One lesson that all young sommeliers come to learn is that, in the end, wine is just a tool of their job. Sommeliers often begin their career with a perception that what matters are the technical details of a wine. The notion that it’s vital to remember things like acid levels and residual sugar. It’s true, sommeliers often need to know these details. But the deeper truth is that being a sommelier is not about being a wine expert. It’s about being a people expert.
There are few jobs more closely involved with the world of premium wine than the sommelier. It was a role once restricted to the restaurants of Paris, London, Milan, and New York. But today, “sommelierie” is global. You’ll find emerging groups of professional sommeliers wherever people are dining out. And they”re looking for more than a wine. They’re looking for an experience. As premium wine grows and spreads around the world, it needs sommeliers who can bring those wines to life for customers.
A detailed knowledge of wine – especially premium wine – is a necessary part of being a sommelier. You need to be able to answer every question a diner might throw at you. And many wine drinkers and restaurant goers are passionate wine enthusiasts themselves. Often with deep and detailed wine knowledge. But for the sommelier wine knowledge alone is not enough. The job of the sommelier is to read the situation. To establish what sort of wine is going to turn a meal into an experience. It also means understanding premium wine’s unique ability to tell stories, to represent meaning, and to create unique moments and unforgettable memories.
Importantly the sommelier also has a unique perspective on the way wine and customers interact. And they play a vital and sometimes underestimated role in wine’s complex supply chain.
There are many roles in wine where the job is to make recommendations. Wine writers produce articles that may – or may not – inspire people to buy. Wine retailers send customers away with a bottle or two, and hope they’ll come back for more. But sommeliers discuss, recommend, and pour the wine. And then see at first hand and in real time whether or not their recommendation was a success.
This gives sommeliers a unique feedback loop. So that sommeliers have not only an almost instantaneous assessment of their recommendation, they also have a chance to test and experiment what makes someone truly enjoy and appreciate a particular bottle of wine. And it turns out that’s rarely what the wine tastes of. Or how it’s made. Or even where it comes from. The sort of things that constitute pure “wine expertise”. It’s a much more human combination of occasion and expectation. The things that are the realm not of the “wine expert” but of the “people expert”.
Sommeliers can only do their job because of the unique ability of wine to match occasions and fulfill expectations. Wine has ability not only to match beef or lamb, but also its ability to match a romantic dinner, a once-in-a-lifetime celebration, or even its ability to mark the end of a tough week.
So the sommelier’s unique perspective brings in turn a unique insight for everyone in wine. From winemakers, to shippers, to importers, distributors, and retailers. We only really know if and how someone enjoys a bottle of wine when we see them drink it. Yet many of those who play a vital role in getting a wine from the vineyard to the table are divorced from that moment.
The growing number of sommeliers in around the world is just one sign of the growing market for premium wine. They are a reminder that wine – at its best – is not about information but connection.
The sommelier stands at the point where all the effort of growers, winemakers, merchants, and marketers finally meets its purpose: the pleasure of another human being. In that moment, wine stops being a product. It becomes an experience. The sommelier’s job will never be replaced by technology, or by algorithms, or even by the most knowledgeable critic — because no one else in wine is paid to understand people quite so well.
