Late last month, JebDunnuck.com announced that Virginie Boone has joined the team as senior editor. Boone will be the site’s new reviewer for Washington and will also cover a number of other regions for the publication.

Boone is a wine industry veteran. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in political science and subsequently received a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford.

Boone wrote about wine for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat for a number of years and subsequently spent nearly 12 years as a contributing editor at Wine Enthusiast. (NB: Boone and I overlapped at the magazine most of that time.) She reviewed over 30,000 wines during her tenure at the magazine.

Here, in part one of a two-part interview, we talk about Virginie’s background and how she got involved in the wine industry. In part two, we discuss her time at Wine Enthusiast and her new responsibilities at JebDunnuck.com. Responses have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where did you grow up?

I’m an Army brat. My dad was career military, and my mom is French. She grew up in Paris, and they met in France when he was serving overseas. He got stationed in Germany for a number of years, so I was born in Germany on an American army base.

We lived there for a couple of years. My dad did three tours in Vietnam. Then he got stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. So we lived on the Presidio in army housing, which was pretty great because it was right across the street from the beach.

My mom, being from Paris, fell in love with San Francisco, and was like, ‘Okay, this is it. We’ve been moving all over the place. We’re staying here.’ So I benefited greatly from that and grew up in San Francisco and then San Rafael.

Did you travel to France during your childhood?

Yes. Most of my mom’s family was still there. She was the only one that left, so everybody was in France. I grew up speaking French, spending a fair amount of time with my relatives in France, and traveling in Europe. That gave me a sense that there was a bigger world out there.

What ways did that influence you?

I fell in love with travel at a really young age and decided I wanted to be paid to travel somehow. That was my goal in life. How can I be paid to travel?

How did you make that happen?

I went to Berkeley for undergrad, and shortly after I graduated, they were starting a guidebook series called Berkeley Guides to compete with one that Harvard had, called Let’s Go! These were popular guidebook series at the time.

So I was hired for one of the first editions that they did for France. I did the French Riviera, which was hilarious because I had maybe a $17 per day per diem or something ridiculously low.

Then I got to do Alsace-Lorraine. I fell in love with Alsace-Lorraine for sure: the wines, the people, the food. I also got to observe my first wine region. Travel has always been a huge part of my life, and I got the chance to do a lot of travel writing.

Later on, I worked for Lonely Planet for many years, Lonely Planet being an Australian-based guidebook company. They had an outpost in Oakland, California. So I was hired pretty early on to do a lot of early-days digital content and licensing deals with companies like Travelocity or Yahoo that were trying to build content. I also got to do some guidebook writing too.

What regions did you cover for Lonely Planet?

I did some crazy places. I did northern Louisiana. Not New Orleans, but northern Louisiana. Not very glamorous. I did the three countries in South America that don’t speak Spanish. I did the former British Guiana, Suriname, which used to be Dutch Guiana, and French Guiana. Then, later, I did a guidebook, or part of a guidebook, to the Loire Valley. Finally, I started to mesh travel with wine.

How did you eventually pivot more toward wine?

I did the Loire Valley book shortly after 9/11, and, as we all remember, travel started to get a little scary. I just kept thinking, do I really want to keep going to all these far flung places?

Plus travel writing sometimes can feel super interesting, and you do have a chance to get substantive. At the same time, there’s a superficiality to it. You’re going to a place, you’re really diving into it, and then you may never go there again.

I was searching for something more long-term. I was still living in San Francisco, but coming up to Sonoma and Napa a lot. So we decided to move up to Sonoma, my husband and I. I went from an apartment in San Francisco to a little farmhouse six miles out of Dry Creek Valley.

At that point, I thought, instead of writing about all these places in the world, maybe I could use my travel writing skills for my own backyard.

How did you go about doing that?

I was lucky enough to get hired by the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, and, at the time, they were owned by the New York Times. They had a quarterly magazine [Savor], so they wanted to do some food and wine coverage, mostly wine, but from a travel perspective too. The initial thing was to focus on the magazine, but then it was like, ‘Oh well, by the way, every week we need a wine feature in the newspaper.’

It gave me license to just get out there and start asking questions and call people in Napa or Sonoma or Mendocino or even further afield, go visit them, taste wines, walk their vineyards, and get to know people. At 1,000 words or more a week, you start to learn a lot.

That sounds like a lot of fun.

It was definitely fun. Very boots on the ground, really immersing myself in it. I got to do that for probably four years, full-time. Then newspapers started to crater. I could see the writing on the wall that, if I stayed, I would probably not necessarily get to cover wine. So I decided to leave.

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