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A sommelier—or wine expert—is a trained wine professional specializing in all aspects of wine service, including wine selection, storage, and presentation. Becoming one requires education, training, and experience, which can take several years.

A career in the wine industry can be rewarding if you’re passionate about wine and enjoy working with people in fine-dining restaurants and hotels. This article lists the steps to becoming a sommelier:

1. Learn Everything About Wine

It helps to develop a robust understanding of wine and its forms if one wants to become a sommelier. They also have to obtain a sommelier certification to back up their expertise.

Through self-experimentation and accreditation, you should be able to learn more about the following wine aspects:

• Grape varieties: Winemaking is the art of combining different grape varieties to create various flavors and aromas. Grape varieties are what create different wine characters, which are some of the most critical elements a sommelier should study and master.
• Wine regions: Learning more about the world’s major wine regions is essential to your knowledge base. It helps you understand the key grape varieties in every region and how climate, soil, and other factors influence wines’ tastes and characters.
• Wine tasting: Developing wine-tasting skills should help you to evaluate wine critically and identify its aroma, flavor, and appearance.
• Food and wine pairing: Knowing how to match wine and food is a skill every sommelier should learn. That should help you offer professional pairing recommendations to customers to suit their preferences when working in hotels and restaurants.

Understanding these aspects of the wine industry can make a qualified sommelier, and a certification school can help you with that.

2. Gain Experience in The Wine Industry

A sommelier certification school can give you a basic theoretical understanding of the wine industry. However, it’s not the ultimate skill-builder since you’ll still need hands-on training working in different fine-dining restaurants, wine shops, and wineries. Handling wine first-hand can help you determine what price a particular wine can be worth and how much you should sell it for.

Practically learning about wine and handling it can also expose you to important networking opportunities, opening up a world of endless possibilities for your career. It’s still essential to enable you to stay at the top of the industry trends and be constantly updated on crucial developments. Moreover, practical experience takes you a step ahead in your career and builds your portfolio.

3. Attend Wine Tasting and Events

Wine tasting and events expose you to the more expansive world of wine dealings and enable you to create meaningful networks with other enthusiastic sommeliers. It also exposes you to different wines and helps you put your skills into practice. 

Wine tasting, in particular, can immensely contribute to the process of learning about wines and help develop your ability to identify subtle wine flavors and types.

In addition to such perks, exposure to wine tastings and other events also grants you the chance to meet industry experts and learn continually. That’s vital in giving you some much-needed hands-on experience to develop your palate and excel in this art.

4. Build A Wine Collection

You can also build a personal wine collection to familiarize yourself with the different wine flavors. Also, tasting wines regularly can help you learn more about the grape varieties used to make them. 

Moreover, the more you have wine lying around your house, the better you’ll learn about the wine aging process to help you understand how that happens. You can purchase tiny amounts of wine and place them in different lid jars before storing them in a suitable place. Try to frequently take a few sips to familiarize your taste buds with the nuances of different wine varieties.

5. Practice Blind Tasting

Blind wine tasting is another essential skill you can learn as an aspiring sommelier. Not knowing a wine’s origin can be an ideal way of sharpening your taste buds. It also makes you a better sommelier by eliminating bias from judging wine based on the source; instead, you get to evaluate it for what it really is. Moreover, blind wine tasting also builds your confidence as it helps you become more proficient with wine tastes.

Conclusion

Becoming a sommelier takes effort and time, and you can be successful in this career pursuit with the right skills and determination. Getting a sommelier certification would be the perfect beginning of your journey. Also, following the steps above should help you advance your sommelier skills to become a revered professional in this field.