About Me
I am Rachel Rees, I have spent the last 16 years working in the wines and spirits industry. I am passionate about wines and spirits and thoroughly enjoy tasting and discussing products with clients, to help ensure consistency, identify any issues, suggest improvements and understanding and interpreting analytical results.
After graduating Reading University with a Masters of Chemistry, part at Bordeaux University, I joined BRI (which then became Campden BRI) as a Beer Analyst, performing routine beer analysis such as bitterness, ABV, CO2, carbohydrate, colour.
A few months later I moved into the Corkwise team where analysis of wines and spirits was performed. I worked as a wine and spirits analyst for around a year performing routine wine analysis such as volatile acidity, SO2, sugars by HPLC, ABV amongst others.
I then became the Corkwise Laboratory Manager, and I performed this role for around 6 years. Ensuring analysis was performed correctly, in a timely manner and reports were sent to clients with any additional comments as requested by the Technical Manager to help the clients understand if there were any issues with their samples.
After many years of managing the wines and spirits laboratory I then took on a more technical role and became the Wines and Spirits Technical Manager at Campden BRI. In this role I regularly spoke to clients to discuss problems or issues they had, suggest the most suitable analysis for their products, or to assist with interpretation of the data we had produced and suggest any treatments their products may require to reach the highest possible quality. I performed this role for around 5 years before taking redundancy when Campden BRI closed the Nutfield site.
During my time at Campden BRI I performed almost daily tastings of wines and spirits, be it identifying faults, consistency of a brand, and shelf-life tastings of forced aged samples against control samples, or PDO/PGI/QWS tastings on behalf of Wine GB. I have reviewed, interpreted and commented on a large variety of analytical results from straightforward ABV/SO2 results, to micro, sugars, taints and GCMS profile comparisons, covering a wide range of sample types from around the world. I also ran a wine fault and analysis training course for numerous clients where a suite of faulty wines were prepared, taken to the client’s site and presented alongside discussions on the faults, how they occur, how they could be prevented and how analysis of wines at certain points could help identify the faults before they became untreatable.
I am now starting the next phase and using the technical skills I have learnt and developed over the last 16 years analysing, tasting and advising on wines and spirits, I am launching my own company – Perfecting Wine to assist and support the wines and spirits industry.