🍷The Greats

Triffon built her entire career in Michigan, anchored for years at Detroit's storied London Chop House, rather than decamping to New York or San Francisco where the trade's spotlight lived. Then, in the 2010s, she made a move that startled the profession again: she became master sommelier for Plum Market, a Michigan grocery chain — putting one of the world's rarest wine credentials to work advising supermarket shoppers on Tuesday-night bottles, and arguing by example that the craft's point is the drinker, not the dining room.

Basset chased the world championship for the better part of two decades, reaching the final rounds repeatedly and losing — defeats he admitted stung more each time. For the 2010 contest in Santiago, Chile, he prepared like an Olympian: a sports psychologist, timed mock finals, structured tasting drills. He won at age 53, the oldest champion ever crowned, and wept on stage. His memoir Tasting Victory, finished as he was dying of cancer and published posthumously in 2020, reads as a manual on losing well for a very long time.

When Tasaki won the world championship on home soil in 1995, Japan responded as if he had won an Olympic gold: television, book deals, a wine school bearing his name. His victory fed directly into Japan's late-1990s wine boom, when imports surged and sommelier-exam applications multiplied, helping make the Japan Sommelier Association one of the largest bodies of certified sommeliers on earth. The state noticed too — he received the Medal with Yellow Ribbon, Japan's honor for professional excellence, an award more usually associated with master artisans than with waiters.

After winning in Rhodes in 2007, Larsson did something unusual for a world champion: he doubled down on blindness. As chief editor of the tasting journal TASTED alongside Markus Del Monego — the 1998 world champion — he built a review platform on a single rule: every wine is scored blind, labels hidden, reputation excluded. It was the competition method turned into publishing ethics, from a man whose entire career had been built on trusting the glass over the label.

The same year she earned the diploma, Singh took over as host of Check, Please!, Chicago public television's restaurant-review show in which ordinary viewers — cab drivers, teachers, retirees — debate their neighborhood spots. For a decade one of the world's rarest wine credentials fronted a show devoted to everyday eating, and the pairing was the point: Singh used the platform, and later her own restaurants, to argue that expertise exists to open doors for civilians, not to guard them.

The Meilleur Ouvrier de France is French craft's supreme title, its tricolor collar worn by legendary chefs and artisans; in sommellerie, no woman had ever earned it. Lepeltier took it in 2018, then won Best Sommelier of France months later — a double no one had managed in a single year — all while working an ocean away from France on the floor of a Manhattan restaurant, championing the Loire's chenin blanc and natural growers her Paris peers were slower to embrace. Her 2022 book Mille Vignes became a bestselling wine reference in France.

The Antwerp final that Almert won in March 2019 is the trade's decathlon performed as live theater: blind flights of wines and spirits, food-pairing problems, a sabotaged wine list whose planted errors must be found against the clock, and full table service for a room of judges, all in multiple languages before an arena audience. Sixty-odd national champions entered; Almert, the young hotel sommelier few had picked as favorite, beat them all — then went back to his day job in Zurich, where he kept working the floor.