Make way for women sommeliers

When Elyse Lambert ascended to the rank of master sommelier at a ceremony last May in Aspen, Colombia, the first thing she did was pop the cork on a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée champagne.She had a lot to celebrate. A wine consultant to Montreal's Maison Boulud, she was one of 63 candidates who took the tough final master sommelier exam this year, the last step in a long, grueling, four-part process.

Of the mere seven who passed, she was one of just two women.

"There were very few female somms when I started out 15 years ago," Lambert says. "I began as a waitress. An MS after my name is important to me - and it helps change the image of women and wine in the restaurant world." In this enlightened era, only 32 of the world's 229 master sommeliers-that's just under 14 per cent - are women. Canada has two. Three-quarters of them ply their trade in the US.

"The sommelier profession has historically been a male-dominated industry," admits Andrew McNamara, chairman of the Court of Master Sommeliers in the Americas. But it's evolving. The venerable somm stereotype of a snooty, balding French guy with a silver tastevin hanging from a chain around his neck is thankfully long gone.

In 2009, when Kelli White (now at Napa Valley's Press restaurant) took a job at New York's Veritas, the wine-centric restaurant had never had a female sommelier. Heidi Turzyn managed to work her way up to becoming the first female wine director at Gotham Bar & Grill only two years ago. But in an era when male som meliers are likely to sport tattoos and sabre off the tops of Cham pagne bottles with bravado, women somm0s in some places still face an innate bias.

"I was once passed over for a sommelier job because the restaurant worried that I wouldn't be able to carry cases of wine up and down stairs," says Shelley Lindgren, wine director and owner of San Francisco's A16, which won a 2015 James Beard Award for outstanding wine programme. Let's invoke a stereotype to counter that assumption: A case of wine weighs about 40 pounds, the same as a small child.

Indeed, overcoming (often ignoring) old-fashioned sexism is the biggest obstacle cited.