Women Sommeliers: Changing the Wine Industry One Bottle at a Time

Woman Somelier

Women and wine go together like men and beer during the Super Bowl. Except with a lot less shouting and high-fiving. Perhaps it’s the relaxing sensuousness of opening and pouring a bottle, or maybe it’s the swirling and slow sipping that we love. Or maybe it’s just the fact that wine in all its varieties and styles is quite a fascinating, delicious, and beautiful part of the human experience. It’s not that women don’t love a good beer—we most certainly do. But wine is special. It can be sophisticated without pretention. It satisfies. It tells a story. And for women sommeliers, their story is only beginning to be told. A sommelier knows more about wine than most people will ever even think to ask. In our food and wine-pairing world, the wine expert is a necessity, of course. But master sommeliers are rare, women among the ranks, even more rare. That is now changing. In this enlightened era, only 32 of the world’s 229 master sommeliers—that’s just under 14 percent—are women,” reports Bloomberg. “Canada has two. Three-quarters of them ply their trade in the U.S.” Men have long dominated the sommelier industry, bringing an air of arrogant, snooty wine knowledge […]

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