Nate Ready
4 min readJun 24, 2020

“You can never step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing onto you” Heraclitus of Ephesus

I resigned from the Court of Master Sommeliers on Monday, an organization I was introduced to twenty years ago by my mentor, Bobby Stuckey. It was this apprenticeship in the craft of hospitality that started one of the most meaningful relationships in my life. Passing the MS exam was never the goal of that informal apprenticeship, but much of our time was spent together preparing for it. Since that time, many of my life’s significant moments and profound experiences of learning have come as part of friendships with other members of the organization. It’s what has kept me involved even as my disillusionment with the institution itself has grown.

I have never understood or advocated for how the organization educates, tests, communicates, governs or presents itself to the world. The emphasis on breadth over depth, on accreditation over education, the lack of transparency, the title, the ties, the pins, the suits have always been at odds with how I view the world. In the early days, naively, it never struck me as something sinister or concerning. I focused on the friendships that revolved around it but couldn’t rationalize spending time on something I didn’t think was bringing value to the world outside its membership.

Over the years the institution has grown in influence. Paradoxically, as incredibly talented people have spent a prodigious amount of time and creative resources to solve these problems they have become worse and not better. This has culminated with the recent failure to take a clear and timely stance with regard to racial injustice and Black Lives Matter. While some of the fault for this lies with individual members it’s the nature of the institution that modifies and shapes their efforts that I find most problematic.

Organizations and institutions are assemblages of people, a set of institutional rules, formal and informal cultural practices, and the intensity and accumulation of these things over the course history. People can move in and out of association with these institutions and can act to change some of these rules and historical patterns, but even in small organizations it can be surprisingly hard to root out problematic structures or patterns based in historical precedence. It is a mistake to take this challenge lightly and one needs to recognize the moment when the characteristics of a particular organization is not suited to the challenge of the set of problems at hand. This is what’s at stake when we as a society are discussing “Defund the Police” and although it is a situation of far less gravity, this is what’s at stake when we discuss the Court of Master Sommeliers.

Viewed in a more positive way the situation takes on even more urgency. If these institutions are set up properly they have the power to solve problems and dramatically change the world for the better. They can magnify our creativity, knowledge and potential for love. We’re at a moment of great change and of crisis. We are at a turning point. We need to act decisively and use our hearts and minds to invest in building new organizations capable of focusing our collective energies to solve the formidable problems of the current age; racial injustice, income inequality, climate change, etc.

As I’ve said recently “Food lies at the center of human life. It is one of our basic human needs and the setting for many of life’s most meaningful experiences. It connects us to the planet and to each other. As such it also lies at the nexus of our problems and their solutions.” The food and wine industry, restaurants, wine professionals and chefs may play a bigger role in solving the problems before the world than any of us realize. The complexity of the current pandemic-driven situation facing the future of restaurants in this country and the way solutions to this will be related to inequality, racial injustice, climate change and food security brings this into sharp focus. This means that it is simply not acceptable to invest energy in an organization hamstrung by an institutional memory and with capacities that are insufficient for the task at hand. It is taking up the intellectual and creative bandwidth of some of the industries greatest minds and leaving the next generation of food and wine professionals without the education they need to tackle these issues.

I’m currently living and working on a farm in Hood River, Oregon. We are using this winery and vineyard as an incubator for developing farming systems that better address the needs of human health and the plants, animals, bacteria and fungi that the proper functioning of our planet depends on. Our interest extends toward the social, ethical and cultural implication that growing food in this way has on the contexts in which it is transformed in the kitchen and enjoyed at the table. While to some people this activity might seems like its world away from the fine dining institutions where I worked two decades ago to me it’s been a very natural progression and an indicator of what it will mean to be a food and wine professional in the future. It’s my hope that we are moving toward a reality where we can build educational institutions for food and wine professionals where the teaching of this type of knowledge has a prominent place.

With hope,

Nate

Nate Ready
Nate Ready

Written by Nate Ready

Farming and Making wine in the Columbia River Gorge at Hiyu Wine Farm.

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