About Me — Charlotte Brown

I am not the person I thought I would be

Me, wine, Spain. That’s really all you need to know about me

My younger self would have assumed that by my 36th year, I’d be married with children, a 9–5 job, living in suburbia. The marriage came (to fellow Medium writer

Sam Dixon Brown

), I tried suburbia (hated it), I ditched the 9–5 job nearly a decade ago and there are no kids in the vicinity.

Growing up, I didn’t give a damn about food. I didn’t even try wine until I was 18. And yet, at 28, I became the co-owner of a wine store and bar (the youngest female wine merchant in the UK at the time) and food and wine became an obsession. My metier, if you will. The shop even won an award for the best independent wine store in the UK.

I owned the best wine store in the country. I sound like I’m bragging, and I kind of am. I never thought I’d amount to much.

Then in October 2020, I sold my business, house, rehomed my cat (the hardest part of it all) and

Sam

and I hit the road. I’m now a homeless, jobless nomad who owns a precise total of 95 things in the world.

When people say ‘I never thought my life would turn out like this,’ it always sounds like it’s a surprise — that something unexpected happened that completely changed their life trajectory. And I’m sure that for some people, this is the case.