All of the women who came forward to The Times have been candidates for the title of master sommelier, an honor conferred by the court after a long process of evaluations and exams, some of which are graded in secret. All of the men are master sommeliers who had the power to help, or hurt, the women’s progress....
At 25, [Marie-Louise Friedland] had passed the introductory exam, and joined a study group to practice for the next level, while also working full-time. Mr. Broglie offered to help her study for the tasting portion of the exam in private sessions at his home [which]... proved to be preludes to sexual invitations.
“At first I was flattered, but also very confused and afraid,” she said. “I never enjoyed our encounters, and really tried to make that clear in the hopes that he would stop trying.” She said she rejected most of his sexual advances, but had to do so in a friendly way in order to preserve the professional relationship.... “I forced myself in my head to treat it as a fling or relationship, to be able to wrap my brain around the interactions,” Ms. Friedland said. “But it never fit. We weren’t dating. We never spoke about it. I felt like I was on call for sex from someone I couldn’t say no to.”
As she advanced in the wine profession, that power dynamic — and the question of whether she had earned her success — haunted her. She moved to San Francisco to work as a sommelier at Quince, one of the most prestigious and popular restaurants in San Francisco, then became wine director at State Bird Provisions, a “dream job.”[but] the emotional cost of working with the many master sommeliers in the Bay Area, was too high. She eventually left the city, the profession and the court....
Isn't this sommelier process mostly a scam anyway? There's a mysterious process to get a valuable credential on the say-so of purported authorities.
Here's an article at Eater: "Is sommelier certification bullshit?" I wouldn't trust the already-certified, especially the wielders of power, to say it's not bullshit.
What a temptation to those authorities to offer a shortcut to success when it serves their personal, sexual interests! And what a temptation to the credential-seeker to take the shortcut! And then if that's how you got your "dream job," what's to save you from self-doubt? The NYT says it plainly: She was "haunted"!
ADDED: And then there was "The Legendary Study That Embarrassed Wine Experts Across the Globe" (Real Clear Science)("In a sneaky study, [a PhD candidate] dyed a white wine red and gave it to 54 oenology (wine science) students. The supposedly expert panel overwhelmingly described the beverage like they would a red wine.")
ALSO: The NYT concerns itself with the women who took the offered shortcut and regretted it. What about the women who did not? Think about how they were hurt. And what about the men who were denied even a choice whether to trade sexual favors for advancement? They too are hurt. I'd also like to see some investigation into the lookism within the sommelier profession. That's not unrelated.
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72 comments:
Based on what we know of blind taste tests, Master Sommelier is about wine label knowledge and ability to use the lingo--to convince someone that the $1,000 bottle really is better than the $50 bottle and would go well with their...whatever French thing they just ordered.
And if that's the case, that it's based on the ability to talk the talk, then just do that--test vocabulary and speaking ability and skip the taste test.
When you reach a certain level - is branding a part of the initiation?
If you can't trust a master sommelier who can you trust?
And if he invites you to his place for tutoring, I'd skip the blind taste test.
You don't know what he'd slip in there.
You only get one shot a year at the exam and like every profession that is credentialed and limits competition, this one seems...uh, 'ripe' for abuse.
Sour grapes.
Let dat Mad Dog breathe...
Barefoot Stank Pussy 1987
So, in other words, the wine was oaky... but not dokey?
Years ago I worked with a woman who was the first American woman to become a Master Sommelier. She was only the second woman in the world at that time to achieve that level. She was pretty amazing. Do not denigrate the ability and training that these people have to go through- or at least- used to have to go through.
There is so much to learn, understand, taste, smell, taste, smell, and understand again. Wine- every vintage from every acreage (or hectare) of vineyards can be so different. A Master Sommelier can discern, not only the vintage, but the Chateau or Winery, sometimes right down to the vineyard or estate where the grapes were grown.
The Master Sommelier was a standard of achievement, telling the world that this person has met various criteria and shown their knowledge and ability to be among the finest in the world. That said, it is ridiculous to look at the Master Sommelier tag as a designation of power to the person holding it. Yet humans, being human, tend to insert their individual sickness and use power over people when they can. This is a shame because it really is (or at least used to be) an honorable achievement.
