Master Sommelier Rajat Parr, writes in Secrets of the Sommeliers: “What you love to drink is never better than when it’s drunk with what you love to eat.” I’m almost a pro at coursing out a meal, but before I studied wine, I didn’t know how to pair what was on my plate with what could be poured in my glass. For sommeliers, like myself, developing that kind of knowledge base can be a full-time job. And it is.
Wine mastery goes beyond the palate though: the most successful sommeliers can communicate and curate an experience that is both approachable, yet elevated for guests dining in a restaurant. And, as the profession works to become even more relatable, wine lists present sommeliers with an opportunity to celebrate terroir and to feature wines with different liquid legacies, without pretension, leading to more education, translation, and inclusion, when it comes to talking about wine. Who doesn’t want to course out a full meal without having to rely on tech at a table?
Before I trained with master sommeliers, who taught me how to pronounce Châteauneuf-du-Pape and spot Sangiovese in a blind tasting, I poured over descriptions of wine labels in wine shops and at wine tastings. I didn’t want wine lists to all look Tuscan to me. My dad is from Italy.
Wine lists are, by their very nature, vital to how sommeliers drive and sustain profits for a restaurant. They help wine professionals justify the cost of adding selections to the cellar if guests dining at their places of business purchase bottles. But multiple factors often drive guests’ decisions to make a purchase or not. And typically, this comes down to the approachability of a wine list and the restaurant’s sommelier, by extension.
During the French Renaissance, being a sommelier was a badge of honor. As Karen MacNeil writes in The Wine Bible, a sommelier (so-mel-YAY), was entrusted with a lord or king’s life; the tradition of tasting wine before serving it was about survival.
If you’ve ever nosed a cork-tainted wine, then you know the dank, wooly, wet smell and gnarly, even metallic taste. Unfortunately, too many people don’t know how to recognize cork taint and continue to drink a bottle of wine that’s “off.” Whenever possible, sommeliers try to prevent this through proper wine storage, which is key to a wine’s survival.
On the Upper West Side, close to Shakespeare & Co., there used to be this cozy French eatery that I liked to frequent because it offered obscure BTGs (by the glass), think Ugni Blanc, and delicious French onion soup. After I completed Intensive Sommelier Training at the International Culinary Center, I remember it registering one night that all the wine bottles at this place were stored upright on the wall, and it was really stressing me out. Maybe that’s why it closed. No, seriously.
Wines must be “sound” to make it through a meal. That’s where the French café might’ve missed the mark. Their wines weren’t being stored horizontally, without exposure to light or significant temperature changes. My guess is that many of its bottles were sent back because they were corked. So much goes into preserving a wine program at a restaurant. It’s why there’s a higher markup in restaurants than retail. There’s more overhead.
In addition to selecting wines and spirits, sommeliers, or beverage directors with sommeliers reporting to them, running wine programs must track and trace inventory. This includes different types of glassware for beverage service, mix-ins for cocktails and mocktails and miscellaneous wine opening and chilling apparatus like corkscrews, serviettes and wine buckets.
Sommeliers also schedule tasting appointments with distributors and producers. And afterward, plead with beverage directors or managers to bring in the wines from the tasting appointments, promising to move the inventory because they’re different from the wines that are already on the list. It’s a hard sell. It’s a lot of pressure. But we do it because we try to make room for lesser- known wine regions and wine producers to earn a spot where they’ve always belonged: featured on a wine list.
In March of this year, Wine Spectator interviewed Amy Racine, sommelier at Chef Kwame Onwuachi’s restaurant at Lincoln Center, about how to curate a wine list for Tatiana, a groundbreaking Afro-Caribbean concept. Here’s part of Racine’s response:
[The chef, bartender, and cocktail director, and myself] … all from totally different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, genders. We represent a very positive change in the hospitality and beverage industry… I thought, what if we did a minority-and-women-focused wine list? Let’s represent producers that are breaking boundaries. We looked for as many of those producers as we could and also selected wines that best pair with African-diasporic cuisine (influenced heavily by Caribbean and West African cooking).
In that same article, Racine references Foradori, a family-run winery in Trentino-Alto Adige, close to the Austrian border.
Three decades ago, after the unexpected death of her father, Elisabetta Foradori returned to her family’s estate to care for the vines. She could’ve chased market trends, like vintners in Tuscany, who famously ripped up their Sangiovese to plant international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon. But instead, she focused on cultivating local grapes.1 Namely, Nosiola, Pinot Bianco, and a relative of Syrah, known as Teroldego. Both are richly flavored and intensely fruit-forward. But who would know that grape by name and feel confident ordering it if they saw it for the first time on a wine list?
