Erin Drain
Key Collaborator
Erin has been fascinated by words, places and people since the childhood. Creative pursuits like writing, cooking, and music gave her a runway to explore these passions, and ultimately shaped her entire academic, personal, and professional path. She was able to explore the world at an early age thanks to a lucky exchange student setup with a family in La Rioja, Spain; as a teenager, she was a semi-professional cellist touring with quartets and youth orchestras, performing for audiences across the US and Europe. At the heart of these adventures was storytelling, whether spoken through music, language or cuisine.
Erin likes to say that she moved to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago, but stayed for the food. The school won her over with its famed architecture and rigorous academics, and the city kept her with its world-class gastronomy. After carving out an unconventional degree (featuring deep dives into linguistics and food anthropology, and the co-creation of a curriculum for Euskera instruction) she realized that traditional academia wasn’t for her. Thankfully, the continued pursuit and interpretation of specialized knowledge—joyfully shared with others—has remained a common thread. Erin started her wine career while still in college, becoming a fine wine retail buyer by graduation. Since then, she’s worked in wine distribution (sales, portfolio management and Director of Education roles) and importing (sales, marketing and education), working with Ben Carson-Brown and Rui Abecassis in both.
In 2022, Erin founded her own creative marketing and communications company. In addition to the food and wine industry, Erin works with clients in other specialized and dynamic fields: internal communications for global biotech corporations; partnering with civic, arts and humanities institutions; serving in nonprofit leadership. These diverse experiences make her a professional who can see the big picture while staying grounded through service, connection, and storytelling. When she’s not working, she’s probably making or reading about food, planning a trip, tending to her slightly haunted bungalow, or exploring the outdoors with her husband while wrangling two enormous dogs. Erin is the Communications Chair for the Chicago Chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier International.