In this day and age of quick fixes and trends in food and drink, fine dining along with fine wines have taken a back seat for many. I would say this. I've sipped some pretty mundane wines in my life. Some crap served in many restaurants and at my friends homes. And I've sipped some of the best from California, France, Italy, and Germany. I will tell you that life is too short to drink bad wine (or bad scotch for that matter). Try a great bottle of wine some time. You won't be able to go back to the crap you may have been drinking. There IS a difference.
"Given enough wine I can get ......."
“At first I was flattered, but also very confused and afraid,” she said. “I never enjoyed our encounters, and really tried to make that clear in the hopes that he would stop trying.” She said she rejected most of his sexual advances, but had to do so in a friendly way in order to preserve the professional relationship.... “I forced myself in my head to treat it as a fling or relationship, to be able to wrap my brain around the interactions,” Ms. Friedland said. “But it never fit. We weren’t dating. We never spoke about it. I felt like I was on call for sex from someone I couldn’t say no to.”
What?
She rejected his advances but was on call to have sex?
Just say what you did! Take ownership. Don't mumble mouth your way around it in an effort to make yourself look better.
Enology, a demanding discipline, has always involved learning bra & panty sizes.
Enology, a demanding discipline, has always involved learning bra & panty sizes.
Sommelier and diesel fitter.
Kamala Harris might have an interesting answer to the question of sleeping your way into a position of power. Too soon?
Columbo's Any Port in a Storm (1973) is really entertaining, a catch-'em-at-their-own-game ruse involving the help of a sommelier.
Sonoma for Pinots and Napa for Cabs. And Zins as appetizer wine and Argentina for Malbecs. It’s that simple.
"Columbo's Any Port in a Storm (1973)"
Terrific episode.
This is an entertaining scandal and far more edifying than the Toobin one. The Toobin scandal had some fruity undertones that I found a bit cloying. This scandal has a dry, woody aftertaste that precisely complements the sweetbreads of fine dining.....She will write a book about this and make far more money than any sommelier has ever made before....Based on a true story. Maybe Lily Collins can amplify her Lily in Paris role by playing a plucky American sommelier who tries to crash the glass ceiling of Michelin restaurants with their antiquated views of woman sommeliers. George Clooney can play the restaurant owner who is at first put off by her pushy ways but later comes to appreciate her wisdom and good taste. I suppose Kevin Spacey is no longer viable, but he'd be great in the role of the master sommelier who plays upon Lily's innocence and eagerness.
AA has an established brand style and is amazingly consistent. I use a blog aggregator that formats every blog I subscribe to in the same innocuous format. Halfway through this article I had to go back and cheek and verify it was an AA item because I always skip the heading for time reasons. Why did I do that? Confluence. Earlier I followed a rabbit trail to a Marki Costello interview (https://youtu.be/HkkZ5BSXM0k). Basically how to be a successful host and influencer. Brand concsistency is one of the keys.
A Master Sommelier can discern, not only the vintage, but the Chateau or Winery, sometimes right down to the vineyard or estate where the grapes were grown.
I bet they think they can. But wine tasters very consistently fall flat on their faces when presented with blind tests.
Wine, wine, wine ...
Where is Orson Wells when we need him?
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=wells+wine+ad&docid=608002855101401732&mid=E849D9678032DD77A118E849D9678032DD77A118&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
to convince someone that the $1,000 bottle really is better than the $50
How about a $2000 bottle of wine versus one for $18, and no one drinking it noticed.
My daughter works for a large liquor store and she is in training, learning about wines. It's not at the sommelier level, more at the "some guy comes in and says his wife likes the Barefoot Moscato, can she recommend something similar but fancier for their anniversary level".
On the other hand, this is more my level of wine expertise.
Let's see. Fine wine, horny Frenchmen, attractive young women, private study sessions - what could go wrong?
But wine tasters very consistently fall flat on their faces when presented with blind tests.
No question. The most famous of which was the Judgement of Paris in 1978 which proved to the world the level of quality of the fine California wines. And I've seen other instances of fooling judges in blind tastings. Because it is so damned hard to do. But I've also seen tastings where the Sommelier correctly offered the Chateau and vintage. I could not do that in 100 years.
