Are you more psyched about the WINE part of Atlantic City Food And Wine Festival? If you answered yes to that question, then Laurie Forster is your girl! This Jersey native left the world of software sales in 2001 to create an empire now known as The Wine Coach that includes a book and radio show appropriately titled The Sipping Point, an app for iPhone and Android ranked in the top eight of wine apps by Wine Enthusiast Magazine, a DVD: Weird Science: Food And Wine Reactions, appearances on national television and throughout the world and so much more!

Laurie will be hosting three, wonderful events at the 2013 Atlantic City Food And Wine Festival: Wine Lover’s Boot Camp: How To Swirl, Sniff, And Sip Like a Pro, The Killer B’s Of Italy: Brunello And Barolo, and Rocks Of Ages: Cocktails Through The Decades all at Mia at Caesars Atlantic City at 12 p.m., 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. respectively.

We wanted to know more about this fascinating career move and growing brand, so we tracked Laurie down earlier in the week to chat. Check out our conversation, below!

TAC: What makes you most excited & passionate about wine?

Laurie Forster: I just think that wine is so inspiring and fun. When you learn about wine, you end up learning about so many other things; the people that make the wine and the story behind maybe the entrepreneur that left his world of work as a doctor to buy a winery and create amazing wines. Or you learn about the area that the wine is grown in and find out about a region of Spain you never knew about and the history of why they create these amazing wines on the coast and that the industry is built around fishing so that’s why the wine goes so well with seafood. You learn about the people, the place, the way they make the wine, and then something else that I really get excited about is food and wine pairings. To me, wine is just part of the recipe of your meal and I don’t think a meal is complete without a glass of wine! Usually I can’t get away with it at breakfast! If I could, I would! It just makes everything taste better. And really playing around with what wines go best with fish or meat or pasta and really opening people’s eyes to how that changes the taste of the food and the wine changes as well. All of those things are so multi-faceted. You just can never get bored in the world of wine. There’s always a new thing to learn, a new place to go.

TAC: Your bio says that you have an “edgy approach of demystifying wine”. Tell us about it!

Laurie Forster: I grew up in Jersey. I like to tell the joke where wine came in a box and it was usually pink. When I was growing up, we didn’t have the fine wines of Burgundy or Bordeaux on the dinner table. Like most Americans, I didn’t grow up with wine at dinner time. When I left my software sales job in ’01 and really decided to pursue a career in wine, I came with a very open mind. I was excited about it, but I didn’t have any of that snobbery or attitude behind it because that just wasn’t the way I was raised. My approach is to just peel back the layer of that pomp and circumstance and attitude and kind of poke fun a little bit of the craziness of the wine world and get people laughing. That opens them up to so many things and makes them comfortable. So many of us in this country are afraid we’re going to say it wrong or pick the wrong line, or we’re afraid that someone is going to think what we like is terrible. There’s a lot of insecurity around wine where when you go to Europe, kids have been drinking watered down wine since they were eight. They don’t see wine as anything that’s scary. But for us, it’s a big social thing. I kind of like to make a little fun of some of that hypocrisy and then move into the fun of the wine education.

TAC: How do you make wine fun for people who may be overwhelmed with all the information out there?

Laurie Forster: First and foremost, I’m a huge proponent of relating wine to things people already understand. It’s not that much different than learning about food. None of us get insecure about not knowing every cheese is out there or every kind of cut of meat. I always try to relate concepts of tasting wine to concepts of what people already know of tasting food or what people know about life. I think there are so many analogies and comparisons that could be drawn. I always try to create those pictures for people and I’m very interactive. Not just interactive with the audience, but getting them to ask questions and tell me what was the first wine they ever had. Mine was Boone’s Farm believe it or not! I also have interactive exercises with jelly beans and food and things that demonstrate different concepts and get people experientially learning about wine.

TAC: Did you have this vision for yourself as The Wine Coach from when you first started at the American Sommelier Association or is it something that just happened naturally?

Laurie Forster: I did evolve. I was a career-changer. I walked away from a six figure software job because I really just wanted to do something I loved. I knew it was wine, but I didn’t know what path I would take. There are so many angles of the business. While I was studying with the American Sommelier Association in New York, I also worked at the largest wine store in Manhattan. One night someone asked me to go lead a wine tasting for an alumni group and it just all clicked for me that night. I was teaching people about the wines and I could see the light bulbs going on and people connecting with each other which is another super important thing to address of wine. It’s a great connector for people. It’s a social lubricant I always joke! People can come to a wine tasting who have never met before. It might be a little awkward in the beginning, but by the end of the tasting, they’re trading phone numbers and looking at pictures of each other’s kids. There’s something about wine that’s different than other alcoholic beverages. It’s very social. There’s a great proverb that I use a lot in my business and that’s ‘over a bottle of wine, many a friend is made.” I certainly know that’s true for me and I see that in my events all the time!

TAC: So cool! You travel all over the world teaching folks about wine! What’s a typical week like for you?

Laurie Forster: I do have a weekly radio show called The Sipping Point on WBAL. Most weeks I’m in the studio one day interviewing guests live or over the phone. I’m going to be interviewing Robert Irvine in a couple of weeks and I have The Neelys coming on in July. We’re going to be talking about the festival! At least once a week I’m in the studio creating the show, and maybe traveling for two days doing an event somewhere. I try to keep Mondays and Fridays as office days if I can so that I can work on my blog, Facebook, twitter and all of those great things and other projects that I’m working on. That’s what makes this job so exciting. There is no typical day, but it always involves wine!

