Enter The Court
I don’t know if any of you have been following the scandal at the court, but I’ll fill you in. The Court Of Master Sommeliers is an organization that certifies people as wine experts. With the upper tiers of the certifications that the court offers comes higher salaries in the world of wine. Recently, a master sommelier within the court was caught cheating with some folks taking the master exam. Whoops!
My own story with the court starts about fourteen years ago when I entered. The court doesn’t offer any study beyond the two day introduction that preceeds the first exam and it’s sparse at best. I remember it being in Traverse City, Michigan. I traveled there with a friend, also taking the exam. We arrived at the motel closest to the exam site on a Sunday and the newspaper headline was, “KKK Flies Flag At Community Picnic”. The subtitle read, “No one cared”. Good times. Of course, I inquired about this to the girl behind the desk who told me that the head of her neighborhood watch was “clan”. Oookkkaaayyy. Where was this court of masters whosywhatsit taking us, anyway? As we drove to a restaurant past lovely manicured homes, I looked past all the gorgeous tulips and saw many lawn jockeys in black face adorning front entrances. Yikes. Did no one at the court scope out the lay of the land first?! It struck me as an embarrasing oversight.
At the exam, I was one of two females in the room in a sea of men. There were at least a hundred people there. Being the only woman has become common for me. I’ve always found myself in male dominated industries, so I was not surprised. And I did pass. So that was cool. But the thing that stood out for me was listening to a bunch of men pontificating about their wine knowledge. Listen, the main thing I’ve learned about wine in the twenty something years that I’ve been involved in it, is how little I know about wine. I tell people that all the time. Wine is a constant journey that you learn from continuously. It’s as fluid as the wine itself and it endlessly evolves just the same as any bottled vintage.
Now, to take the next level exam, the court requires that you spend some time doing “service”. Um. What? Yeah. Service. Basically, I had to go be a waitress. I was incredulous. Here I was, thirty three years old at the time, and applying for a food service job. And let me tell you, I am the worst waitress ever. I hadn’t waited tables since I was a teenager working graveyard at some crappy pancake house in the ghetto I escaped from. A poor unsuspecting French restaurant on the strip in Las Vegas rolled the dice on me and away I went, turning down food substitutions left and right. Oh, did you want a glass of the house white? Sorry, not in my station. But I can bring you the Drouhin Chardonnay! Big smile. Or I can seat you someplace else. Still smiling. Ching!
My wine sales on the lunch shift were as high as some of the dinner shift servers. I sashayed wine all over that restaurant in my compression socks and sensible shoes. I developed a list of regulars that loved my salty attitude about slinging crepes. Soon, I was shuffled upstairs to work as a sommelier after breaking in as a wine runner. I left over ethics or rather to keep mine in tact. It was a lot of men behaving badly. Five other somms worked there and most of them were drunks with shocking scruples. Let me just say this….if you ever take an expensive bottle of wine to a restaurant, do not let your somm open your bottle any other place than at your table. And make sure you get the sediment pour. I’m just sayin’. There’s a possibility that someone somewhere in the wine world is going to read this and give me crap about it, but I really don’t care. I’ve made my own way and I’ll continue to do so on my own terms, thank you very much.
When I realized that selling wine table side to tacky rich people that treat the help poorly with colleagues who were perpetually hung over was not my bag, I started to look elsewhere. This is not how I had envisioned my career shift into wine. So I moved to Oregon. I had hoped to continue with the court when suddenly they changed the rules. Now they gave you a time limit in between exams. But wait! I was busy cramming six years of wine college into three years….hey, I was a single mom and I didn’t have six years to blow….surely I would be grandfathered in? Nope. If I wanted to continue with the court, I would have to start at the beginning. I was sad. Ok, I was a little pissed off. But I couldn’t dwell because I was whisked off into grape growing, wine making, and selling craft beer (of all things) for the years following.
That brings us to today. There’s around 270~ish master sommeliers in the court, maybe a few more. On the whole planet. Only 25 or so are women. That’s a sad number. The court certified it’s first master somm in 1973. The first woman wasn’t until 1987, and one more in 1989. Since then there’s been a smattering of women, but not many. So, when I read about this cheating scandal, which everyone is talking about, it’s hard not to roll my eyes. The whole exam program is independent study and then you pay them to take the next level exam, which many have to take multiple times the higher you go and they aren’t cheap.
The court encourages you to be mentored by masters in the court. Well, as a woman, I can tell you “mentoring” by other men in higher positions than you was a lot like today’s internet dating. Without the actual date part. It was a lot of paying for wine and listening to them talk about themselves. No thanks. I learned nothing, except a reaffirmation of what I already knew. It was a man’s world, this court of “masters”. And that whole coy thing men do when they know you need them for something had gotten increasingly tired the older I got. It’s boring. They always expected a little flash of cleavage, a little leg, maybe some fawning over their knowledge. Many were married and still acting like frat boys. What a yawn.
The details of the scandal? Apparently, a master somm who works (or used to before this happened) at Youngs Market….a major wine distributor *wink wink*…passed some answers to the blind tasting to some of his proteges on the master exam (remember that mentoring thing), an exam you have to be invited to, by the way. You don’t get to choose to take that exam on your own. It has an 8% pass rate. I’ve seen no less than 15 articles on it so far and everyone seems so shocked. Ha! I find that humorous. What?! Men behaving badly?! No! You don’t say?! Insert my dramatic eye rolling here. Because this kind of thing isn’t new. As a woman, and especially as a woman in wine, I know this. This is just the first time someone has been busted in the act.
I wanted to be a master somm in the court because there were so few women with that title. I didn’t want to be a waitress. I didn’t want to have to use my feminine wiles to get there. I didn’t feel like I needed to feign interest in higher ranking men to get what I wanted. And I didn’t. Today I still want to be a master sommelier, but it won’t be through the court. There are other organizations that focus on wine rather than hospitality, merit rather than cliques, and education over marketing. Recently, I have been struggling with whether or not to stick with the court and push on. I finally have the time again to start looking at pursuing a master somm level. The scripted shock over this scandal has really sealed it for me. It has been exposed for the nonsense it is. And to the court I say good luck. Or is it riddance? Teeheeee!!!