Tanisha Townsend: English-speaking anchor lady in the beating heart of the French capital
Tanisha Townsend is the Chief Wine Officer of Girl Meets Glass, a wine lifestyle and education agency. She currently lives in Paris, France, where she creates wine and food pairing experiences for expats and tourists, hosts a wine podcast named Wine School Dropout, and teaches wine courses at universities in Paris.
Tanisha holds the WSET Level 3, Certified Specialist of Wine, Certified Specialist of Spirits and French Wine Scholar certifications. She has been featured in many publications, such as Wine Enthusiast, France Amerique, and Cuisine Noir magazines. She also created the ‘75 in the 75’ guide to wine bars in Paris. Her greatest honor of 2021 was being inducted into the Echansonnerie des Papes, a wine brotherhood of Chateauneuf du Pape. During the induction, she was recognized for her teaching style, social media, and the sharing of French wine culture amongst her Anglophone audience.
She aims to empower individuals with an advanced knowledge of wine & spirits in order to build confidence in their tastes and make choices as a better-informed consumer. A Girl Meets Glass wine tasting ensures that each guest completes a wine flight equipped with valuable information as well as fond memories of their experience.
In 2021, she travelled to several wine regions and documented the trips via Instagram and her podcast, Wine School Dropout. Her outstanding storytelling can`t leave anyone indifferent and made you feel like you were there with her.
Her latest podcast season focused on the Puglia region in Italy. Tanisha notes that this region isn’t as well known for tourism (she certainly hopes to change that) but its grapes are definitely popular among Italian wine aficionados. She visited different wineries to understand and get to know the grapes, producers, and also foods, sights and sounds of this region.
Tanisha spoke with winemakers, ambassadors, and a sommelier-turned-aperitivo producer to give her followers a feel of what the region is like. In this podcast we can discover about wine making techniques, various native grapes of this southern Italian region, and what types of food to pair with the wines.
She also travelled around her current country, France to visit Bordeaux, Champagne and Ventoux, just to name a few. For Tanisha, it’s not only about production methods and grapes, but also showing how the people of that region live, what they eat, what they do for fun in the area, etc. Wine is to be shared with friends and drunk as a part of life, and Tanisha shows us that aspect of each region she visits.
