Here’s a fun story about a regular guy becoming a Sommelier:
When Randall Lane first started thinking about becoming a Sommelier, it seems he was more than a little suspicious of the whole idea. He begins his article, Alcohol Testing: Can a Regular Guy Pass the Sommelier SATs? with the following:
Viewed from the outside, sommelierhood always seemed to me like a high-fenced country club — snobby, exclusive, and yet as hopelessly alluring as the Groucho Marx aphorism promised. I was a sometime food writer and full-time wine lover, and the studied rituals (the dainty stem pinch, the little swirl, the deep sniff) and the pretentious adjectives (”chewy,” “herbaceous”) seemed to me like Skull and Bones with a buzz.
He decided to go ahead and try to gain admission to that “high-fenced country club” of sommelierhood. Lane continues:
Formal wine training generally falls into three camps. First, the horny amateurs, who show up at functions thrown by the Wine Brats or Fun With Wine in search of Mr. or Ms. Right (or, after a few too many glasses, Mr. or Ms. Right Now). Then, the rich amateurs, who have more money than time, and take one of any number of intensive courses that convey just enough information to impress friends. Both accomplish their goals, but neither gets you into The Club.
The only route for me was professional certification. Technically, sommelier is a just job title, like welder or garbage hauler; anyone can call herself a sommelier and many do. But becoming a certified sommelier requires a class and a test. And the doors to the highest levels of sommelierdom are even more firmly gated: To become a Master of Wine or a Master Sommelier, you need to be invited just to take the famously rigorous curriculum and tests. But basic sommelier certification remains open to anyone with six months to kill and $800 or $900 to blow.
Lane explains his impressions of the program:
High school is a pretty apt description, except that here the teachers pour you booze instead of confiscating it. Gazing about at my 40 or so classmates, it didn’t take long to see the cliques emerge. The trade professionals were the jocks — confident, pack-oriented (wholesalers, distributors, and others often send entire teams in for training), and full of the ease that comes with not personally paying or particularly wanting to be there. The waiters were the nerds — working stiffs diligently trying to move another notch up the restaurant industry ladder. Next came the foreigners — like the exchange students at your high school, they were a bit aloof, smoked in the hallway, and took exception whenever their country’s reputation came up.
I was the odd duck, a journalist who fit into none of these categories. The class loner. Which was fine, because it was hard enough to drink wine at 9 a.m., much less kibbitz. The restaurant-friendly start time was supposedly a great hour to taste, since our tongues begin each day relatively uncorrupted. This is also how I learned to appreciate spitting. Previously, spitting had represented to me everything wrong with wine snobs. Tipsiness, after all, is part of drinking wine. But given that nothing kills a day quicker than a midmorning buzz, I began filling water glasses with my own version of rosé.
Lane continues to explain is experiences in Sommelier class, and his feelings upon passing the test and receiving his certificate in the mail, and concludes:
So, now I have the pedigree. Has my life changed? Maybe a bit. There are some benefits of being a sommelier. At bad restaurants, when a bungling waiter (and when it comes to wine, they’re almost all bungling) brings the wrong bottle, I can confidently shoot down the invariable B.S. explanation. At good restaurants, the sommelier will cut to the chase: This is what you should order.
With a discerning eye, I now drink better without spending any more money. All my pals let me order the wine, and because I picked it, they think it’s better than it probably is. And my family now has an easy time buying me gifts. Sometimes, I detect a sommelier-to-sommelier wink, as if we’re two Swedish speakers coincidentally meeting up in the Andes. That said, I haven’t been invited to any secret meetings, taught any new handshakes, or given any fabulous new friends. Maybe it’s because I still act like an interloper. I’ll never be able to utter the word “jammy” with a straight face. But now I know what it means.