True… people read her statement then translate it as though she is speaking directly about them personally. The people in this forum represent only a miniscule fraction of the total population of diners that purchase wine with their meal at a restaurant - just an extreme slice of the bell curve. Meanwhile Ms. White has dealt with the entire bell curve and was only giving her observations, and only when asked.
So it matters that it is a “young, female”?
Prolly only to those OWMs (older white males) who prefer in matters of wine to patronize, rather than be “schooled” by anyone much younger or of the opposite sex
If the appointment of Aldo Sohm or Bernie Sun would’ve sparked the same thread, the answer is no. One can only speculate.
Turning the discussion into something ageist and sexist was surely pulled out of thin air, there being nothing in any post on this thread that suggests either. It seems to me that it takes time to amass experience. I will cop to not being smitten with the first-worldish and uniquely American cult of the sommelier, and I find the notion of “curating” a wine cellar to be pretentious horseshit. Other than that, I am all for youth and womanhood in all of their respective glories. I simply will never understand why only Americans have such an obsessive need to have total strangers tell them what wines to buy and drink…
Possibly because the culture of wine here in the US is so very young? And there has been very little generational passing on of familial wine lore as well as very little passing on of cellars. Are people supposed to absorb wine knowledge from the ether? It has to come from som(m)where. Not everyone who enjoys wine has time to learn about it in all its complicated aspects.
There have always been “curators” of wine – for the British upper crust who sucked up most high end french wines in the first half of this century, they had their butlers or whomever peons they employed for that task. Sommeliers have evolved partly to fill a unique need created by an ever-growing cohort who newly has access to, and can afford fine wine.
Apologies for the thread drift.
I don’t know what America you lived in but most restaurants do not have a Somm. In fact I’d bet it’s less than 5 percent. Most places have a manager handle the wine and if someone inquires they’d answer to the title.
I have always found that drinking the stuff and reading about it (well-researched, well-written books by wine writers, rather than scores and sloppily assembled musings on the run churned out by robo-tasters) works wonders, and if one has little time for either or both, I am not sure that wine is the hobby for that person. And it seems to me that the priceless objects found in the Louvre and the Smithsonian need curating, but that wine, being a beverage, needs only to be purchased, properly stored, inventoried, sold and drunk. (Well, unless The French Laundry is going to start charging admission to tour its cellar.) That’s just me, I guess. Probably just an OWG thing… 
I agree with that, although the percentage of high-end restaurants with sommeliers in major American cities would be considerably higher than 5%…
So in order to “properly” indulge in wine, you have to
a) have tons of spare time on your hands and
b) Always have had tons of spare time on your hands (in order to amass experience) and/or be quite old (another way to amass the experience. Not too old though, in case your palate gets parkerized)
So you basically have to be uppercrust or retired with means.
The kind of elitist crap that makes be glad to no longer live in Europe and happy to live in the US where anyone with interest and drive can succeed in the wine profession without having to deal with a bunch of old fogeys guarding the entry doors.
A huge +1 on agreeing that Kelli is amazing. While with only 20 years in the wine business, I recognize I am a wine newbie by Bill K’s standards. But Kelli is tops in knowledge, customer service (both to customers and to people selling her wine). I always enjoy talking to her about wines and other things (there is more to life than wine). She will be a great addition to Vinous!
Well now we’re getting into the definition of a high end restaurant. I would hazard to guess that most of the type of places that have a somm here would also have one in the UK and France. While I bet even restaurants in Italy have sommeliers !
Since I opened this whole can of worms, I’ll just close by promising never again to bring my own bottle to a restaurant unless it’s a special occasion like an anniversary or something. I mean, I can kind of see her point of view. It really pisses me off when a patient shows up to my office with a CT scan they’ve obtained from an outside provider, when we’ve got several perfectly good CT scanners and radiologists at our medical center. The audacity of it all, and then proclaim to make their own diagnosis of what ails them. Damnit, that’s my job!
Katrina, how on earth did you manage to synthesize “drink and read” into all that venting? It takes no particular amount of money to do either, and I did most of both while in my early 40s, holding down a job that often required 14-16-hour days and 7-day weeks, IN AMERICA. There is no elitist crap afoot, and no old fogeys guarding entry doors in my posts. The “analysis” above seems to be a projection of issues from elsewhere in your experience.
Only one old fogey here, with all the doors open, expressing some general thoughts about the sommelier profession (using a thread about Kelli White, a sommelier, as a springboard, but making few comments about her personally) that are obviously unpopular with you for reasons not in evidence on this thread. If you want to indulge your own agenda, by all means do it, but leave me out of it. And do you look around you and see everyone with interest and drive in America succeeding in the wine profession? Talked to many retailers lately? Wine sales and the wine service profession are tough, tough jobs, typically with long hours, relatively few employment opportunities, constant cash flow problems, inadequate compensation, low profit margins, extreme competition (on national and international levels for some retailers), excessive, antiquated and irrational governmental regulation, difficulty or impossibility of sourcing the wines highest in demand, shipping and other fulfillment issues, and a high business failure rate at both the retail and restaurant levels. Success seems assured only at the fat-cat distributor level, where buying legislators keeps the money rolling in. God bless wine America, and fie on European fogeys…
Hardly surprising that somms would react negatively to someone whose goal is to “school” them, is it? I’ve had my share of bad somms like everyone else, including at places that should know better (I’m looking at you, Blackberry Farm), but I just talk to the dudes/dudettes, get a sense for whether they seem knowledgeable (and in particular whether they know their lists), and if not I politely wind up the conversation and go about doing what I would have done if they weren’t there. I suspect many folks have a hard time resisting trying to demonstrate to all that they know more, and I also suspect that that gets old quickly.
