Andrea Immer is one of only nine female Master Sommeliers in the world, but it is a title she wears lightly. Her conversation is punctuated with “cool”, and her enthusiasm for wine is infectious. In fact, the premise of her new book, Great Wine Made Simple, is the same as her attitude toward life. It’s a celebration, so crack open a bottle and drink deeply.

As a sommelier, author, and now aspiring restaurateur, Immer has guided hundreds of waiters and thousands of diners past the myths and snobbery that surround wine to discover their own taste and confidence when it comes to choosing and drinking wine.

“I don’t like to say a wine is good or bad,” says Immer. “It makes people nervous that they won’t be able to distinguish between them.” Instead she says, there are different wines for different purposes and tastes. Immer has approached wine, in building her career and writing the book, with curiosity and a bit of irreverence. In the book she writes about her dream of making wine easily accessible. “The perfect solution: bag-in-a-box wine.” Those guys with the silver cups on chains around their necks may be rolling their eyes, but that’s Immer’s point. Enjoy the ritual, but remember it’s about finding a wine you like.

Immer learned about her own taste preferences in a college extra-credit wine course. After graduating as a finance major, she worked as a stockbroker, but still pursued her interest in wine. Immer volunteered as a pourer at wine tastings at famed New York restaurant Windows on the World. “I got to see the backstage workings of a world-class restaurant, and got to taste a little of what I was pouring,” she remembers.

She began to realize that wine is an artistic achievement that is best appreciated over time. Her decision to leave finance and pursue a wine career was not too difficult. But she knew she had to do it, as she says, “before I got used to making a lot of money.” She also felt that if she made that leap sooner rather than later, she could always go back to stockbrokering.

There was no clear career path for Immer to follow, so she apprenticed herself at a chateau in Bordeaux where she harvested grapes, shoveled stems, weighed sugar, and learned about the manufacturing end of the business. Immer also worked in a Tuscan vineyard, where she tested the wine’s acidity. “European governments require vineyards to supply harvest statistics every year, so I was in the lab, but also tasting,” she recalls.

Becoming a sommelier developed incrementally. “It wasn’t really identified as a career path then.” Her self-designed graduate school gave Immer a leg up on passing the three-tiered training course and tests required to become a master sommelier. She had to prove her knowledge about viticulture in the world’s major wine regions, proper wine service, and pairing wine with food. The final test is by invitation only, and exponentially more difficult. Immer was tested on wine knowledge, social skills, and salesmanship. Finally, she was given a blind tasting--twenty five

minutes to identify the variety, country, region, appellation, and vintage of six wines. Immer writes that she was thirty years old when she passed the exam. “Where I lacked encyclopedic tasting experience, I compensated with technique.” The same techniques she shares in her book.

Immer reflects that there might have been some obstacles to becoming a sommelier in Europe, where wine has a long and revered tradition. “But I presented myself as an aspiring professional who wanted to learn everything they would teach, tell, or show me. That kind of earnestness gave us a shared passion.”

Immer has a sense of humor about her sometimes unexpected role as sommelier. She recalls that as Cellarmaster at Windows on the World, her arrival at the table would sometimes startle guests. She writes, “They would try to recover and say something polite like, ‘We expected you to be...taller’ (They really meant older and a man.)”

While becoming a master sommelier is an extraordinary achievement, it is the way she shares her knowledge that makes Immer’s book fun and informative. “The best way to teach is based on the way people learn,” says Immer. She likes teaching in a group where people can share their impressions and see how their personal tastes coincide with standard characteristics of the wine. She calls it the “revelation style” of teaching and relies on analogies and memory devices to help novices remember flavors and preferences. She says, “The light goes on every time.”

She begins by identifying “the Big Six,” three red grapes (Pinot Noir, Merlot, and Cabernet Sauvignon) and three white grapes (Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, and Chardonnay) that are used to make eighty percent of today’s best selling wines. By comparing their textures to milk (skim, regular, and cream) and with helpful memory tricks (pink Pinot and crimson Cabernet) without even tasting, the reader gets an idea of what to expect from a bottle. Immer excels in this kind of common sense analogy that makes it fun to learn.

Once you can take clues from texture and color, Immer moves on to taste, that truly intimidating realm where wine snobs start tossing out jargon. She explains in an understandable way how something wet can taste dry, degrees of fruitiness in something made of grapes, what oaky means, and the even more obscure character of tannin. To emphasize the qualities of taste, Immer sets up tastings that highlight wines on each end of the flavor spectrum. All the book’s tastings are set up with a variety of recommended wines, making them easy to find and afford.

Immer is not a wine by the numbers person and neither is her book. There’s no dusty bottle of ancient vintage that she’s dying to taste. “I really don’t want to miss anything,” she says. “I’m not looking for some Cadillac of wine. I just want to taste everything.” Not that Immer gives
short shrift to the premier crus. She charts appellations but brings their flavor right off the page be describing the subtleties of the Burgundy teroir as “funky,” and comparing wine to a croissant

or a country biscuit. Both good, both bread, but created from vastly different cultures, ingredients, and aspirations.

Immer’s wine judgments are not made on a calculated scale. This is about you and some friends sitting around a table and enjoying your meal that much more because you’ve developed the confidence and experience to get what you want from every bottle you buy.

In fact she recalls frantically taking notes at a Piedmontese winery, determined to turn experience into expertise, where she was reminded by the vintner to stop thinking and drink. It was a gentle reminder that “The real purpose of wine is not about snobbery, the fancy labels, the big bucks and status symbols that are supposedly going to make you look and feel sophisticated. Its real purpose is simple--wine is lube for life.”


©2006 Claudia Kousoulas

Getting More Than Attitude from the Sommelier

Immer wants to make wine easily accessible and removes the intimidation factor, from using a corkscrew to facing a wine list as big as the yellow pages. Here’s what Immer says you should expect from your sommelier.

• A good sommelier doesn’t try to inspire fear. “They want to ensure a relaxed, flavorful wine experience for every customer.”
• You don’t have to order a whole bottle. Look for restaurants that have wine by the glass menus that you can use to expand your own repertoire.
• Don’t feel self-conscious about price, everyone has a budget. Instead use it to narrow your range of wine choices.
• Use your taste experience to guide you. Look for the big six grapes--pairing their body and flavor with your meal.
• Enjoy the tableside rituals. The waiter presents the label to make sure you’re getting what you ordered and to make sure he doesn’t open the wrong bottle.
• Cork-sniffing is fine, but you need to taste a wine to know if it is spoiled. You may want to feel the cork; a damp end will let you know the wine has been properly stored on its side.
• Take time to smell the wine and relax when you take the sample taste. Focus your mind and add the sensations to your personal taste inventory. Then enjoy dinner!