TAC: And that’s always a good day in our book! What are you most looking forward to about the 2013 Atlantic City Food And Wine Festival in July?

Laurie Forster: I’m happy to be Jersey born and raised as the official wine educator of the festival. Atlantic City is so alive with so many things to do and great food and wine that sparks inspiration for people. I’m looking forward to my three seminars on Saturday and meeting some amazing people providing what I call wine ‘edutainment’. A little bit of wine education, a lot of fun, and I’m also psyched to meet and toast with some of the celebrity chefs that will be there and take in some of the great activities going on when I’m not working.

TAC: Absolutely. What are your favorite wines at the moment?

Laurie Forster: I’m always in love with sparkling wine and now that it’s warm, even more so. I’m a huge fan and so many people think that it’s only for celebrations, but I think it’s for every day! I’m always in love with champagne, but sometimes that can get a little pricey. A great wine in place of that is from a company called Gruet which is actually made in New Mexico. The family is originally from Champagne, France, but now they make sparkling wines here in New Mexico and it retails under $20. It’s a great, fun bubbly. That’s one of my real favorite summer wines. For white wines, I always love a Spanish albarino. That comes from the west coast of Spain where there’s two industries: wine making and fishing! Albarino is crisp with great, fruit-like citrus and peach. It’s the quintessential summer wine. It’s really fruity and has that crisp pucker factor of acidity on the end that makes it a really amazing food wine. Last night I had a great, dry rose from Provence. Rose wines can be really overlooked and I love rose. It’s great with seafood and salads and all kinds of appetizers.

TAC: What are the biggest misconceptions about wine and wine purchasing?

Laurie Forster: One of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to spend a lot of money or the most expensive wine is the best. Certainly when you go up in price you can get rewarded with additional quality, but there are so many amazing wines $20 and under where it’s easy to drink well on a fairly limited budget as opposed to when our parents were our age and there really wasn’t the selection and the variety that we have. Price is a huge misconception. The other piece would be that you have to have white with fish. You can definitely do a really nice, light red, like a Pinot Noir, or Beaujolais with the fish. If you still want to have your fish with a light red, you can have that and you can pop those low tannin, softer reds in the fridge so that they can chill a little bit and it’s refreshing in the warm months.

TAC: Nice! If you could give the top 3 tips to choose the right wine to compliment your meal, what would they be?

Laurie Forster: The overriding rule that people really need to think about and that I teach a lot is matching the weight of the wine to the weight of the food. When I say weight when talking about wine, I mean the body. If it’s a light body and feels lighter in your mouth, it’s typically a lower alcohol wine. With fuller bodied wines, you feel that texture and heaviness on the palette and they tend to be the heavier-alcohol wines. The old analogy is to picture three glasses of wine as skim milk, whole milk and half and half. Think of how those would feel in your mouth and that’s the idea of a light, medium and full-bodied wine. Skim milk is going to be light and refreshing, whole milk, you’re going to feel that viscosity and heaviness, and if you took a sip of half and half it would be like velvet. When you’re matching your food and your wine, those light ones like your Pinot Grigios and things like that go with your lighter foods like your salads and your delicate seafoods. With the medium bodied wines, you can do a meatier fish or poultry and when you get to your fuller-bodied reds, you want to think full-bodied foods like meats, stews, hearty things. That’s really the number one rule that I want people thinking about. Then if you’re having a regional kind of cuisine, it really works that you will find a great pairing with wines of the same region. If you’re having an Italian food, you’re not only limited to Italian wines, but I best bet that I can find a great Italian pairing for that pasta or that Italian dish. If you’re having Spanish cuisine, there are amazing Spanish wines. That could be useful for a fast pairing tip. And don’t be afraid to go online to look at blogs like mine. I have a free app for iPhone and android called The Wine Coach which has a grape guide to the key grape varietals and it lists what foods have an affinity for those grapes. There are a lot of resources out there for people online or on your phone. Or if you’re out at a restaurant, ask for help! Sometimes it’s like where guys don’t want to ask for directions! The wine people at the restaurants and wine stores are there to help and that’s what I do every day. Nine times out of ten, it’s hard to make a humungous mistake if you follow the first couple things I talked about.

TAC: Would you ever consider expanding your brand with beer and/or mixed drinks? We see that you used to be a former beer drinker.

Laurie Forster: Certainly wine is the main thrust of what I do, but absolutely. I started a beer drinker, I still love beer. There are so many exciting craft brews out there these days. The selection of what we have now with beer is so much more vast than what we had back in my college days! I love it and I definitely do events that feature beer. At the festival, I’m doing a great seminar called Rocks Of Ages where we’re going to do cocktails through the decades and I’m really excited about that. In our sommelier training, we study wine, beer, spirits and sake. All of those are areas that I’m trained in and really enjoy. We’re going to be featuring some classic cocktails through the different decades and having a little fun with those.

Yes we are! Be sure to grab your tickets for Rocks Of Ages: Cocktails Through The Decades and any of Laurie’s events at the 2013 Atlantic City Food And Wine Festival if you haven’t already! It sure is getting close!