o p i n i o n s

A Scarce Vintage Stock of wine experts on the decline By Mike Powers From time to time, you hear a blurb on the evening news or read a half-column piece in the daily paper about the coming shortage of teachers, as their population ages to retirement and as the number of young people entering the field declines each year. Many young people who do choose to enter this field leave it after only a few years now, too, as class sizes increase, budgets are cut, and classroom decorum deteriorates. We are all familiar with this trend. However, I'd like to talk about a situation that receives almost no coverage in the press, but which boasts numbers that are more grim still than the teacher situation. I'm talking about the worldwide shortage of master sommeliers. I'm sure some of you don't even know what a sommelier is -- it's gotten that bad. "It's understandable when there are only 47 master sommeliers in the US and only 104 in total worldwide," says Gerald Parsons, head of the International Sommelier's Guild. Simply put, a sommelier is a wine steward. A sommelier is intimately familiar with every wine on a restaurant's wine list, and is able to recommend a selection based on a customer's tastes or on it's suitability to the table's entrÈe selections. It is projected that 2.2 million teachers will be needed in the next 10 years just to stay ahead of attrition and increased student enrollment, but how many countless millions are eating dinner RIGHT NOW and drinking a wine that was not recommended by a sommelier? How many picked the wine based on the name? "Eola Hill, sounds too much like 'Ebola Hill.' Blue Nun sounds fun!" How many just picked the cheapest wine available? These bad decisions will just feed back upon themselves, compounding error upon error, and the ignorance will grow until we're all drinking the fruitiest white wines with steak. Parsons paints this chilling scenario, "If 2 sommeliers were attending a sommelier's conference and, drunk on the appropriate wine for the occasion, happened to knock their knees (think of the worst softball injury you've ever seen -- first baseman leaning, reaching for the throw, runner speeding ahead plowing knee into outstretched knee, an explosion of tendons and caps), you're looking at an instantaneous 4.26% reduction in available sommelier man-hours for at least a year. God forbid someone should break a nose." We must do something to encourage young people to enter this critical field, or the imagined worst-case scenarios will soon become stark reality. We must develop potential sommeliers from a young age; elementary school study of wine history and tasting is at an all-time low; introduce the BLT fundamentals of wine appreciation (bouquet, legs, tannin) alongside the RRR fundamentals of language and math. We must also reduce the customer/sommelier ratio to a manageable number, and we must broaden sommelier coverage from just the top-tier to all classes of restaurants. There is a perfect wine to accompany the Bloomin' Onion, we just need a trained expert to help us identify it! But the recruitment of new talent is far from the only concern here. Parsons emphasizes, "Above all, we must protect sommeliers new and veteran from asshole patrons who would attempt to vent, at the sommelier's expense, the entirety of their pent up frustrations and disappointment in the way their lives have turned out over a poor wine recommendation. It is the screaming assholes that cause the majority of sommelier's to leave the field. Restaurant management must step up and protect their sommeliers from assholes, especially the screaming ones." If we follow these key steps, we just may be able to reverse our course from the coming winepocalypse.   Mike Powers feels the need for speed.