Four young men, one year, thousands of flashcards. Jason Wise’s documentary “Somm” (2012) follows Ian Cauble, Brian McClintic, Dustin Wilson and DLynn Proctor as they prepare for one of the hardest exams in the world: the Master Sommelier diploma, awarded by the Court of Master Sommeliers. Since the first exam in 1969 only a few hundred people have passed. The film turns study into sport: kitchen tables covered in glasses, partners quizzing them on German wine regions, and one aroma descriptor that becomes a running joke, “fresh cut garden hose”.
Three exams, one grid
The exam has three parts: theory (oral, from appellations to sake categories), service (a staged restaurant evening with Champagne, decanting and difficult guests) and the blind tasting: six wines in 25 minutes, grape, country, region, quality level and vintage, spoken aloud in front of the examiners. The film shows the method that makes this possible at all: the tasting grid. Instead of guessing, you work through it in order: colour and viscosity, ripeness of fruit, oak, acidity, tannin, alcohol, length, and only at the end do you conclude where the wine is from.
To drop at the apéro
In the blind-tasting part of the Master Sommelier exam, candidates identify six wines in 25 minutes: a little over four minutes per glass for grape, country, region and vintage.
That grid is the most useful part for the viewer. Anyone who learns at home not to guess a wine but to describe it drinks more consciously: is the acidity high, the body light, the fruit more tart than sweet? Then we are in a cool climate, perhaps the Mosel or the shores of Lake Zurich. Vanilla and toast: new oak. The rest is experience, and flashcards.
A cult film and its sequels
“Somm” became the trade’s cult film and the start of a series. “Somm: Into the Bottle” (2015) tells the history of wine through ten bottles opened on camera. “Somm 3” (2018) sits Fred Dame, Steven Spurrier and Jancis Robinson at one table, looking back at the 1976 Paris tasting. “Somm 4: Cup of Salvation” (2024) follows an Armenian winemaker trying to source grapes in Iran. Netflix picked up the theme in 2020 with the fiction film “Uncorked”, in which a young man from Memphis is torn between his father’s barbecue joint and the sommelier diploma. The moral of all these films is the same: behind every assured sommelier lie years of failure, and a rather particular sense of humour.