I worked exclusively as a full-time sommelier for 10 straight years (in the ‘70s and ‘80s) before going into management and part-ownership, when I was finally fortunate enough to hook up with a chef with some serious culinary chops. Suddenly I found myself selling more than 10 times more wine then I ever did as a pure sommelier.
Then again, I always knew that would happen; since, in my experience, the better a restaurant’s food, the easier it is to sell wine.
These days, of course, there are genuinely talented chefs everywhere, even if some are better than others. Off-the-chart wine sales are no guarantee because there are a lot more factors involved with success. Management and service, for one. Nothing kills a restaurant, or wine sales, faster than bad management, sloppily trained servers, or uninspired or unsupportive owners.
Needless to say, a sommelier or wine manager also needs to bring some talent and savvy to the table. There are tons of beautifully assembled restaurants out there serving glorious cuisine, but with wine managers sleepwalking on the job, putting out wine lists no better than that of run-of-the-mill steakhouses, spaghetti barns or Chinese palaces.
But the one thing that is most often found, even in restaurants with purportedly good wine programs, is this: Lack of true sense of the best wines for a given cuisine. There you often find sommeliers who rarely talk to chefs (aside from lip service) and vice versa. Which makes little sense, given the old, tried-and-true adage: The better the food, the bigger the wine sales. It’s food that pulls the cart, not wine. Synchronization is key to keeping operations moving.
Guests, that is to say, come to restaurants to eat, not to gaze at wine lists. They also want to be pampered in a way they can't get at home. Those are the priorities, full stop. Therefore it makes sense to follow these equally time honored guidelines to maximizing sales, guest experiences and, ultimately, return business...
Prioritize food when making wine selections. Meaning, forget what’s cool, what’s highly rated or doing favors to maintain relationships with industry sales peeps. The most successful “wine restaurants” (at least in my book) are the ones in which no wine exists on a list if there is no dish on the menu with which it absolutely kills. If most guests prioritize their food experience, so should you.
Taste wines with dishes—constantly. I’m talking about, number 1, tasting samples by yourself with dishes. Number 2, tasting your staffs with rounds of wines with dishes—at least once a month, if not once a week or at every pre-shift. Number 3, tasting rounds of wines with dishes with your chef and even your entire back-of-house staff, also as much as possible. Last but not least, tasting wines with dishes with your guests within as many tasting menus and wine events as you can muster. And through it all, doing as much back-and-forth about it as possible—listening to the impressions of guests, staff and chefs, not just proselytizing them. This is for your own good as much as theirs. It is how you develop a more exacting sense of why and what wines truly maximize guests’ culinary experience.
Do some reading. You’re a sommelier, aren’t you? Which means you read, read, read about wines. You also need to read, read, read about matching wines with foods. There is an art and science to it, after all. Do not, for one second, believe the cockamamie about any wine being able to go with any dish. Certain wines taste infinitely better with certain dishes, even if other wines can do the same for different reasons. On the sensory level, the ultimate experience you can give a guest is a best possible wine for a best possible dish. The best restaurants execute nothing less.
Interested in becoming a true wine-and-food-matching stud of a somm? A first stop may be the book Red Wine with Fish; penned by two culinary smart-alecks, David Rosengarten and Joshua Wesson a long, long time ago in another galaxy (1989). It is out of print but still worth the search because, unlike any other tome, it at least frames the subject of wine and food matching in the only way that matters—in terms of sensory interaction, not theory, the usual hearsay or touchy-feeliness.
Needless to say, you also need to become just as well versed in food terminology and cooking techniques. Read, read, read; taste, taste, taste. Think like a chef, maybe even begin walking, talking, acting and quacking like a chef, even if it's only in your own kitchen. Matching wine with food, after all, is not much different than a chef putting ingredients together to create a balanced, sensational dish. To understand how components in wines fit, you need to master components in dishes, understanding ingredients, the right proportions, and how they go together. Until you do that, I’m afraid you won’t be much better than a run-of-the-mill steakhouse, spaghetti barn or Chinese palace.
To put it simply: In most of the country’s finest restaurants, all that matters is culinary. Especially in wine programs.