Duncan Gammie, Sommelier

I am a certified sommelier. I have also not had a drink since May 2020, which means I do the entire job with my nose, my palate and a spit cup.

My certification is from the Napa Valley Wine School. It is not the grandest credential in wine and I have never pretended otherwise. What it gave me was the formal grammar for something I had been doing by feel since I was nineteen: structure, acid, tannin, balance, length, and the discipline to describe a wine in terms another taster can check.

What a sommelier actually does

People assume the job is drinking. The job is reading. A sommelier tastes a wine and tells you what it is, where it came from, roughly when it was made, whether it is sound, whether it is ready, and what it will do next to a plate of food. None of that requires swallowing. Swallowing is what happens afterwards, and it is optional.

Professional tasters have always spat. Walk any trade tasting in London, Napa or Tuscany and the spittoons are full, because nobody can assess sixty wines in a morning and stay useful past the twentieth. The difference in my case is that I never stop spitting, and I say so out loud.

The technique

Wine is assessed in the first six seconds. You take a measured amount, hold it across the whole tongue, draw air through it to volatilise the aromatics, register the sequence of attack, mid palate and finish, and then get rid of it. The finish continues after the wine has gone. That is the part most people miss, because they swallow and lose the signal in the warmth.

I carry my own cup. It was a farmhouse thing from Monmouthshire and it has been to more tastings than most sommeliers I know. The full method is in the appendix of my book, written out step by step, because people kept asking me quietly at events and I got tired of explaining it over the noise.

Working sober in a drinking trade

Wine is the one industry where the product is the hazard and the tasting is the work. Most people who stop drinking leave. I stayed, and the practical upshot is that I can sit through a four hour tasting, a trade dinner and a producer visit, and do the job better at the end of it than I did at the beginning.

If you want the long version, that is what the memoir is.