Wine · Terminology

Sommelier

The wine specialist on a restaurant floor — buying, listing, serving and matching wine to what's being eaten.

A sommelier is the wine specialist in a restaurant: the person who builds the list, buys and stores the stock, trains the floor staff, recommends bottles, and handles service from uncorking to decanting to the last pour.

The public half of the job — suggesting a pairing — is the smallest part. The rest is inventory, margin, cellar management and teaching, which is why a good sommelier's real skill shows up in the shape of the list rather than in the table-side patter.

In practice

  • Buying and listing: balancing regions, styles, price points and by-the-glass turnover against what the kitchen actually cooks.
  • Cellar work: stock rotation, storage temperature, tracking what is drinking now and what needs another five years.
  • Service: presenting, opening, tasting to screen for taint, pouring in the right order, managing glassware and temperature.
  • Pairing: matching acidity, tannin, sweetness and body to the dish.

Where you'll meet it

  • Restaurants with a serious list; in smaller rooms the role often merges with the general manager's.
  • Wine competitions such as the Concours du Meilleur Sommelier du Monde.
  • Certification bodies: the Court of Master Sommeliers, the CMS's Master Sommelier title, and the WSET's Level 3 and Diploma qualifications.

Sommelier, winemaker, Master of Wine

The three titles get muddled constantly:

Title Domain Route
Sommelier Restaurant floor, service and lists Experience plus CMS / WSET certification
Winemaker / oenologist The cellar — see oenology Degree in oenology and viticulture
Master Sommelier (MS) Service and blind tasting, at the highest level Court of Master Sommeliers exams
Master of Wine (MW) The wine trade broadly — production, business, tasting Institute of Masters of Wine

Roughly 300 people hold the MW and a similar number the MS; both are famously difficult, and only a handful of people hold both.

The exam angle

Service questions expect the sommelier's decisions, not their charm: serving temperature by style, glass choice, decanting judgement, order of pouring, and the food-and-wine principles that make a match work — matching weight, mirroring or contrasting sweetness, and treating acidity as the palate-cleanser.

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