Jane Lopes

Jane Lopes trained at University of Chicago, and that academic grounding informs a career built around region, regulation, producer identity, and the practical conversion of study into usable fluency. Her approach to wine combines reading and tasting, with maps, appellation law, producer profiles, flash cards, and repeated contact with the material serving as part of the work. She began in wine retail, where bottles are handled daily and knowledge has to meet the needs of the person across the counter.

She later worked as a sommelier at The Violet Hour in Chicago, The Catbird Seat in Nashville, and Eleven Madison Park in New York, where recall, pacing, listening, and fit matter as much as cellar depth. In those settings, the work is not simply collecting addresses or bottles, but learning how wine functions in sequence, at a table, with food, budget, mood, and guest expectation all in play. At Attica in Melbourne, Lopes became Beverage Director, responsible for selection, glassware, and list architecture that carried the restaurant’s point of view.

The role required judgment around origin, texture, farming, and placement, shaping how a bottle reads beside a specific menu, room, and standard of service. Her work there reflected the same rigor that shaped her study, with attention to detail translating into practical decisions on the floor and in the cellar. Lopes also expanded her work into imports. As co-founder of Legend Imports in the United States, she worked with the movement of bottles across borders, shelves, lists, and trade conversation.

That kind of work shifts wine from the table to the route that makes the table possible, while still requiring producer identity to remain clear through retail, distribution, and restaurant language. Her focus on Australian wine importing and advocacy in the United States is informed by that experience and by time working in Melbourne. Rather than treating Australian wine as shorthand, her work has approached it as a category that requires detailed reading of regions, farming, and expression.

She is currently Managing Director of Thatcher’s Wine, where retail, imports, and distribution overlap. The role requires clear language, fast calibration, organization, relationships, and the ability to translate identity without reducing it to a sales line. Across these different parts of the trade, Lopes’s work stays centered on precision, context, and the relationship between structure and tasting. Recognition has followed that sustained practice across the floor, the cellar, the import channel, and wine writing. Her honors include Master Sommelier, Early Career Achievement, and Best New Sommelier.