That’s where Sommeliers shine. With hours of self-study and tasting practice under our belts, it’s gratifying to suggest a new wine to someone, especially when we think they’ll love it, but only if they’re willing to engage with us. But some guests just prefer to scroll through their Vivino app.
Someone in New York City declined my suggestions once, in favor of using their phone. I’ve got to believe realtors encounter a similar apprehension from buyers or sellers preferring FSBO (for sale by owner) transactions. With unfettered access to the internet and no one to guide you, what could go wrong?
A lot, especially when it comes to matching food and wine in a way that’s appetizing without missing the mark. Secrets of Sommeliers, which won a James Beard Award for Beverage, includes many useful quotes, including this one: “The process of narrowing down a pairing involves both trial and error and good taste.” And sommeliers are advanced tasters, at least when compared to non-industry professionals.
While we don’t want to overcomplicate a pairing, we also don’t want to see a meal overwhelmed by the wrong wine. So, we make a point of knowing how the five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami and a wine’s structure (e.g., racy [acidic] or round [oaked]) contribute to what a guest will experience on their palate with their meal selection. As far as I know, apps like Vivino don’t provide that level of service. It’s job security for now.
Although there’s always the possibility that diners can encounter a wine snob on the job, often, sommeliers are motivated by driving an experience and not just a sale. The best philosophy I’ve encountered to date when it comes to selecting pairings comes from Secrets of the Sommeliers: “Light reds [are] great with fish, and richer whites can pair with certain meats. White wines with a touch of green in them—Albariños, Sancerres, some Greek whites—are usually good paired with green foods like salads and vegetables.” I’d even add Vermentino, Grüner Veltliner, and Pinot Grigio to that list.
But how can we serve guests if they aren’t inclined to engage with us? We can appeal to them through a wine list.
Food writer Sara Dickerman says, “Menus are a literature of control. Menu language, with its hyphens, quotation marks, and random outbursts of foreign words, serve less to describe food than to manage your expectations.”
When creating or editing wine lists, sommeliers make choices. I take the view that wine lists represent texts or tools that the public needs to be able to engage with in order to advance rhetorical action, based on an essay I read in grad school titled, “Ecological, Pedagogical, Public Rhetoric,” co-written by Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber.
In practice, if a guest orders a cocktail in lieu of a bottle of wine or, worse, takes to social media to tell their followers just how unsavory they found the whole process of navigating the wine list—a true story revealed later in this essay—it’s a missed opportunity for a sale, yes, but also for a wine professional to practice engaging public rhetoric pedagogy.
While to some, wine lists may seem like nothing more than “mundane documents,” according to Rivers and Weber, they help to “mold human behavior.” They have the potential to drive sales and interest in wine or to turn people off completely. Take the following observation: “Sometimes when customers open a wine list and find a lot of verbiage on the page, they don’t want to deal with it,” says Nicole Burke, chef/owner Burke & Black. “But then when a list is just that—a list—and there is nothing to guide [guests], they similarly don’t want to look at it.”
Before the wine buyer’s revolution, after the mid-2000s, an industry-wide shift to stop arranging wine lists by bin numbers, producers, and prices but little else, a lot of sommeliers stocked cellars based on their desire to get a taste of celebrated Burgundies or rarer wines, rather than appeal to their guests’ particular wine preferences.2 However, that changed when people like Paul Grieco at Terroir, Belinda Chang at The Modern, and Carlton McCoy at Element 47, a few years after that, reinterpreted the content and tone of wine lists so that the form and function, as well as its creator, could take on a whole new (creative) rhetorical discourse.
The wine programs they took over, and wine programs at famous restaurants elsewhere, mostly touted Chardonnays and Cabernets made almost exclusively in Burgundy and Napa. But with these sommeliers at the helm, their wine lists featured Rieslings made in Germany and Austria, Nebbiolos produced in Piedmont, and Cabernets, Syrahs, and Pinot Noirs from the U.S.
As Parr writes in Secrets of the Sommeliers, “Good lists also have diversity. The best wine directors have a democratic sense, wanting everyone to love wine as much as they do, so they will make sure to stock their list with lots of styles at lots of different prices.”
One of my favorite examples of this is Seasons 52, which offers 52 wines by the glass. The BTG list is a joy to navigate. White wines feature prominently at the top, all arranged by varietal (e.g., Sparkling, Sauvignon Blanc, Rosé, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio), even including a section for “Interesting Whites.”
