For years they have patrolled dining rooms, putting the terror into terroir. Yet for all the times that a haughty sommelier winced when you dared to inquire after the second-cheapest bottle on the list, or seemed pained by the way you swirled your glass, they are not infallible. Even French wine experts are now confessing their past embarrassments.
Some of the profession’s leading figures have cast aside their habitual reserve to confess to ghastly blunders, even ethical lapses. Fabrice Sommier, president of the Union de la Sommellerie Française, the association of French sommeliers, has owned up to charging a customer more than €5,000 for a cheap boxed cooking wine.
The episode happened decades ago, when Sommier was a novice at a top restaurant, which he did not name. “An American customer ordered a bottle of Château Latour, a highly prized vintage [claret],” Sommier told the newspaper Le Figaro. “I gave it to him to taste but he complained and asked me to change it. Again, he sent the wine back after it had been opened.”
Panicked, Sommier turned to a more experienced sommelier for advice. “He took a beautiful silver decanter, went into the kitchen and filled it with a wine from a box used to make sauces. He served it to the customer, who went into raptures and said it was exactly what he wanted.”
Sommier, later head sommelier at Michelin-starred restaurants including Georges Blanc, did not know what to charge for “a vulgar boxed wine” so again asked his superior. “He added up the cost of the two wines that had been sent back, and came up with a bill of 35,000 francs [more than €5,300].”
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Another leading sommelier, David Piquet, of La Villa Madie, a three-star restaurant in Cassis, on the Riviera, confessed to a slip-up, also with an American customer. Late one evening in 2014, when Piquet was working at Michel Guérard’s three-star restaurant in the southwestern town of Eugénie-les-Bains, he asked a group if they would like to move to the salon. They had been drinking Cheval Blanc 1982, a renowned Bordeaux priced at €4,500, and the bottle was still half full. While clearing the dining-room, Piquet poured it down the sink in “a stupid reflex”.
“Then I was told that the customer wanted to finish the bottle. I pretended that, because of its age, there was too much sediment and it would have been dangerous to drink it to the end. I must have been convincing as, very fortunately, he believed me.”
Sylvanie Gaignard, a female sommelier, or sommelière, at Medlar, a French restaurant in Chelsea, said she had also thrown away expensive wine early in her career. “It was a Meursault Premier Cru, a Burgundy worth £450 or £500 that can be sold at up to £2,000 on a wine list. The customer said it was corked so I tasted it and agreed,” she said. “No sooner had it gone down the drain than I realised we could have sent it back to the producer and got it replaced.”
Gabriele Del Carlo, head sommelier of the Royal Monceau in Paris, said his worst mistake was opening a Petrus 1989 instead of a less expensive Petrus 1999. “It was in 2010, at the three-star Pinchiorri in Florence. The owner wanted to offer a bottle of Petrus 1999 to a very important customer and told me, ‘Prendi un novantanove’ [get a 99].
“In a rush, I understood ‘ottantanove’ [89], so I brought up a Petrus 1989. Then I saw Mr Pinchiorri turn pale. Rightly so: the 1999 was priced at €6,000 but the 1989 was €13,000! The customer got a huge treat, I got my knuckles rapped.”
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Philippe Faure-Brac, named the world’s best sommelier in 1992 and now owner of the Bistrot du Sommelier in Paris, admitted serving a Château Haut Brion 1989, worth more than €2,300, to a table that had ordered a cheaper wine.
“I opened the bottle and decanted it to let it aerate before serving, but when I came back to look for it, I discovered that it had gone to the wrong table,” Faure-Brac said “Mortified, I opened another bottle for the customer who actually ordered it, and I told the lucky couple at the other table there had been a mix-up. Obviously, I left them the wine. It was expensive for me.”
Some blunders are beyond the control of sommeliers, however. “I had a gentleman who was very knowledgeable about wines,” Gaignard said. “We got on quite well and he ordered a good Bordeaux. When I served it, he asked for a Coca-Cola on the side, which he poured into the wine before drinking it. I was disappointed.”
Snooty, arrogant wine waiters still lurk in the cellar
In decades of ordering wine in restaurants, including seven years as a restaurant critic, it has been a struggle to cope with sommeliers (Jane MacQuitty writes).
Admittedly, like everyone else in the wine business, I am not an ordinary restaurant customer. Unlike most diners it’s relatively easy for us to calculate the mark-up on a little-known petit château claret, or an obscure pinot noir, plus spotting which wine merchants have provided the bulk of the list.
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Insiders know full well wine represents the lion’s share of the bill and the bulk of a restaurant’s profit, way more than the food. Alas, to my cost, upselling is still part of many sommeliers’ repertoire and a fair few still get rattled by a woman grabbing the wine list.
It would be wonderful to claim that snooty, arrogant, pretend-to-know-it-all wine waiters, both here and on the Continent, have been replaced by knowledgeable, enthusiastic, friendly and modest sommeliers who love to serve, but that’s not correct.
Certainly, trained, professional, top sommeliers are a huge improvement on previous generations and those in the best establishments are genuinely geeky about their subject.
Still, only one stands out in my experience as a flawless ambassador for his craft: the late, great, best sommelier in the world, Gerard Basset.
Jane MacQuitty is wine critic of The Times
