Main content

Sommeliers: Wine waiters uncorked

What the person serving your wine is really thinking

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, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ)

Available now

26 minutes

Last on

Sun 8 Dec 2019 08:32GMT

Broadcasts

  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 02:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 03:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 04:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 05:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 11:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 18:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 21:32GMT
  • Thu 5 Dec 2019 23:32GMT
  • Sun 8 Dec 2019 08:32GMT

Food Chain highlights

Tea, coffee, spices, chillies ... snack on a selection of programme highlights

Podcast