YVONNE LORKIN
Drinks Editor
dish’s scintillating regular drinks features are the work of our effervescent Drinks Editor Yvonne. She tells us about the joys of the drinks scene and her tasting process.
How long have you worked for dish?
Yvonne: I wrote my first dish piece back in 2007. A story on a couple who were farming snails in Hawke’s Bay. I called it “Smooth Snailing” – great title, right? I wrote food stories for years and was on deadline to submit a piece about ham curing and sausage making when the
2011 Christchurch earthquake struck. Everything went tits up, but thankfully my editor was very understanding and gave me an extension. I’ve been focusing on drinks for the last 10 years and was excited to introduce our “Tasting Panel” features back in 2012. We also started hosted “dish Drinks” events back in 2014 and began actively supporting our local craft beer, cider and distilling industries too.
What does your day-to-day job at dish involve, and how do you juggle it with other work?
Yvonne: Every day I’m delivered samples of new beverages, so I’m constantly unpacking, cataloguing and trying to disguise all the recycling so my neighbours don’t assume I’m a total soak. I’m also the co-founder and chief tasting officer of winefriend.co.nz and I write the wine reviews for the NZ Herald every week. Each day I’m looking at products to assess whether they’re delicious, decide where they could fit on those different platforms and then write up tasting notes. All my jobs are deadline-oriented, so I literally lurch from week to week. It’s a lot and it don’t stop.
What’s your favourite bit of the job?
Yvonne: As a freelancer, the rush I get when I see an email saying “Remittance Advice” is pretty awesome. My other favourite thing is discovering something that absolutely shivers my timbers. Something that makes me roar “Whoa!” I love it when readers say they tried something because of a review I wrote and that they loved it. Or when I rate a wine highly and it goes on to win gold medals and 5-star ratings, that’s pretty great.
What’s your least favourite bit of the job?
Yvonne: Wine writing might sound glamourous, but you can end up kissing a lot of frogs before a prince appears. Not all drinks are delicious. At the end of a long day of wine tasting, sometimes my teeth hurt from all the acid. I’m also hopeless at dealing with criticism, so when I receive negative feedback about something I’ve written, I just want the ground to swallow me up, but I try to learn from it.
What’s the best thing about working for dish?
Yvonne: There are SO many best things. When I say “I write for dish” and the person I’m talking to goes “I LOVE that magazine!” That feeling of intense pride is something I’ll never tire of. It’s given me an amazing work family and taught me so much about the changing tastes of our nation. I honestly felt like one of my dreams had come true when I was asked to join the team.
Any favourite dish memories?
Yvonne: One of my favourite moments was seeing Issue #90 arrive in my letterbox when the March 2020 lockdown threatened to stop the presses. Everything was grinding to a halt, so it was really exciting to see it get through! Hosting the Tasting Panel evenings is a huge buzz – it’s so fun meeting readers over a goblet of something gorgeous.