Vanessa Jungbluth-Fullmer
Founder | Masters of Champagne

I've spent nearly two decades working every tier of the wine industry — in retail, distribution, and importing — and the through line has always been the same: finding wines worth getting excited about and putting them in front of the right people.

My career has taken me from the shop floor to the supplier side, from regional distribution to luxury importing. Most recently I managed a Midwest territory and a luxury import portfolio at Folio Fine Wine Partners. Along the way I've built relationships across the Chicago market and beyond — with buyers, producers, and everyone in between.

Before the trade, I built a career in marketing, events, and tour management. I came to wine with a marketer's instincts and an operator's habits and I've never stopped using both.

I've spent enough time on both sides of the portfolio conversation to know what a producer needs from a distribution partner and what a buyer needs from a rep. I've also seen how the industry can overlook small, family-owned wineries simply because they can't outspend the big houses. The producers I work with don't have marketing departments or massive promotional budgets. What they have is land, craft and skin in the game. They're not underdogs — they're independent. No corporate parent, no boardroom, just a family that knows exactly what they're doing.

My connection to these producers is personal as well as professional. I still get my hands dirty on my family's farm. I know what it means to work land and build something from the ground up. I've logged 20 countries, 45 states and three continents, traveling extensively through wine regions across France, Italy, Austria, Spain, Switzerland and the United States — including an in-depth trip through Champagne that culminated in earning my Masters of Champagne — always with the same question in mind: what, and who, makes this place worth paying attention to?

I founded Working Title because after years of building something for someone else — more than once, more than twice — it was time to build something of my own. I grew up in a family business, was raised by farmers and come from a family that built everything it had from scratch. Hard work and ownership aren't abstract concepts to me, they're just how things get done. If I was going to put in the hours, I wanted them to count toward something with my name on it.

I'm also a founding member of the Cella Gals, a Chicago-based professional wine education and consulting group. When I'm not working, you'll find me on the road as an international competitive dance adjudicator — which, it turns out, requires many of the same skills.

Email me here.