Hello wine lover. Do you wish you knew more about wine, but aren’t sure really where to begin? Are you facing two weeks of boring vacation with family members you spend most of the year avoiding? Unbeknownst to me, there is apparently a way to solve both problems at once, and earn a bit of hard cash besides. No, I’m not talking about hawking Rolexes at Grand Central Station all day. I’m talking about becoming a wine retail underling. Or something that comes close.

Apparently, it’s not only the clothing stores around town that pick up extra seasonal help. It’s the wine stores, too. Or at least one of them in New York City, according to this article from the New York Times.

It actually sounds like a pretty cool idea, if a bit competitive and certainly not without stress. Apparently, anyone can apply to work at the Sherry-Lehmann wine store on Madison Avenue in New York for the holidays. If you make the first cut of the application process, then you go through a sort of retail wine boot camp, where they cram as much wine knowledge into your already full brain as possible in a week, and then if you graduate, you get to work in the retail store.

Not a bad way to learn a thing or two about wine, or at the very least, about the wine drinking habits of New Yorkers over the holidays. Apparently, this job has become popular enough that some people are working for free. Better try it out before you have to pay them to do it. Read the full story.