By Eric Asimov
Restaurants are bustling and dining rooms are buzzing. If you want a reservation at the newest and hottest places, you are out of luck unless you know somebody.
On the surface it seems that restaurants have safely emerged from the despairing depths of the COVID pandemic and the throbbing hangover that followed. Yet one key element that seemed essential in any serious restaurant before 2020 is often missing: the sommelier.
Wine is still poured at many tables. But the dedicated wine professional responsible for selecting and procuring bottles, assembling an intriguing list, training the staff, assessing a table and telling stories that turn otherwise unknown bottles into delicious adventures — those people are rarely strolling the dining room.
For many restaurants, the sommelier is now a luxury, nice to have but expendable in the blunt calculations of the post-pandemic restaurant model. The highest-end restaurants seem unaffected — diners at Le Bernardin in New York will still be greeted by a smiling Aldo Sohm and his team of ace sommeliers in their black aprons with silver tastevins.
But underneath dining’s stratospheric level, many serious, wine-oriented restaurants are doing without. Instead, those positions once dedicated to wine are now often hybrids with servers, bartenders or managers handling wine in addition to their other duties.
Sometimes, consultants manage lists and train servers to at least have a perfunctory idea of what they are now tasked with selling. The training job might even be farmed out to distributors who sell wine to restaurants. As a result, many wine lists seem not only more expensive but shorter, simpler and less inventive.
“Not so many wine lists are curated, and wine-by-the-glass lists have less precision,” said Étienne Guérin, a former wine director at M. Wells and Gage & Tollner in New York, who is now retail manager at Sotheby’s Wine on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Cedric Nicaise, a sommelier who is now an owner of the Noortwyck in New York, said wine lists were less creative and more “generic-looking.”
What’s made the sommelier expendable? The pandemic changed the economics of the restaurant business. Most obvious was a severe labor shortage. Many restaurant professionals, both in kitchens and in dining rooms, chose not to return, having found alternatives to the grueling hours and lack of benefits in restaurant work. Restaurants had to attract workers by raising wages. In many parts of the country, minimum wages rose, too, further increasing costs. Some restaurants even sold off parts or all of their wine inventory.
In addition, supply chain issues and inflation raised the prices of everything, from real estate to ingredients, goods and equipment. And wine itself has risen in price, beginning with the tariffs former President Donald Trump imposed on certain European foods and drinks in 2019. The tariffs were removed by President Joe Biden, but prices have continued to rise. The cost of real estate has raised the price of wine storage, and many restaurants have cut back on inventory.
While wine consumption has leveled off in the United States and other parts of the world, the fact that wine is enjoyed globally rather than in just a few countries means demand for good wine remains strong.
“There’s been a new awareness on the part of winemakers of what wine is worth, and you’ve seen price escalation across the board,” Nicaise said. “A dedicated sommelier is a luxury you don’t always need.”
For nearly 40 years, the trajectory of the American sommelier pointed to the sky. Before the early 1980s, only formal French restaurants offered such a thing as a sommelier. In that hard-drinking era, sommeliers were considered snobbish, condescending types who cajoled diners into overspending.
But pioneering American sommeliers like Kevin Zraly, Daniel Johnnes and Larry Stone presented a friendlier, disarming face. Diners came not only to trust their expertise but to rely on sommeliers to introduce them to new and different wines.
The presence of sommeliers became more common, even typical in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, restaurants like Veritas and Cru in New York were opening, where wine was so much the focus that diners knew the names of the sommeliers who served them, if not the chefs.
The 2008 financial meltdown was a gut-punch for the food and wine industries. But they recovered, and the 2010s turned into a heyday for sommeliers. Social media won them recognition and movies like the “Somm” series, with its reality-show focus on passionate young wine lovers competing to earn certification from the rigorous Court of Master Sommeliers, made them into celebrities. They even became a flashpoint in wine culture wars as sommeliers were praised, or blamed, for championing little-known grapes and styles.
But then came the pandemic and all the difficulties that trailed in its wake.
