The Food Chain

Sommeliers: Wine waiters uncorked

Master sommeliers are the elite of the global wine industry - only a few hundred people have claimed the title over the last 50 years. It can take decades of training and cost thousands of dollars, and the final exam has been described as one of the hardest in the world. Master sommelier Fernando Beteta tells Tamasin Ford why it's so difficult.

Release date: 05 December 2019

Duration: 2 minutes

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Sommeliers are to a restaurant’s wine what a head chef is to its food. These waiters taste and study thousands of bottles, and the best can even tell you exactly where a wine was grown and when its grapes were harvested, just with a sniff and a slurp.

But to some they can seem part of a stuffy, exclusive and mysterious club. We meet three sommeliers from the USA, Sweden and London who are all trying to change that image and guide even the most clueless of customers through their wine lists.

We hear how much wine they actually drink, how they deal with know-it-all customers and a master sommelier tells us how he passed one of the most difficult exams in the world. Plus, we put all of them to the ultimate blind taste test.

(Picture: Cameron Dewar, Fernando Beteta and Emma Ziemann. Credit: Cameron Dewar, Fernando Beteta, Emma Ziemann, BBC)