A Rare sighting of the Black Sommelier in the Wild

A peek into my little world as an African American sommelier

I am a black guy who works as a sommelier. If you come in for dinner at the posh downtown Houston steakhouse where I work, the hostess will walk your party to a table, about which you will inevitably complain, and upon being seated they will give everyone a menu and leave a wine list that looks thick enough to be a novel. I’m the guy that helps you with the novel.

I will be charming and well dressed. If there is a grandmother at the table she will always like me. I will ask what kind of wines you normally enjoy, and almost bashfully I will ask if there is a spending limit, hoping and praying that you will say: “I’m not really worried about the price, just show us something special.” I’ll talk about grape varietals and small countryside hills where the soil is littered with pebbles that might as well be diamonds. People love to hear about oak aging. Talking about biodynamic grape growing, a sort of hippy grape growing philosophy that’s a mix of astrology and home remedies for grape vines, is like pulling out Skywalker’s light saber tableside.

But ultimately, my job is to convince you, in spite of your subscription to your favorite wine magazine, to have just the right wine with what you order for dinner, to make you think of wine from then on as something more than a beverage, something more closely akin to a religion, to make a fanatic of you, to create a little Fred and Ginger dance in your mouth. Should you insist that I have a taste with you, I will oblige and graciously thank you for contributing to both my education and my flashcard inspired fantasies. We might talk about the Grand Crus of Morey St Denis or the old soldier from whom the Rhone region of Hermitage takes it’s name, but this is all sightseeing because I know, even before we meet, that you will likely retreat to the relative safety of Napa Cabernet.

Assuming the others have not abandoned their posts for the greener pastures of nights and weekends off, I know of only two other black sommeliers in the city of Houston. We are a rarity. Drunken unicorns. But people don’t notice our absence any more than you’d notice the absence of male servers at Hooters. We are warriors, born not of suburban dinner tables where a merciful father (I am always told it was the father) let the children have a bit of Bordeaux with Sunday dinner, but of street corners where cold malt liquor is wrapped snuggly in brown paper bags and wine is whatever is very cheap and sweet.

When I greet a table for the first time I give my name, offer them my sincerest welcome, tell them I’m one of the sommeliers and I offer my help in navigating the wine list. I usually get one of two reactions: the non-black, usually white, usually male host will look back at me with fresh questions in his eyes, as if he’s not sure he heard me correctly when I said I was the sommelier, or the black couple who beam proudly, looking at me smilingly, as if I was the new float in the MLK Day parade.

I get the test questions from some people, quizzing me just to make sure I’m not just filling in on the real guy’s day off. I tend to enjoy these actually, or more specifically, I enjoy the looks on their faces after I’ve given them more information than they even asked for. Some people refuse my advice, dismissing me with a declaration of “I got it,” before welcoming the other sommelier working the floor at the large restaurant who looks a bit more like what you’d expect. I’ve come to understand it as the consequences of my lacking the appropriate level of good-old-boyness.

I love the wine world. I love every guy who’s ever wrapped his arm around my shoulders at the end of a happy night and insisted that he loved me just like a brother. I appreciate how even if only through books or videos, it has allowed me entry into a world I could only have dreamed of as a poor kid growing up in Houston’s inner city. Most of my friends who are from the neighborhood I grew up in don’t know what I do for a living, other than that I work at some fancy restaurant, and I’m happy to just have a cold beer with them and talk about old times.

Lately, with all that’s been going on in the country, there have been discussions as to how the Court of Master Sommeliers America could go about diversifying its ranks. Thus far, they’ve come up with the magical idea of doing away with the word “Master” both in the name of the organization itself and in the highest title it bestows upon the brilliant, that of Master Sommelier. I am merely a Certified Sommelier and certainly not privy to the deepest machinations of the esteemed court, but I’ve never heard of anyone who thought the word was some vailed reference to slave masters. They’ve also assembled a kind of panel on diversity comprised in part of one of the 14 female Master Sommeliers out of 103 total in North America, and one of the 2 black Master Sommeliers. We all wish them well in treading uncharted waters.

When I go to local wine tastings and classes everyone always remembers my name because I’m generally the one black guy you will see there. It would be nice if there were a few more. Maybe they’d all be snobs who would think of me as some uncultured savage. Maybe they wouldn’t even have the good sense to love Al Green’s music. But I’d still like to meet them, have them show me how much more they know than me. Perhaps they would make somebody actually have to ask, “Which black sommelier?”