Put together the bright picture of a girl, growing up in Minnesota, with her younger brother, their Japanese mother and American father. She attended Luther College in Iowa, and took her degree there in a compelling interest, music. She said: "Music played a big part in my high school years. I had a good idea that I would not continue with it in my professional life, but music is something you can take with you always."
She spent a year in Belgium, where she often went fly-fishing. "Casting the line is artistic and always meditative," she said. When she was living in Tokyo until recently, she traveled around on her motorcycle.
Currently, Yukari Pratt teaches classes in Japanese food at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. Professionally she made her name as a freelance food and travel journalist in Tokyo. However, it is also as a sommelier that she is well remembered, and partly in its guise that she hopes periodically to return here.