.
When I moved back to Boston, I started teaching at Grape Experience Wine School, teaching mainly out of the Boston Center for Adult Education. [Grape founder] Adam Chase and I merged Grape Experience into Commonwealth Wine School, so that we became the official program provider for all of the WSET [Wine Spirit Education Trust] courses, which really meant that we were no longer just focusing only on wine. We were bringing in spirits and sake, and they’ve just started off their new beer programming.
We have all of these extraordinary content experts, and they’re all sharing their passion, knowledge, and excitement. Did you ever suspect you’d grow up to do this? Was there an early spark? I grew up in Providence and was raised by a single mom. She was very culturally oriented and educationally focused.
She would bring us up to Boston to go to the Science Museum and to the MFA. She would bring us up for doubleheaders, where we’d sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park. She was an architecture professor at Roger Williams.
She would take me out of school when the architecture students would come up to Boston, and we would visit Harvard Square, and she would point out the buildings. That was sort of my experience with the place, feeling like Boston was the capital of New England. Advertisement In Providence, the restaurant culture wasn’t anything like what it became in the ‘90s or 2000s or certainly today.
The really good food was at my house, when my grandmother would come to visit. She was an extraordinary Italian cook. I came from certainly a middle-class background, but middle class with no extra funds.
I was really lucky in that my best friend growing up was part of these international summer camps that originated from a woman who grew up in Barrington, Rhode Island. After World War II, she went to work with refugee kids in Europe and built a summer camp for them, with the idea that that they would grow up playing together and living together and never go to war again. There was a little Rhode Island contingent.
There was a house up in New Hampshire, and I became part of that. The woman then became headmistress of an alternative school in Switzerland, and they gave me a full scholarship. I went there for my last couple years of high school, and when I was there, it opened up a whole new world for me that I couldn’t even previously imagine.
To say, ‘I went to school in Switzerland’ sounds super posh and snooty. It was not that. We had cold showers, and we peeled our own potatoes and cleaned.
It was very simple living. But the people who went there were from all sorts of backgrounds, from wealthy backgrounds in Europe. Sometimes their parents just plopped them there because they didn’t want to be bothered raising kids.
Advertisement One of my best friends was a young woman from Tuscany, which I knew nothing about. I stayed with her family one Easter. They were this British aristocratic family that ended up moving to Tuscany, like an Edith Wharton novel or something.
I went there, and it blew my mind. They had an old farmhouse surrounded by vineyards. I’m not kidding.
They passed a joint around at the table. I was a real goody-two-shoes, and I was mortified. I must have been 16.
They passed wine around. I said, ‘Gee, I just really don’t like it, thanks.’ And my friend said, ‘No, you should really taste it.
Maybe you’ve never had wine that you’ve liked before.’ Oh my gosh, it just blew my socks off. I felt like a grown-up for the first time, having that wine.
It was such a teaser for how flavors can make your brain be imaginative and creative and romantic. I transferred to Macalester College, and I quickly realized that if I wanted spending money, because I always loved to go out to eat, I needed a job. I answered a want ad for a cleaning lady.
I had to take a bus to get to this woman who was a cookbook writer, and she was doing tests for her second cookbook. Her name was Lynne Rosetto Kasper, and she actually had a cooking show on Minnesota Public Radio, but I think it became nationally syndicated on NPR. I would clean for her; she would cook.
She’d send me back with all of the food that they had tested that day — so I was eating really good food. I would listen to her shows on Saturday morning on the radio. One day, she had on Mary Ewing-Mulligan, the first female master of wine.
And that, to me, was completely eye-opening. I listened to her journey of how nobody had ever really encouraged her to learn more because the [wine industry] had been the purview of older white men who came from money. To listen to her story was just like: ‘You can do that as a job!’ What local restaurants have a really good wine list? My little neighborhood spot, Dear Annie, is really fun.
They’re always changing their wine list. And, of course, they’re very focused on natural wine, which is their bent. In the Square, in my neighborhood, I think Alden & Harlow brings in some really interesting wines.
That’s fun. The Grafton Group, which is now Hourly Oyster and Russell House Tavern, et cetera, recently brought on Cat Silirie as their beverage manager, and they’re increasingly more interesting. Where do you like to eat when you’re not working? We go to Colette, which I think is an interesting little restaurant at the Porter Square Hotel, with some nice French wines.
My daughter goes to school in the Back Bay, and I’ve always loved Boston proper as a place to go: Bistro du Midi, Saltie Girl — what’s that little Mexican place that pours such great drinks on Dartmouth? Lolita? What are you drinking this summer? I love that question. Let’s not neglect just how great good rosés can be. You know, rosé from Tavel AOC in France is a little bit darker than your typical light, salmon-colored Provençal rosés, and they have more spicy strawberry flavors.
I think they’re so good cold. They have a little depth in them. You can bring them down while people are sitting around the grill and share them, and they’re interesting; there’s something good to talk about.
I kind of am in love with a lot of wineries on Long Island right now, and it’s not just because I like to eat and drink local. I wouldn’t drink them if I didn’t think they were fabulous. Wölffer Estate makes a really delicious rosé called Summer in a Bottle, which is just fun and pretty.
And Paumanok Vineyards is one of my absolute favorites on the North Fork of Long Island. Last night, we had Sauvignon Blanc from a producer out in the Sonoma Valley called Passaggio. And this woman’s story is so interesting; [Cynthia Cosco] was a police officer who got into making wine.
She has relationships with growers, and she makes all sorts of different grapes. And this was a Sauvignon Blanc from a couple years ago, and it had great herbal flavors, and it was so sharply acidic and beautiful. Any tips to avoid wine hangovers? There’s been so much research about that lately, and also about people who have allergies to wine.
If you drink a whole lot of alcohol, you’re going to probably get a hangover, unless you’re really used to drinking tons of alcohol and you’ve become a little resistant to it. So the first thing I would say is moderation, truly, in all things. But I do think there are some wines that really give people problems.
I hear a lot of people talk about red wine: ‘I get a headache; I get a hangover. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.’ There’s been a lot of research lately that shows that it’s actually increased antihistamines in some wine that seem to really affect people.
It makes sense, right? I’m not a doctor, just to put that out there, but it makes sense that if you’re triggering people’s immune system by loading them up with antihistamines, their immune system is then going to go into overdrive and either make their nose run, give them a headache, or make them congested. The preventative hangover cure is, for every glass of wine, have a glass of water, truly. And before you go to bed, have a couple glasses of water.
Even though you’re going to get up in the middle of the night to pee, it’s worthwhile. Interview has been edited and condensed. Kara Baskin can be reached at kara.
[email protected] . Follow her @kcbaskin .
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