It's like anything else. When you repeat it thousands of times, you get very good at that which you are doing. But there is also the other thing: A sommelier has a certain taste. Everyone has their own taste- what tastes good and is considered good by the sommelier may not appeal to you at all. The thing about wine is: A good wine is the one that tastes good to you. Not necessarily what the authorities tell you is good.
This is just another organization of supposedly professional critics that neither seem to be professional nor trustworthy in their criticism. If they didn't exist, their loss in my world would be insignificant.
"But wine tasters very consistently fall flat on their faces when presented with blind tests."
Falls into the same category of judging "art." Museums and their "experts" are fooled enough times that it's a serious problem. I remember a John Stossel piece (March, 2005) where he offered, to "discerning art lovers, "paintings" by 4-year olds.
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=563146&page=1
Excerpt,
Four of the art works in our test were done by 4-year-olds, and when we showed their artwork on the Web, and showed it to people at the mall, the kids' work ranked ahead of most of the masters.
I assumed real artists wouldn't fall for the trick, so we invited some to take our test. Most of them also put at least some of the kids' work up there with the masters.
One artist, Victor Acevedo, described one of the children's pieces as "a competent execution of abstract expressionism which was first made famous by de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and others. So it's emulating that style and it's a school of art."
When I told him the work was done by a 4-year-old he said, "That's amazing. Give that kid a show."
The Court Board is a voluntary position.This article gives the impression sex was the expected payment.If this is so widespread are we to assume the female board members also prostituted themselves to attain their title.Is that the only way to succeed, or were these particular "victims" just willing to take the shortcut. Do the female board members also use their positions for sexual advantage or are the females just so much more charitable than their male counterparts.
This article brings to mind the bottled water blind taste test of a few years ago when the top three sommelier selections came from a water fountain in Harlem, Walmart's giant jug brand and one more innocuous source that I can't remember. Can't remember if the winners had to pull a train, though.
"As she advanced in the wine profession, that power dynamic — and the question of whether she had earned her success — haunted her."
I wonder if these kinds of thoughts go through Vive President Elect Hariss' head, late at night, when the demons come out.
Does a red or white wine go best with #MeToo?
Any group controlling entrance into a lucrative field is to be treated with suspicion.
Oh, stop the wining.
"Judgement of Paris in 1978”
Seriously? That’s what they called it? Somebody has a sense of humor.
https://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/JudgmentofParis-1024x801.jpg
Next it will be a band name.
"Mr. Broglie offered to help her study for the tasting portion of the exam in private sessions at his home [which]... proved to be preludes to sexual invitations."
"Proved to be"--who could have guessed???
What a bunch of corksuckers.
I am Laslo.
The real trick is finding tasty wine that doesn't result in a headache for ~$5.
In a 50 year working life I have knowledge of three incidents of harassment. They ran the gamut from dead bang, hands on “massage therapy with the guy totally unrepentant to a he said-she said about an offhand remark to a totally bogus accusation from a woman whose position was being eliminated. The first two resulted in real damage to the fabric of the organization. The third cost the HR manager his job because he was sleeping with the accuser and had tipped her off to the elimination of her position. Funny life.
Even if their charges are true, they will always be winers.
"Hail Cork Master!"
Money doesn't always buy taste...
I think we can safely assume that whenever men are in a position to exert power over women, some fraction of them will use it to obtain sex from the women they find attractive. Which is to say, this isn't news. Businesses in which physical attractiveness is a condition of employment will obviously supply a higher fraction of attractive women, and may well attract a higher proportion of men willing to abuse their power. That might be news, but that's not what is happening here.
But MeToo makes a good newshook for a story about the peculiar world of sommeliers.
Couldn't they just brain him with a Champagne bottle?
"Couldn't they just brain him with a Champagne bottle?"
That's what Magnum, P.I. would do...
Why You Should Never Soak Corks
Long soaking times allow the cork to absorb whatever liquid it is submerged in.
That liquid can then be squeezed out of the cork when it is inserted. Anything that comes out of the cork at that point goes into your wine.
The only proposed benefit is that the cork goes in easier. While this may be true it could go in a little too easy. A soaked cork may go too far in, possibly ending up all the way past the neck.
Soaking corks came about as a way to clean the dust off of new corks. However, corks were not soaked for very long. Somewhere along the way some wine makers decided that soaking the cork is a necessary step during the bottling process.
