TRACY WOOD ANDERSON

Tracy Wood Anderson began her cooking career at the age of five when her parents came home to a lemon meringue pie and a spooked babysitter pointing to Tracy and saying “she just did it, I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Tracy and food have always gone together, but it being part of her nature, she did not immediately consider it as a career and attended Scripps College and earned a B.A., majoring in studio art. Not particularly wanting to throw herself into the spinning fan blades of the art world, and finding out that not every girl out there could cook, she finally considered food as a vocation. After a short stint at the restaurant in the Calistoga Inn to make sure this was the right direction, she enrolled in San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy. After a 16 month program in the Culinary Arts, she graduated with top honors and discovered that pastry was her specialty of choice.

A short period in the pastry department at Domaine Chandon was followed by a much longer period at her husband John Anderson’s family winery, S. Anderson Vineyard. There, Tracy was chef for their winery events ranging from 8 to 500 people, learned the art of blending their sparkling and still wines as well as performing the myriad of other jobs that crop up at a family winery. Balancing this with raising a family was her life’s pursuit of over fifteen years.

2002 marked a change for Tracy when the focus of her life switched from wine to chocolate. She spent two years at home and traveling in Belgium and France, tasting, taking courses in chocolate and confectionary, and generally just up to her elbows in chocolate developing her own creations. The combination of her art background, her sensitivity to flavors and her love of food and sharing the fruit of her labor culminates in what is now Woodhouse Chocolate.