To compound the thread drift, I’ve had good QPR luck going for the oddball bottles on well-curated lists. I figured that if Fat Duck had one lonely bottle of Slovenian wine I’d never heard of on the list, it was there because the somm was willing to go to bat for it. I wasn’t disappointed. I was equally happy with an Austrian Blaufrankisch at a pretty good but not overly fancy restaurant in DC - not an obscure wine for Berserkers, but very obscure for the average diner, so I figured there was likely a reason it was there (and it was in theory a good match for our meals, which was borne out in practice).
So wait a minute.
Maybe someone has been in the wine business, or has been drinking wine and has tasted as Kelli for as long or longer, and maybe someone has been in NYC for many years and has brought wine to lots of restaurants. If that someone disagrees with the quoted comment from Kelli, it’s solely because of sex?
Sorry. That’s just horseshit.
Oh, and the best is that the people who MIGHT know a little bit because of oh, maybe years of experience, those people are old fogeys who don’t matter. And they’re somehow gatekeepers?
It’s a good thing that the Kellis of the world are forever 20 somethings for whom time stops. Expertise only matters if it’s only ten years old and no more? Twenty years old? Thirty? Point being of course, that after some point experience is irrelevant.
What an interesting parallel universe in which experience is only relevant before it’s experience.
Yes wine culture in the US is young. It really took of in let’s say the 1970s. So anyone who developed an interest in wine in the 1970s or 1980s doesn’t know much and needs to be schooled by people who developed an interest in the 2000s. And if that person who developed in interest in the 2000s has some kind of diploma, certification, or whatever, that’s it. Case closed.
OK.
To Paul’s point - agreed. It has to be tiresome to listen to a bunch of blowhards all day long and if you’re a responsible somm, it has to bug you. But that’s part of dealing with the public and it goes for any profession anywhere.
The key takeaway here however is - lack of sufficient excitement for Kelli means you’re sexist.
I have no clue who she is, nor do I particularly care. I don’t bear her any ill-will and I guess I’m more or less indifferent. So I guess I’m as sexist as hell.
Uh no. People who know a little (or even a lot) might just desist from trumpeting that fact on any thread discussion of a wine professional. They might desist from tearing down every individual wine critic or writer whose name pops up on the board. And I definitely think the old fogey-ism around here is equal opportunity in nature – sexism has relatively little to do with it. Galloni, O’Keefe, somms in general – a new target every week. It gets really old even as it is entirely predictable.
It comes with the territory for wine professionals, Katrina, in part because so many, like Galloni, are passionate opportunists rather than professionals in the first place. It may indeed get old for you and others, but there is educational value in understanding how, when and why the Gallonis, Parkers and Sucklings of the world are getting it wrong and using their bully pulpits to spread naivete, ignorance or personal politics. Keeping critics honest has long been my thing. I have paid their often exorbitant subscription fees and have done my share to pay for their meals at L’Ami Louis, Boulud’s places, the Batali restaurants du jour and EMP, not to mention providing a bunch of people with little or no prior wine background or expertise with an opportunity to taste and drink wine for a living. Some choose to live vicariously through them. Since I do not need to do that, I observe, analyze and comment. If reviewers cannot stand the heat, they can always get out of the kitchen.
You may want to re-read my post #10 and the second paragraph of my post #36 and show me where exactly I brutalized Kelli White, by the way. It seems to me that I gave a relatively unknown newcomer the benefit of the doubt, and spent the rest of my posting time discussing sommeliers in general and responding to your posts.
I will tell you what: i will pass my trumpet to you (clean it well before use, as it may have residual old-fogey drool on it) and see what you do with it. Let’s see if we get any more than maybe another 2-3 “congrats, Kelli!” posts before this thread disappears…
More thread drift, but Paul, could you expound on your experience at BBF?
Sure. Perfectly pleasant guy, more or less knew the basics, but didn’t know much more - it wasn’t really a negative experience (and the food and service generally were quite good); it just became clear to me that I wasn’t going to get much of a new angle from him beyond things I already knew walking in the door. One night we brought wine in (and it wasn’t particularly obscure - I want to say it was something like 89 Montrose and 95 Lignier CdlR), and the other nights we went off the list.
I think we may have gotten one of the more junior guys, and I’m still very much a fan of the place generally. We were there 3 days, which was about right in my book.