Photo courtesy Jill Mott
Sommelier Jill Mott
Sommelier Jill Mott
The wine god, Dionysus, incarnates themself in sommeliers. But what exactly is a sommelier? And who better to ask than a woman who completely incarnates Dionysus?
Jill Mott has been a sommelier at cool wine bars and the fancy restaurants from Chicago and Minneapolis to New York City and Palma de Mallorca. She has made wine at both great and humble estates from California to Spain to New Zealand. She has been a wine broker and a wine shop merchant. And she is always, everywhere teaching wine. She is presently the wine director of the Carlyle Hotel in New York.
An Interview with a Dionysus about Being a Sommelier
How would you describe being a sommelier?
I grew up in wine learning that the word sommelier was tied to an Italian phrase, something like, and don’t quote me, “Somigliere di bocca e di pepe.”That the sommelier was in charge of the joy of someone's ingestion and, obviously, said sommelier had the knowhow to do so. It wasn't just someone off the street that knew how to eat and drink well.
Do you require certification to call yourself a sommelier?
If you’re the type in need of certifications, then yes. However, if you taste, order, pair, organize and teach wine around the notion that the end result of what you’ve just ordered, paired, organized and taught will be someone sipping the resulting elixir and hopefully finding joy in it, then no. But with a caveat. Part of being a sommelier is the working nature of it. Are you active in and at your craft? If you're not active but you merely received an online certificate, what does that mean? There has been a capitalization of the “certificate,” thus allowing one to use its name. You can tell in a very short discussion what being a sommelier means to an individual. Is it a title or a craft?
What are the characteristics of a good sommelier?
I think many would speak here about knowledge of wine, traveling for wine, keeping with the times and vintages, etc., which I obviously think are necessary traits of a good sommelier. A few days ago, while I was running around the three dining rooms I serve, I got asked this very question by a table of guests. They inquired, graciously stating that they could discern I knew a lot about wine and the many facets within.
If I taste a thousand wines a year, I meet 10,000 people. How do I gauge guests’ needs, their insecurities and demands, usually bound to a financial boundary? I put others at ease talking over something we've talked over for millennia—wine. And gauging people comes naturally to me. I’m never influenced by how much someone will spend, their personal preference for flavor. I read a table and become one with them, without sitting down. Their joy is my priority, without it being an effort.
When I explained this to the guests, one of them said, “So you’re highly naturally inclined toward empathy.” I smiled and said thank you as I made sure their chalices were full of Knoll Grüner Veltliner.
Of all the wine jobs there are what makes you want to be a sommelier?
What made me want to get into wine was what led me toward certification. “Sommelier” was a key word when I was getting my feet wet, and you couldn’t leave a great job at a Fortune 500 company to go taste wine and jaunt around the world hoping to make a living. Certification was a good way at the time. In hindsight, I'm so glad I did it, because fundamentals are key, and because I almost exclusively drink natural wine. If one doesn't understand the basics and the intricacies of conventional wine like, say, much of Burgundy, how is someone going to get their head around why natural Burgundy is so profound and so difficult to execute? The easy answer would be it got me closer to rocks and maps and geography and poetry and the like. But at the time, I didn't have hindsight. Everything happens for a reason. Anything that makes you study will hopefully improve your craft. However, you can acquire a certificate and not practice this vocation. And the reverse is true.
How would you advise somebody who wants to be a sommelier?
Learn. Listen. Travel. Absorb. Order wine. Serve wine. Taste wine. Drink wine. Learn the rules of food and wine pairing. Break them. All with or without a certificate.
