Julia Burke Freytsis

Julia has been working in the wine industry since 2008, when she wandered into a small Niagara Escarpment winery for a tasting and left with a job. Her roles since then have included wine (and beer) writer and editor, vineyard worker in Southern Wisconsin, retail buyer in Chicago, harvest intern in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and communications/education manager for Willamette Valley Wine. She is now Flatiron's events manager and buyer for New World wines. 

A passionate educator, Julia has been teaching classes, seminars, private events and tutoring sessions on wine for over a decade. She is a certified WSET instructor and holds a WSET Diploma in Wine & Spirits as well as an Italian Wine Professional certification. Julia believes in the power of wine to facilitate important conversations about sustainability, agriculture, labor, memory and psychology, and she has never fallen out of love with wine's ability to combine topics from geography and microbiology to language, politics and history in unexpected ways.