I like the idea of “interesting” styles because there are popular varietals being made in unusual places, like the Napa Valley. One of my favorite wineries, Matthiasson, produces Ribolla Gialla, an Italian varietal, in the southern part of Napa Valley. They’re serious vintners making serious wine in a place seriously obsessed with Bordeaux varietals. “Interesting” to say the least. Although they’re not presently on the BTG list, Seasons 52 is featuring Band of Vintners—wine that’s made and priced fairly by industry vets. That’s why I’ve got a hunch that the beverage directors at Seasons rotated through bottles of Matthiasson at one time or another.
I mention Matthiasson, the husband-and-wife winegrowing and winemaking team, here because they are opening doors with their internship program which provides entry for women into the farming side of their business; their involvement with the Two Eighty Project empowers anyone and everyone to learn how to make, manage, teach, and sell wine. It’s all part of how they run their business. They’re regenerative farmers. I think you might even be able to taste their thoughtful philosophy.
On a list Ribolla Gialla might not mean anything to the average wine drinker, but it does to me. I got to visit the Matthiasson’s yellow house and taste their wines under a fig tree, after I passed my Certified exam in 2018, through the Court of Master Sommeliers. The following spring, I had the privilege of tasting Laura Felluga’s family’s Ribolla Gialla while working for Lidia Bastianich’s hospitality group and later attending Vinitaly in Verona. I mention that here because if I said that to someone out of context, I would probably sound like a wine snob.
Sommeliers get a lot of scrutiny. We deserve some of it, especially The Washington Post coverage back in 2020 from Dave McIntyre, decrying restaurant wine lists that intimidate “even the dining pros.” As McIntyre writes:
The language of wine can be intimidating. Wine lovers have our own vocabulary, complete with foreign words that can be difficult to pronounce…. All this leads to the stereotype of the wine snob lording knowledge over the rest of the world. And of course, there’s the snooty sommelier who intimidates diners with an impenetrable list and an imposing demeanor. Most sommeliers I’ve met here in Washington and elsewhere take great pains to dispel that stereotype, but the negative image seems to be alive and well.
The article then references Helen Rosner, famed food writer for the New Yorker. And her now famous X (formerly Twitter) rant:
I am an actual professional restaurant eater and I still have no … clue which of the many many words on a wine list is the one word I’m supposed to say to indicate that this is the wine I want a glass of.
Judging by Rosner’s tweet and McIntyre’s motivation to write the article, the snooty sommelier stereotype still exists.
But our profession is and deserves to be distinguished. Not because of Wine Spectator’s acclaimed Restaurant Awards program, now entering its 43rd year or due to coveted titles Wine Enthusiast bestows on a “Sommelier/Beverage Director of the Year.” (Fun fact: Seasons 52 boasts a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.)
Setting aside the fact that healthy disagreement exists within the industry about who can refer to themself as a sommelier, (I’m partial to the idea that you can call yourself a Sommelier, even if you no longer work on the floor of a restaurant) our profession deserves more praise than Twitter punishment because our job is to do more than sell: it is to educate.
That’s why I think the food and wine writing category has become so popular in the last four decades. But some bad press is good, especially if it forces people in the industry to pay attention to and reshape our approach to our rhetorical activity. Other press is just in bad taste.
If there’s a takeaway from Helen Rosner’s criticisms about unreadable wine lists, let it be, as Rivers and Weber write, that we bring together “disconnected threads.” Let the “we” be the wine industry and let us take our menus (e.g., mundane documents), snobs (e.g., interpersonal networks), exclusionary hiring practices (e.g., rhetorical moves and countermoves), and grapple with this “messy ecology of public discourse.” We and you deserve so much more than Sip. Swirl. Repeat.
- Louis/Dressner Selections, https://louisdressner.com/articles/an-interview-with-elisabetta-foradori. ↩︎
- Sciaretta, Gillian. “Biography of a Wine List,” Wine Spectator, 31 Aug. 2018, pp. 63.
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Nikki Palladino, a full-time copywriter, enrolled in the graduate writing studies program at Saint Joseph’s University to write about her passions, food and wine. She has worked as a sommelier on the floors of Lupa and Oceana in Manhattan and also, as the program coordinator for the Wine Studies Program at The International Culinary Center. Her creative nonfiction explores the culture and personality of the wine and hospitality industries and she’s currently at work on a young adult novel about a first-gen Italian American teen with a passion for pastry arts. Follow her @nikki_pall .
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