Wine Tasting Through

Christina Snyder, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I used to work as a sommelier, even though I still need autocorrect to spell the word properly which is not that big a deal as I need autocorrect to spell anything beyond my name (the rarely used middle name is a cause for pause, but I get it right more often than not.)

There’s confusion as to what it means to be a sommelier (got it right that time.) A lot of people assume that means that you went through a rigorous set of expensive exams and got the nod from an oenophile elite. You can do that if you like, but it’s not necessary.

Sommelier is a job description, not an accreditation. I remember watching a TV (television) interview where the subject mentioned that being a sommelier doesn’t require a test. You get hired to do a job. If you get hired to be a receptionist, you are a receptionist whether you’re good at it or not. If you are hired to be a sommelier, you are a sommelier even if you don’t know your Albarino from a hole in the ground.

A lot of people will hold that without a certificate you can’t call yourself a real sommelier. Rubbish. Even the Court of Master Sommeliers concurs. On their website they state that they are “the premier examining body for Sommeliers worldwide.” Medical schools don’t test doctors, they test medical students. Law schools test law students. Engineering schools… etc. But the sommeliers are already sommeliers before they crack a book.

Master Sommeliers amaze me. There are only two hundred and sixty-nine of them in the world as of this research, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting five and suffering through a miserable afternoon with another. With a noted exception, their knowledge and willingness to share that knowledge is something to behold. Master certification is a hell of an accomplishment. It’s the first round of testing graduates that drive me nuts.

Those first round folks are very employable and impress potential diners with their title on a website but their lists are predictable. If you keep up with wine trends you can tell when a certified sommelier took their test. Theirs are too often a what has been taught list over a what has been considered and found to be best for the menu, location, and season list.

I was welcomed into wine tastings in the late 90s. I was living in Savannah, GA and working at a place called Elizabeth on 37^th. The brothers that owned the restaurant had an extensive cellar and a tremendous reputation – there was a Beard Award for wine. I was a twit that thought wine was a mystery that occasionally got you laid. They taught me otherwise. I showed interest and they included me so I had conversations with distributors, growers, and makers.

I met people from all over the world. I tasted several times weekly under their guidance. When I returned to Birmingham I took a job with a wine importer/distributor before eventually moving back to restaurant work. I settled into a wonderful job where for seven years I was the front of house and bar manager and ran a wine list with just over one hundred and fifty labels. Those that want to be in the cool club of the wine world like to call them “skews,” but the brothers that owned that place in Savannah called them labels, so I do too.

I taught classes to staff and hosted wine dinners. It was fun. I developed a reputation of my own because I took notes at tastings. When I was selling wine to restaurants I would take a nice syrah or something at a by the glass price point around and let my accounts taste it. Invariable I’d get a call within the next two weeks from one of those accounts asking if I had an affordable Syrah or something at a by the glass price point and I’d want to rip their hair out because I apparently wasted a day and a bottle with the previous week’s bottle. I vowed never to do that to my suppliers. As  a buyer I took notes and when there was a need I started with what we called the two phone books – huge binders I wrote my thoughts in after and during tastings, one for white and one for red –  loosely organized but with info on every wine that was pitched to us.

I said goodbye to all that when my oldest started kindergarten. I was going in at two in the afternoon and coming home after midnight and I realized I would only see him on Sundays. I descended on real estate. After years of selling houses the appeal of arguing over counter tops and spending football Saturdays following a guy with a metal rod poking various spots around a yard and saying “No septic tank here,” I’ve gotten back into the restaurant world if only tangentially in a consult-y way.

I had a reintroduction. I just went to my first industry wine tasting since 2011 or 2012. I recognized old friends. They had a bit more gray, but they were friends and we reformed clicks like a bunch of high schoolers at a twenty year anniversary. That’s wrong. They had been there all along and I was the prodigal but instead of a fattened calf I got a bunch of hugs and handshakes and phones held up to me with the bearer asking “Is this still your number?”

One of the most wonderful things about getting older is realizing that people have forever tried to imprint order on what should be allowed to be chaotic. The wine tasting was held in a ballroom at the top of Red Mountain with pretty spectacular views of Jones Valley and downtown Birmingham. There were twenty-five or so tables with six seats each and the idea was that rather than have a mob wander and compress you would sign up on line for twenty minutes with a particular representative and your app would guide you – might be a wine maker or a regional rep or one of the local sales people – so you and five others would be able to ask all the questions and make all the comments that the rep would smile and nod at no matter how far off you were from the actual profile of the wine you were tasting.

Seems orderly and efficient. But this was an event where they were pouring wine. Good luck keeping that on schedule. I was dutiful for my first two appointments but then I saw a friend at one table and a respected importer at another and I told them that I didn’t sign up but asked if there was a spare seat. I did that with several tables. To a one the response was “If there isn’t I’ll find you a chair.”

The chaos allowed us to be cliquish again and since we could, we quickly dumped the anonymity of online reservations and descended on whatever caught our fancy. We smirked at the younger buyers trying to impress with “malolactic,” or some such, and asking questions about oak aging that they barely listened to the answers to. We used to do that. It was so strange to be of the arrived.

After the wine tasting event I slinked down the hill to a reliable neighborhood joint with a good burger. I was sitting at the bar when one of the distributor/importers sat beside me.

She got her start in the Birmingham market. I went to parties at her house. She would have a several tables with a bartender pouring half glasses and we’d get a sense of the next year’s offerings. It was great with a Red Mountain city view and she would pull fifty or so guests on her above a garage red tiled porch. The porch was terrifying to me. It was precipitous.

I mentioned that I did a bit of time in real estate. I kept a marble in my pocket so that when it seemed that a floor slanted one way or another I could show that it did or didn’t. Her terrifying porch cost me a marble as it sped its gravitational way to the north. It was a beautiful house, but on the slip zone.

But there we were at the reliable neighborhood joint.  We’d run so many wine specials together, wine maker’s diners, by the glass specials, etc. over the years. I had a pale ale and she had a vodka soda.

It was nice to talk. People are so much fun.