How the young scion of a local food-and-wine family cracked the wine industry—the hard way.

When Megan Walter gets excited—as she often does when talking about food and wine—her eyes flicker, and a light Australian drawl sneaks into her speech.

During four years at the University of Adelaide in Southern Australia, the brand-new Highlands Inn wine director picked up a tendency to call appliances “white goods,” a habit of dropping the “r”s off words like “bar” and “car.” And the 23-year-old Walter, who has an easy smile and engaging manner, also got a world-class wine education.

Contrary to popular belief, she says, wine education isn’t an extended picnic with a backpack filled with Bordeaux and Burgundy. “People don’t realize winemaking is really tough,” Walter says. “It’s physical and manual.”

Megan’s parents, Ted and Cindy Walter of Passionfish Restaurant in Pacific Grove, took pains to make sure Megan understood that from the start. As it happens, they took those pains to allay the pain they themselves experienced when their 16-year-old told them what she wanted to do for a living.

“When Megan told us that she wanted to own a restaurant, my heart just fell to the floor,” says Ted, whose restaurant has earned the Award of Excellence from the Wine Spectator annually since 1998. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s horrible.’”

Megan was already part of the restaurant scene. She started with “cleaning toilets and washing dishes” at age 14 and later waited tables.

But while Megan clearly loved being on the floor, her parents were afraid she wasn’t aware of the stuff Ted says makes the industry so brutal: “the crazy hours, the fact that your inventory will go bad immediately.”

So began the earnest evolution of a wine guru. The family began looking at different careers in hospitality.

With Ted’s wine connections, Megan began working crushes at local wineries like Galante by age 16. Along with Jennae Lizza, longtime manager at Passionfish, she began scouting out wineries in Sonoma and Napa counties.

Lizza said it was a natural passion for Megan. “It had a lot to do with the way she was raised,” Lizza says. “For me it was a hobby. For her it was a way of life.”

Megan found what she was learning simply “fascinating.” So she revised her ambitions and, again, Dad had a plan.

“He told her, ‘You think you want to be a winemaker, work for a winemaker,’” remembers Cindy. “‘It’s an agricultural job. You need to get dirty.’”

After graduating at the top of her class at Carmel High, Megan was off to get dirty at Kendall Jackson in Gonzales.

Ted says that the winery was ready to dismiss the blond girl who “looked like she was 14.”

“They gave her the really crappy jobs,” he says. “Cleaning out the inside of the 20,000 gallon barrel.”

Rather than scare her off, they only fed her enthusiasm. “The dirtier she got, the more she loved it,” says Cindy. “The harder they pushed, the harder she worked.”

“She’d come to the restaurant just to show us how dirty she was,” says Lizza. “Covered head to toe in Pinot—that’s not the normal way of doing an intern job.” Soon the initially skeptical folks at Kendall Jackson were coaching her through every position there.

Duly assured, the Walters started planning the next step. Cindy recalls that they quickly discovered that everone in the wine business said, “‘There’s this school in Australia…’”

At Adelaide, it was all wine, all the time—no general-ed requirements, as with state schools with degree programs in agriculture and oenology, like UC Davis and Fresno State. Megan says her first year of schooling was stacked with wine-relevant science classes—organic chemistry, biology, engineering physics and environmental science. Her second year was an intensive experience in viticultural science—studying at the University’s winery and absorbing lectures by scientists from the Australian Wine Research Institute, which is based at Adelaide.

Year three? “All practical,” Walter says. “We got to know the process.”

“Our four-person team was allocated a ton of red grapes and white grapes,” she says. “We had to decide the final product and plan the whole process. Then we were­ let loose, picking the grapes…designing the label, selecting the cork.”

Her fourth year she was required to take a paid internship at a local winery. She selected Torbreck, applied, and soon was creating vintage wine at the rustic winery with five other interns from across the world—including a Californian who became her boyfriend, and now lives with her in Carmel Valley.

The couple hopes to open their own winery some day, but in the meantime, Megan is enthusiastic about arranging the local winemakers’ showcases for the Highlands’ Masters of Food and Wine Feb. 16-19, and eager to start planning remarkable food and wine pairings with Pacific’s Edge Executive Chef Mark Ayers—to create what she calls “magical experiences.”

Rob Weakly, who coordinates the Masters as executive food and beverage director at Highlands, knows that enthusiasm well, citing it as a critical reason he hired her to form an idyllic pairing with one of the deepest and most dynamic cellars in California. “My thing was the energy level once you meet Megan—the kind of sparkle in her eye,” he says. “She’s very energetic and enthusiastic about what she does. With her age, college education and growing up in the industry…it was a perfect match.”