Thoughts on the sommelier scandal

I’ve been closely following this brouhaha about sexist sommeliers and the raging debate it’s inspired about topics ranging from wine snobbery and elitism to employment opportunities for women in the wine business.

Given my long involvement in the wine business, which included exceptionally close contact with sommeliers, and given that I’m a gay man in an industry that traditionally has sidelined gay people, I feel entitled to speak my mind when it comes to questions of equity and abuse. The first thing I want to say is that this is a good debate. The wine industry—on the growing side, the production side, and the hospitality/service side—has been heavily dominated by men—specifically, straight white men–for too long. On the marketing-public relations side, that’s less true; women traditionally have been very powerful in P.R. But for that very reason, P.R. has been viewed (mostly by men) as the less important side of the wine industry, the province of “the weaker sex.”

I’m not big on quotas; no industry should be compelled to hire in the exact percentages of the U.S. population by gender, ethnicity, race, sexual preference, or anything else. Still, when a group has historically been excluded from participating in an industry, it should surprise no one when representatives of that group complain. It also should not surprise anyone that, where there is exclusion, there exists the possibility of abuse: some groups perceive themselves (and are perceived by others) as being more “worthy” and “talented,” and those groups—usually white men–believe they should support the existing power structure which, of course, benefits them.

I look back over my decades of involvement in wine and restaurants here in California and elsewhere, and I’m surprised that I didn’t realize sooner that the wine industry had serious equity problems. Back in the 1980s, when I was getting started, men ran everything. They made the wine at the wineries. They worked at the restaurants, both as chefs and as sommeliers. They ran the tasting groups, and they dominated the media, in books, newspapers and newsletters. Women were relegated to the sidelines. I remember Merry Edwards telling me the story of when she applied for a winemaking job at Schramsberg, in the 1970s. Her resume read “Meredith Edwards,” so the owner, one of the Davies, assumed the job applicant was male. When he met Merry for the interview, he was clearly taken aback. Merry asked him, “Would you have brought me in for an interview if you’d known I was a woman?” The answer was no.

I heard similar stories from a wide variety of women: Genevieve Janssens, at Robert Mondavi, described how she feared she’d be fated to work in the lab, not as a winemaker. The story on the restaurant floor was similar. Were there any female sommeliers or wine service people at top San Francisco restaurants in the 1980s and 1990s? If there were, I don’t remember any, but I remember male somms at Square One, Lulu, Rubicon, Farallon, Fleur de Lys, Postrio, Aqua, Boulevard, Hawthorne Lane and others. How come I didn’t find this overwhelming dominance by men weird or discomfiting? Because, I suppose, I wasn’t sensitive to the issue. Sometimes we have to forcefully be sensitized to these things; otherwise, we accept them blindly and blithely.

I was, on the other hand, acutely aware of the void of gay people in the wine industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Or, to put it more accurately, I knew people who were gay—or were said to be gay—and in some cases they were quite famous. But there was a silent agreement to not say anything. You couldn’t really come out of the closet; despite the wine industry’s supposedly liberal orientation, the actual towns of wine country were (and are) socially conservative. You couldn’t ask anyone if he or she were gay; that would have been unprofessional. And, as a writer, I knew for certain I couldn’t say in an article that someone was gay (not that it made a difference to the wine). Gay people (including Lesbians) were therefore hidden away, like the mad aunt in the attic. I’m not sure that, even now, things have changed that much.

The male sommeliers I’ve known and worked with have been in general a friendly, kindly bunch. But, again in retrospect, when I look back, I can see how thoroughly they dominated their local scenes. They were highly respected, especially if they were Master Sommeliers. They were looked upon by us lesser mortals as almost divine in their authority and knowledge—indeed, this is how they saw themselves. We all deferred to them, and they took advantage of it and acted in very royalist capacities. When I quit Wine Enthusiast to work at Jackson Family Wines—which, in my time (2012-2016), employed more Master Sommeliers than any other company in America—my feeling about them was that they were quite happy to be the resident muckety-mucks. They were a separate priesthood within a large, diverse employee community. This isn’t to say that I ever knew any sommeliers, Master or not, to engage in inappropriate sexual activities. I did not. But then, I wasn’t a woman, working alongside and for a somm. Nobody was making “moves” on me. And men in power were inappropriately compromising women in many industries, not just wine. So it would be unfair to single out the wine industry for sexism. The wine industry, like nearly every other industry grouping in America, was simply doing what America itself was doing.

The good thing about our modern society is that situations of such rampant inequity can’t exist for long. They’re exposed in the media; people naturally take umbrage at such outrages. Demands are made for reform, and industries must accede to these demands, or suffer the consequences. I think there are probably excesses: not every male who’s accused by every female of inappropriate behavior is guilty. There are two sides to every story. But overall, this scandal that erupted in the Court of Master Sommeliers is good news. It will make the wine industry fairer and more responsible. It might even make it less elitist. I’ve said for decades that there is way too much snobbery in the wine industry. I “get” it; I know why that is, and I confess to having done my part to aid and abet it, albeit unconsciously. But I always thought that, when it came to “Master” Somms and “Masters” of Wine, things had gotten a little out of hand. I think, although I can’t prove it, that women somms are less authoritarian, less given to power tripping than male sommeliers, and certainly less prone to sexual harassment. So if the field of wine service is more open to women, that will benefit the dining public. Women may be able to demystify wine (a rallying cry for the last 80 years) in a way that men could not—or did not want to.