Most of the recommendations I’ve seen for soaking a cork take upwards of five or six hours. That’s a long time to leave your cork out there exposed to everything.
Howard cuts to the heart of the matter, though I'd go as high as $9 per bottle if it meant being able to function a bit better the next AM.
"the emotional cost of working with the many master sommeliers in the Bay Area, was too high"
So, giving in to one man's advances for personal gain makes the emotional cost of working with other men elsewhere too high?
Don't forget the fourth victim category: the men that would have wanted to sleep with her via a non quid-pro-quo route but didn't have that opportunity because she was busy going to 'study sessions' with this other guy.
My wine selection skills allow me to evaluate the alcohol by volume number on the label.
I always pick the wine with the bigger number cuz that means it has been in the barrel longer, and probably tastes better.
Am I wrong?
Maybe the skill set of a sommelier does not consist of being able to make fine distinctions between various chateaus and vintages but rather in convincing you that he has the ability to make such fine distinctions. If so, the ability to talk a girl into taking private lessons with him would dovetail nicely with such a skill set. The girl doesn't necessarily need the hands on instruction, but she could learn something by auditing the sales pitch.....Who knew that being a wine sommelier was such a cool job.
It's not at all clear to me from the NYT article what power the master sommeliers held over the applicants. Were they the judges, or able to influence test results, or was it just that they were experts who had knowledge to share? The first is a gross abuse of power, the second seems to me to be a matter of no interest to the general public.
On the other hand going to a mans hotel room to spend the night thinking you are going to “crash on the sofa” seems a little naive to me. Or calculated.
But I've also seen tastings where the Sommelier correctly offered the Chateau and vintage.
Yes, and I've seen TV preachers who could guess your deceased grandmother's name, and assure you entry to Heaven to join her (for a modest donation.)
Back in the 90's I got into wine rather deeply. Put a 400 bottle cellar in my new house and mostly filled it. Spent thousands on fancy bottles in restaurants. Went to wine tastings where the snooty sommeliers prattled on about pencil shavings and new-mown hay and toasted Turkish cinnamon that I couldn't taste or smell. My wife and I enjoyed our wine-country vacations, but my suspicion of being scammed grew and grew. This was around the same time that we first saw those stories of blind taste-tests where even renowned experts couldn't tell red from white when it was served to them in an opaque dark glass.
I think the last straw was a "Wine War" party more than a decade ago with a couple of dozen other would-be oenophiles. Everyone brought two identical bottles of wine taped up in brown paper sacks. You could bring Boone's Farm, or you could bring Petrus, it was entirely your choice. One bottle of each pair was set aside, and the other bottle was opened for tasting. Each partygoer ranked the wines on a 10-point scale, and average rankings were then calculated. Whoever brought the highest-ranked wine to the tasting won everyone else's extra bottles as a prize to take home. There was a guy who brought a cellared Château Pavie from a top vintage, and another guy who had a premier cru Burgundy that I have forgotten. Both of them would have been worth several hundred dollars, even then. A number of other contestants brought 100-plus dollar wines too. But the winner was a Peter Lehmann Shiraz from Barossa in Australia that could be had for about twenty bucks the bottle at the time, although I just checked and I see it is over $70 these days. It was perfectly delicious.
That was a very fun theme for a wine-drinking party, but it really opened my eyes to how much I had wasted over the years. I realized that the world of top end wines is a dishonest mirage, just like every other field where we social-climbing monkeys can be induced to part with our money for the sake of status.
I have not bought anything over $50 since that day. Cheap grocery-store reds from South America, Australia, and Portugal will provide me all I require from wine for the rest of my days. My new house doesn't have a wine cellar.
@Shookum John
As with most things, there are diminishing returns with wine.
My family has been in the business (on the grower side) for decades and I have access to winemakers and wine, mostly from Napa Valley.
I don't buy much over $100 these days. For $50 if you choose wisely, you can get a very good bottle.
But my 'daily' is something from Kirkland (Costco) or Safeway...$10 to $20.
I have never acquired the taste for wine; partly because of the sulfites, which I am allergic to.
But more importantly, I think the whole oenophilia thang is BS. It took me a long time to reach the point where I will, after some polite refusals to sample or to have another glass, be rude or mocking about the stuff.
