Sip, She Says

Female Sommeliers Reflect the Growing Power of Women And Wine

Caterina Abbruzzetti brings two advanced wine degrees to her job as sommelier for two restaurants in the Willard InterContinental hotel. (By Len Spoden For The Washington Post)

Elli Benchimol didn't mind being mistaken for the coat clerk or hostess while she worked at Rasika restaurant in Penn Quarter. But then she was scoffed at by two male diners when she asked if she could help them select a wine.

The men, set-in-their-ways types who tend to want a Bordeaux or a Burgundy, "gave me a hard time about being a girl," remembers Benchimol, 30. But she won them over, getting them to "try one of my hidden gems, like a pinot noir from Umpqua Valley, Oregon. I wanted to turn them on to the New World, and I totally did."

Forget the image of the stuffy male sommelier. These days, diners at many upscale restaurants in Washington will encounter a woman when they need help navigating a wine list.

Some women say their gender gives them a tableside advantage when it comes to one of the most important parts of the job: the sales pitch. "Women are better at the soft sell," says Nadine Brown, the 34-year-old sommelier at Charlie Palmer Steak near Union Station. "I have an approachable attitude. I'm conscious of not being snooty and looking down my nose at people."

A Jamaica native, Brown sees a benefit from her background in social work and thinks her opening line -- "What are you in the mood for?" -- creates an emotional tie with the customer. "I don't think a man would say that. The tone of my voice is reassuring."

The average bottle at Charlie Palmer Steak costs $60, she says, but "if I sense someone is worried about spending $400, I can say: 'Trust me. I've had this.' It's easier for women to be more sincere."

She does not believe, though, that female sommeliers tend to recommend a style of wine different from what men in the profession would propose. "It's not about my personal taste," she says. "It's about the customers' experience and their style. Novice wine drinkers, men and women, tend to like sweeter wines, like an Australian shiraz, rather than a more earth-driven Bordeaux."

Brown and other women are still dinstinctly in the minority. No formal education or certification is required to work in the field, but some groups, such as the highly regarded Court of Master Sommeliers, bestow accreditation on those looking to set themselves apart. Of the 87 people in the United States who hold the London-based group's designation of master sommelier, 14 are women. That's up from six in 1997.

This year, of 65 U.S. candidates who sat for the master's exam, 12 were women (one woman and seven men passed). And for the court's third-level advanced sommelier exam, of 242 U.S. candidates, 44 were women. While the total number of applicants for the U.S. test has more than doubled since 2003, the number of women applicants has quadrupled.

Undoubtedly, though, women still face challenges getting into the business.

"The beverage industry is an old-boys club that's tough to break into," says Barbara Werley, a master sommelier who works at the Greenbrier resort hotel in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. Her own advancement, Werley says, came in the late 1980s when, as director of purchasing for the former Jockey Club near Dupont Circle, she started writing the wine list.

Women have held their own in a variety of restaurant positions, especially the pastry department, for decades. At the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., in the mid-1980s, 80 percent of the student body was male. By last year, that number had dropped to 60 percent. But women's entrance into the wine world has been slower.