Smoke, Mirrors, & The Definition of a Somm
Whenever I write, I am reminded of the great HoseMaster of Wine (whom I just learned is going to retire to just occasional posts on Tim Atkin’s site, the bastard), and one snippet of his words of wisdom:
“Apart from the wine business, on a personal level, wine, for us self-proclaimed wine experts, also becomes part of our identity. A part we cherish and brag about. And what is the internet if not a place to create a new, completely fabricated, identity. The place is littered with people who want to be recognized as authorities on something or other. Wine attracts its share. Eventually, we begin to believe our own stories. We believe we’re right. We believe we’re talented. We believe we’re fascinating. We must be. We’re experts. Hell, we have our own blog! What we say must be true, it must be right. We have a President like that.”
And yet… here I am, proselytising to you like you should listen. And maybe you should. But I’m using his disclaimer because you should never believe everything you hear in the wine business.

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What inspired me to get on my soap box this time was because of a friend who posted his friend’s blog post about sommeliers and snobbery (the never-ending topic).
This friend-of-a-friend slaughtered the profoundly snobby wine world (and we do need a good slaughtering sometimes), particularly the old world, and spoke of how much more fun the new world can be. But what struck me: he bemoaned the fact that once someone knows you are not a sommelier (even if they have noticed how much you know about wine), somehow your knowledge has been somewhat discredited, somewhat adulterated. It’s that pesky piece of paper nonsense, that little body of certification saying, “Yep, this person gets it.”
After this outrage, he suggested that all too well known, post-modern medicine of “Who is to say who knows what about wine? They’re all snobs anyway! I know as much as any of them! That term is abused! To hell with it!” (My paraphrases, not his.) The solution: forget about the titles — they don’t mean anything anyway.
Well, my dear friend-of-a-friend, that is the problem: as far as the general drinking public is concerned, sommelier never had a clear definition anyway.
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If you’re not “in the industry,” as we love to say like it’s some secret club, you may not know that there is no one certifying body for sommeliers. There’s no wine equivalent of the medical board or the bar association. You can get many different certificates and specializations, and while it’s true some are taken more seriously than others (Court of Master Sommeliers holds weight, as does the Guild of Sommeliers), ultimately there’s no official one.
In theory, you could write “sommelier” on your resume and there would be no one to stop you. Hell, I know of people who have. If a word has no working definition, it of course becomes meaningless, and that’s what breeds rants from people like my friend-of-a-friend. The fact that there is no finite definition is reflective of the flimsy, snooty nature of the wine world. We need to quit it with the smoke and mirrors.
I think it’s time we gave a definition to this unnecessarily elusive term, and I’m about to assign it one — though I think you’ll be terribly bored with my idea.
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A person is not one’s job. A sommelier is not a summation of one’s knowledge. It is a job. It follows then, that if I am not working in a restaurant or winery doing sommelier work, then I am not a sommelier. I can be trained as a sommelier, but unless I have a job as one, I am not one. I can be a wine industry professional. (In fact, that’s what I’ve listed on my card.) But I am not a sommelier until I am hired as one.
What can you do as a sommelier? Essentially, you are charged with the care and cataloguing of a collection of wine professionally, in whatever work place setting you happen to be in. If that is a restaurant, you are surrounded by food, so you are working with the chefs and those in charge of the food on choosing the best wines to showcase both wine and food. If you are a wine server, you will serve the wine to those wanting to purchase it properly — at the right serving temperature, with (hopefully) excellent food, and ensuring it is stored properly to ensure it can last as long as possible. You are both an expert and well versed in customer service; you know what a person wants to drink before they know they want to drink it.
There. It’s that simple.
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This isn’t to take all the wind out of the sails of all those self-proclaimed sommeliers out there, but it is intended to take a little wind from that puffy chest. Without the job, you are just a knowledgeable wino. And that is every bit as important.
No, really, it’s okay. We have to begin the dismantling, and become the people’s winos.
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Currently drinking:
Icellars Estate Winery 2014 Merlot; Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
