The OC Wine Society: 50 years strong

All right, for 50 years, one group has combined their love of wine with their love of helping others. That group, the Orange County Wine Society. What started as a few winemakers gathering monthly in a small shop-to-talk shop, about bloomed into something much bigger and greater. 800-plus members, imagine that, promoting the knowledge, appreciation, and responsibility when it comes to enjoying wine. And here's the key, raising some money to provide scholarships to eight California universities. What a great deal. Here to talk more about it is board member of the OC Wine Society, C.L. Keating. Welcome. Good morning. Thanks for being here. You don't need an excuse to drink wine, I always say. Not around here. You have a great one because it's benefiting so many universities. Tell us about this wine society. Well, as you said, it started 50 years ago. just a couple of home winemakers decided that they'd get together and start helping each other. And they started an organization that basically was oriented towards education, educating themselves, but also towards appreciation of wine and of course, responsible enjoyment of wine. And then they started just about five years after that, they thought they'd do a scholarship. So their first scholarship was $2,000 to one university. And over the last 45 years of of raising money, they've now raised over a million dollars, so we've raised a million dollars in scholarships. And this year, it'll be over $50,000 given to eight different universities and colleges in California. That's a lot of wine you're drinking. Yeah, well, we have a lot of help from other people drinking wine. How did you get involved, and why did you get involved? Well, I retired a number of years ago, and actually when I was in college, I kind of was interested in wine, but- Weren't we all? Yes, exactly. Maybe more so than I should have been. And then when I retired, I thought it was a good hobby to get back into learning about wine. And it's a great, great program, great thing. You know, wine is more than just what's in the glass. And learning about wine and the education of wine, and then finding an organization that actually could help other people learn about wine, not just our members, but the public and the universities, to help young people learn how to basically make wine and grow grapes and educate themselves. So the scholarships specifically go toward those types of programs. Right, they go towards enology, viticulture, other programs oriented towards wine making, wine management, how to run a winery, and culinary sciences, because food and wine always goes together. Right, and wine is produced in every country around the world. Right, just about. So really, you could take this education and really thrive anywhere you go. Oh, absolutely. And then California in particular, the wine industry, there's such a culture around it. And what's beautiful about wine is that there's always a story behind it, right? Everyone falls in love with how it came to be and the passion behind making wine. Right. And fun thing about wine, too, is having the North and South, basically, hemispheres. You can do wine in the Northern Hemisphere and then switch to the Southern Hemisphere. They have a different wine season. so you can actually be doing wine all year round if you're a winemaker so can anyone become involved how can people learn more about Orange County Wine Society well it's really easy ocws.org just go on that wine society site and you can join as long as you're 21 the only requirement we have women men young old just you know if you like wine or would like to learn more about wine you know come and do that and so you have various events what's it like well we do a number of events. I mean, the biggest thing we do is actually we do a wine competition. It's the largest California-only commercial wine competition in the country. And it's basically the Orange County Fair commercial wine competition. We also do a home wine competition as well. And basically, it's an opportunity to have all the wines basically brought in. And then we use those wines at the fair to raise money. And this year, we raised over $43,000 just at the fair alone for our scholarships. That's so great. Well, it was nice to meet you. Thanks for educating us about this great program and society, the Wine Society. And I love your answer. We said, what's your favorite kind of wine? And you said anything that's in the glass. The answer. That's right. For more information on the scholarships or the Orange County Wine Society, go to OCWS.org. We'll take a break. We'll be right back.