Help Wanted: Wine Waiters

France, producer of some of the world's most highly prized wine, is facing a desperate shortage of wine waiters to market the liquid gold in its restaurants.

Aware that wine has become a greater potential source of profit than food, top eateries are eager to get professional sommeliers - as they are called in French - into their dining rooms to help clients make sense of their well-stocked cellars.

The trouble is that finding a good sommelier is about as hard as finding a bottle of highly prized 1945 Pomerol.

"We have a real shortage of professionals at the moment," said Georges Pertuiset, president of the French Union of Sommellerie. "Restaurateurs have finally realized that nowadays they need proper wine specialists," he told Reuters.

The image and influence of today's sommeliers, originally the monks in charge of a monastery's crockery, linen, bread and wine, have changed a lot in recent years.

Once a male preserve, the profession is now attracting more young women. The old view of a sommelier as a sneering specialist in the pocket of a local wine merchant has gone.

Pertuiset said there were around 1,200 sommeliers working in France, selecting wines for restaurants and advising customers about what vintages would go best with their meals.

But the demand was higher than the supply, with his organization receiving up to 30 calls a month from restaurants anxious to find an expert to take care of their cellar.

"Even smaller establishments want a sommelier. It boosts their image and quality of service," he said.

Sommeliers need at least two years' training to become fully qualified, which means that the trade cannot meet the upsurge in demand at the click of the finger. Low salaries in the catering industry also make it difficult to sign up new recruits.

Worse still for local restaurants is the fact that, with fine wines fetching hundreds rather than tens of dollars at top establishments, French sommeliers are hot property abroad.

"We depend an awful lot on French sommeliers coming here," said James Brown, chief executive of the British Academy of Food and Wine Service, who acknowledged that there was a scarcity of wine waiters in Britain as well as in France.

"It's becoming a real fashion for top restaurants to have sommeliers," Brown told Reuters by telephone. "If you have a dedicated sommelier you will sell a bottle of wine to practically every table. If you don't, you won't."

Although the various national sommelier federations organize regular wine tasting competitions for their members, Pertuiset said it was more important for a wine waiter to have a nose for commerce than for a wine's bouquet.

"They clearly have to know about wine...but what is more important is for them to be able to establish a commercial relationship with their clients," he said.

By Crispian Balmer
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