Erin Drain

Trade Marketing & Communications

Key Collaborator

Erin Drain, Communications & Marketing
Syntax conductor. People index.

Erin has been fascinated by words, places and people since the beginning. Creative pursuits like writing, cooking, and music gave her the runway to explore these passions, and shaped her entire life: academic, personal and career. 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 and toured with youth orchestras, performing for audiences across Europe. At the heart of these adventures was storytelling—spoken through music, language or cuisine.

Erin likes to say that she moved to Chicago for college but stayed for the food, but the truth is that the University of Chicago and city itself won her over with great architecture and linguistic and anthropological richness in addition to world class gastronomy. After carving out an unconventional degree featuring deep dives into food anthropology, cinema, Iberian linguistics, and the co-creation of a curriculum for Euskera (Basque) instruction, she realized that academia wasn’t for her, but the pursuit and interpretation of specialized knowledge—joyfully shared with others—certainly was. This realization led her to begin her wine career while still in school, and she became a wine buyer in a boutique fine wine store by the time she graduated. Since then, she’s worked in wine distribution (sales, portfolio management and Director of Education roles) and in sales, marketing and education on the importing side, which is where she first met and worked with Ben Carson-Brown and Rui Abecassis.

Since 2022, Erin has run her own one-woman marketing and communications company, which has provided the opportunity to reunite with beloved colleagues from her lengthy wine career. In addition to the wine industry, Erin works in other specialized and dynamic fields: B2B and B2C technology startups, within agency settings serving large transnational biotech corporations, extensively with arts and humanities organizations, and serving in nonprofit leadership. These diverse experiences make her a professional who can see the big picture and predict what’s around the bend while maintaining the common threads of 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 Drain, Communications & Marketing