I’d recommend a nice cheese and onion: meet the ‘sommeliers’ of chocolate, oysters, mustard – and crisps
‘We thought we were being original,” says Andy Shovel, co-founder of the plant-based brand This. Having advertised for a meat “sommelier” to taste new products as part of a marketing campaign last year, Shovel was dismayed to hear that This was not the first company to co-opt the term, traditionally used to describe the person in charge of wine in a restaurant.
In April, Subway recruited a crisp sandwich “sommelier” in collaboration with Walkers. Poppy O’Toole, a trained chef and the “Potato Queen” of TikTok, would visit the chain’s branches and advise customers on how to perfect their crisp and bread combinations, “imparting some of the flavour training and techniques from my Michelin training”, she said. Brewers, meanwhile, have had “beer sommeliers” for years, as those championing craft varieties sought to distinguish themselves from industrial-scale operations. As Sophie Atherton, the UK’s first accredited female beer sommelier, puts it: “Many of us are essentially ‘beer ambassadors’ – sharing our expertise, knowledge and enthusiasm to promote beer as a drink to be taken seriously.” The “sommelier” title has also spread to tea, honey, mustard, olive oil – even chocolate and oysters.
Most of these new-wave, non-wine sommeliers work with rather than in restaurants (and with caterers), advising chefs and training front-of-house staff as well as running educational courses. The Olive Oil Times’s sommelier programme – in which participants are taught to taste and distinguish between more than 100 olive oils from around the world, for example, is designed for producers, retailers and enthusiasts as well as chefs. Maille’s mustard sommeliers work in its shops, advising customers on which mustard will best suit their preferences or their intended dish.
Of the sommeliers I speak to, only Bobby Groves is based permanently in a restaurant: his role is head of oysters at the Chiltern Firehouse in London, where he works alongside the chef and wine sommelier. There is no official oyster sommelier certification, but after completing a 5,000-mile tour of every oyster farm and fishery in Britain and shucking “well over a million oysters”, Groves feels he has earned his stripes.
Not everyone is happy to see this venerable title redefined, however. To become a head of wine takes years of study and experience. To take “sommelier”, with all its grandeur, and apply it to crisps is to “make a mockery of a status which young people in our industry look up to,” says George Hersey, the Cornwall-based restaurant director of Adam Handling’s restaurant group.
That said, Hersey is no puritan; he believes that sommeliers in restaurants should not be confined to wine, but equally well versed in beer, non-alcoholic drinks and spirits. Being a sommelier means having knowledge and a good palate – “but for me, it ultimately comes down to customer experience. The more we progress, the more we need to ensure a guest’s experience is just as good if they are having a pairing of non-alcoholic drinks or beer.”
Tea and wine have much in common, with characteristics that change according to the variety of crop as well as where and how it was grown
Predictably perhaps, certified tea sommelier Jane Milton would go further. Her training – two years at the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada, one of the few places in the world offering a certified tea sommelier course – and her experience since then mean she feels the title is appropriate. That, and the fact that tea and wine have much in common, being naturally derived drinks with characteristics that change according to the variety of crop they come from, as well as where, when and how it was grown. Olive oil, chocolate and honey also fall into this category, and perhaps the foods and drinks that lend themselves best to sommelier status are those that demand serious application to be in any way “known”.
This is certainly true of honey, which C Marina Marchese studied for three years to qualify as a professional honey taster with the Italian National Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey. Now based in New York, she dubbed herself a “honey sommelier” on her return to the US because “tasting honey professionally was an unheard-of concept, and I found it difficult to explain my credentials”, she says.
“It is a language people understand,” says Sam Smallman, whose official title is pastry category manager for the French chocolate brand Valrhona, but who often describes himself as a “chocolate sommelier”. His job is to advise pastry chefs on which chocolate works best for the dessert they are creating. He tells the story of the chocolate: where the cocoa is from, how it’s conched, ground or blended, and how it was made.
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Pat Eckert, founder of the London “water boutique” Fine Liquids, whose bottles come from as far afield as Chile, Iceland and Fiji, once thought all water tasted the same – until a particularly poor glassful sent him on a deep dive that resulted in him amassing one of the world’s biggest water portfolios. He employs (and plans to become) a certified water sommelier, and insists that tasting water isn’t like tasting wine; it is harder. “When you are tasting wine, it is obvious. There is so much flavour, it is easy to talk about,” he says. “But to taste water, you have to be aware. You have to be very quiet inside yourself to find out what is happening. Water always tastes like water at first.”
Eckert describes his water suppliers as “artists” – something I’ve heard traditional sommeliers say of winemakers – and while his earnest descriptions of water terroir and the difference between “wet” and “dry” water might sound like satire, they also highlight the pretentiousness we allow in wine, in comparison with other foods and drinks. Instead of asking if the term sommelier is appropriate beyond the world of wine, perhaps we should ask why not?
