🍷Sommelier

"Sommelier" descends from the Old French sommier, the pack animal, by way of the household officer who drove a lord's baggage train and answered for his provisions. The word remembers what the job originally was: not luxury but trust. Long before restaurants existed, the person who kept the wine also tasted it before the ruler drank — in Egyptian, Persian and medieval European courts, a cupbearer's palate stood between the powerful and poison, which is why the office often went to confidants of high rank.

It remains one of the few elite professions with no license anywhere on earth. Nothing legally stops anyone from printing "sommelier" on a business card; what sorts the trade instead is the floor — years of service under chefs and wine directors — and a ladder of voluntary exams so hard they became famous. The Master Sommelier diploma, first examined in London in 1969, has been earned by only around 270 people ever, and its blind-tasting section asks for grape, country, region and vintage on six wines in twenty-five minutes.

This page follows the craft from the 8,000-year-old wine jars of Georgia and the labeled vintages in Tutankhamun's tomb, through the wine criers of medieval Paris and the first Paris sommeliers' union of 1907, to 1969 — the single year that produced the ASI, the Master Sommelier exam, the WSET and Japan's sommelier association. It covers how people actually enter the trade, what a service day demands, who reached the top, what the work pays on four continents, and how much of it software can honestly take.