I drank a little wine almost every day last year on the luxury barge trip (which I realize was exactly one year ago), but only because I had paid for it already, but I drank more beer, which I've always preferred if I crave alcohol. I rarely do but it's fine with a lot of good food.
Broglie is an ancient family of Frog aristos.
Narr
I bet he knew what went well with cunnilingus!
https://tinyurl.com/yx9cggzh
"Isn't this sommelier process mostly a scam anyway? There's a mysterious process to get a valuable credential on the say-so of purported authorities."
Yeah. Kind of like passing the Bar Exam.
Well played, The Elder.
Bob Smith said...On the other hand going to a mans hotel room to spend the night thinking you are going to “crash on the sofa” seems a little naive to me. Or calculated.
--
Yep. When I was in college, the gals were taught "Every man is a potential rapist".
But then, look how far Boldfinger has gotten.
Unfortunately many sommeliers give wine a bad name. Not that the credential is worthless, but a sommelier’s job is to sell wine to people who came to eat. It doesn’t have to be difficult unless the customer is an ass or the somm wants to show his (and it’s usually his) ass. In the few cases I’ve eaten at a restaurant where a somm was employed, I had trouble getting them to talk. Except the one in Vienna who spoke quite freely, only in German.
Gearing up for retirement I’m taking some wine classes. It’s as complex a world as you care to perceive it to be, and I find it fascinating and tasty. But my primaries are <$10 bottles from Costco. I don’t always want to think about my beverage.
And to Narr, my spirit brother: the thang is real.
"...this one has fleshy legs and a creamy finish"
sommelier? art curator? Emperor's new clothes tailor? Pimp?
Grant, think about the smart wine buyer who's putting those nice <$10 bottles into Costco.
I just wish I could afford Pomerols, like I used to 50 years ago in college.
I had the world’s most magnificent pork chop at the Bachelor Farmer a few summers ago. Very sorry to hear that it closed.
Some people really do have that olfactory gift. I don’t. But a key part of the gift is being able to connect what you smell to the words that name or describe it. It’s much harder than you think.
Isn't this sommelier process mostly a scam anyway? There's a mysterious process to get a valuable credential on the say-so of purported authorities.
No it's not. My sister is a fine wine marketing executive at a company everyone here would recognize. She went into the wine industry after earning her MBA in 1997. Over the years, she went through the sommelier process and is now a master sommelier. During the certification process, she had to identify wines blind. She nailed them all.
The thing that really made me think was that it wasn't a scam was when she was in Minneapolis on business and we went to James Beard award recipient The Bachelor Farmer for dinner. One of the dishes we had was the duck broth. In a deep earthen bowl was a mound of tasty stuff and when served, the waitperson poured a small teapot of hot duck broth over it. One of the best dishes I have ever eaten. At one point, she asked our server if there was chervil in it. The server said she didn't think so because they had stopped growing it on their rooftop at least two months earlier and were no longer using it, but would ask the chef about it.
She came back a little while later and said the chef told her that some of the chervil they harvested was infused in oil and that the dish had a little bit drizzled on it during plating. I was truly amazed because I couldn't taste it and I grow chervil.
Sadly, Civid-19 caused the restaurant to close not long after the pandemic started. Given that it had been a very popular restaurant for over 10 years and was owned by the Dayton brothers -- the Daytons founded Dayton's and Target and the family is worth billions -- it signaled to me that if billionaires can't keep a restaurant going that we were in for a long, sad culinary ride.
I read about a year ago that there are people who are genetically predisposed to have hyper-discerning palates and that those folks are used in the food industry for testing purposes.
So no, I do not believe it's a scam.
Oh, and she's pissed about this sexual harassment story in the NYT. Full disclosure, her undergrad was women's studies, so this sort of thing troubles her greatly.
11/9/20, 5:52 PM
Grant, I reposted after you did in order to correct some grammatical errors. But feel free to tell folks that you are clairvoyant. ;-)
While I’m at it Boomers. It wasn’t a “sexual revolution. It was a sexual revelation.” We spent more time doing it and less time talking about it.
SO THERE.
Mary Beth said...
On the other hand, this is more my level of wine expertise.
11/9/20, 8:21 AM Delete
Bad link before. This.
Wine and sex - I just don't get the connection.
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