Court of Master Sommeliers

In another life, in another city, I was a rising-star sommelier, with my hopes pinned on a Court of Master Sommeliers’ pin. I was 25 years old when I got my first gig as a cellar rat (a term bestowed on those of us who came to the cellars for free to stock bottles, haul cases and learn), 27 when I passed my certified exam. I worked those late nights on the floor like there was no other way to work. Restaurant life has its compulsive cachet, of course, but being a sommelier, for me, meant more than opening bottles at gueridon. It meant meeting with vendors, organizing inventory, educating staff, conducting profit and loss reports, carrying bottles up and down stairs, creating pairings, reading the minds of guests and enacting order from chaos. The position instilled in me a quality that would later play out on the road of eight marathons and, more recently, in the pages of countless magazines: discipline. That was the one quality I needed in my tender early days as a working person. The hours of a sommelier are long. The nights that spider into dawn would actually start late morning, when I would meet with the distributors who work nine to five. During those daylight hours, I would pick up the detritus from the night before, reprint the wine lists to reflect absences, restock the pull, make the last desperate phone calls to replenish the wine-by-the-glass before the weekend. If I was lucky, I’d eat family meal at four. To repeat this day in and day out for years—to continue to show up without allowing the business to break you down— requires giving yourself over to the work. Eventually, you become good at doing the things that you don’t love in service of doing the things that you do. Everything I needed to know about being a working person came from this recognition: that work can be both grueling and rewarding; that discipline can yield result; and that throwing yourself into work wholesale can get you where you want to go. I’m a hair over 40 now, and while I’m not necessarily nostalgic for my days on the floor, I’m thankful for them. Without that young life, I never would have found myself.