“The pandemic was a tipping point,” said Eduardo Porto Carreiro, vice president for beverages at Rocket Farm Restaurants in Atlanta, which operates 23 restaurants in the Southeast. “It was taken for granted in many restaurants that there would be a dedicated wine person and thoughtful lists. Now, it’s a cherry on top.”
Before the pandemic, Zwann Grays had been the wine director at Olmsted, a small jewel of a restaurant in the New York neighborhood of Prospect Heights. When the restaurant reopened after the shutdown, it was a diminished place, serving only outdoors with a much smaller list.
“The necessity for a sommelier dwindled,” Grays said. She started serving tables for tips, a job she thought she had left behind. “It felt like you were going back in time. What you had fought for, your goal, it started to look a little bleak.”
Like Guérin and many other sommeliers, she left restaurants. She had started a wine club during the pandemic, and it was doing well. She did speaking engagements and corporate tastings, and even made a wine.
Just as restaurants faced an economic reckoning, the pandemic gave many sommeliers an opportunity to reevaluate their work-life balance. The restaurant life can be punishing. Hours are long and generally include nights and weekends. It’s tough physically, and difficult for families. Many seized the opportunity to change their lives.
“Somebody said sommeliers are like athletes, and there comes a point where you have to turn into a commentator,” said Joe Campanale, a former sommelier who now owns Fausto and is an owner of LaLou and Bar Vinazo, all in New York. “It seems like something that people in their 20s and 30s do, less so in their 40s.”
Yumilka Ortiz is a sommelier at Cucina Alba in New York. She’s sold wine at retail shops and worked harvests in Italy and Spain, but she loves selling wine in restaurants, which she’s done in New York since 2015.
“The gratification of connecting with a table that learns something meaningful and is grateful, that’s priceless,” she said. “The fact that you can create a whole experience around a bottle of wine.”
Now, she says, the emphasis in many restaurants has shifted away from hospitality toward sales and volume. She spends more time multitasking and has less time to talk to guests and understand their needs and desires.
“I’m still holding on, I’m surviving,” she said. “But all these changes have me feeling uncertain.”
Porto Carreiro says hospitality requires more effort than efficient service. Since the pandemic, many restaurants simply don’t have the staff or time to engage in the work that goes into warm hospitality. They settle for service, and it’s not necessarily efficient. Updating wine lists often falls by the wayside as managers juggle other tasks.
“Sommeliers came under the category of hospitality rather than service,” he said. “It became a luxury.”
June Rodil, a master sommelier who owns June’s All Day, a restaurant in Austin, Texas, and is CEO of Goodnight Hospitality, which operates four restaurants in Houston, sees shortsightedness on the part of both sommeliers and restaurateurs.
“Ten to 15 years ago, you could be focused on wine and not see the periphery or the bottom line,” she said. “Now you have to be multifaceted. Nobody who has a job does 100% of what they want to do 100% of the time. The ‘Somm’ films made people think it was a sacred job.”
Restaurant operators, she said, were narrow-minded in thinking sommeliers should be the first position to go. Wine and beverages have always contributed strongly to a restaurant’s prestige and bottom line. “They need to understand what that position can actually bring,” she said.
Johnnes, who is now wine director of the Dinex Group, Daniel Boulud’s restaurant organization, said that with so many restaurants suffering after the pandemic, he understood the need to cut back on sommeliers. Still, he believes they have a crucial role navigating through lesser-known wines to find good values.
“You can still find so much good, inexpensive wine,” he said. “That’s why you need a wine professional.”
It’s difficult to determine whether this shift is a long-term, structural change or whether it’s cyclical — one more reaction to an economic shock from which restaurants will soon come roaring back.
Paul Roberts, who once ran wine programs for all of Thomas Keller’s restaurants and served as CEO of Colgin Cellars, one of Napa Valley’s cult wine producers, says he believes restaurants and sommeliers will prosper again. But he is cautious, he says, because the world seems so unstable economically, politically and psychologically.
“We have all this great economic data, but people still think the sky is falling,” he said. “That may have to settle down before things can come back.”