This Is Wine Country | Monuments of gluttonous Western culture: we love food and booze so much we build castles in their honour.
The tour bus twists up through the California mountains, dipping in and out of quiet groves of immense redwoods. I watch through the window, my eyes straining to pick out the geometric lines of vineyards visible between drooping branches. I’m still caught up in the newness of it all, still stunned at the sight of those perfect rows carpeting field after field. Even buses of Nikon-snapping tourists cannot dampen my enthusiasm.
As the altitude falls, a few more bends through the Napa Valley reveal the stone edifice of the CIA—the Culinary Institute of America. I marvel at its stately elegance—cheesy jokes of espionage have long become old. A centuries-old relic, the CIA is a small chateau clad in light brown stone and framed by stories-tall palms. Weaving through the crowds of fellow students, I enter the building’s cool, earthy interior, congratulating myself again on having the foresight to take the first level of the Court of Master Sommeliers program here, in the epicentre of wine country. This place is the cherry on top.
Soon, I realize my musings are rife with stereotype and cliché. Awe and excitement are quickly replaced by an affected air of cool disdain. The foreigner, pretending to be a jaded local. Trendy cynicism. This is just an ostentatious bit of architecture, another monument to gluttonous Western culture. We love food and booze so much we make castles in their honour. The vineyards across the road are not places of magic; they are miles of plants, uprooted millennia ago from their quiet home twining up trees in the forests around the Black Sea. Here, they are tied with metal, bared to the harsh sun, perpetually on the edge of death and frantically reproducing in a thwarted effort for offspring. Their fruit is embalmed through fermentation; it becomes the site of social hierarchy and global marketing campaigns. The cult is millions-strong, and I’m a full-fledged member.
Clearly, melodrama was a staple of my trip to Napa. But how could it not be? There I was, in the heart of wine country, studying wine in a castle surrounded by vineyards. Granted, there’s only so much wine studying you can do before madness (and an insatiable thirst for beer) sets in.
I’ve worked in the wine industry for five years—a year longer than it took to get my bachelor’s degree. As an undergrad, wine was both fuel and therapy, and perhaps it was the attainment of that expensive piece of paper that spurred this endeavour; I still crave justification through parchment. Whatever the case may be, I’ve started down the road of the Court of Master Sommeliers, the only internationally recognized sommelier certification. (There are many other institutes that have sommelier programs, but only the Court is recognized throughout the world.)
The introductory course was simple enough, despite its breakneck pace. We started off plunging right into the Court’s specialized blind-tasting technique. It was fairly sobering to sit down at eight in the morning and start tasting wine, with my mouth still in coffee mode. The majority of the course was devoted to a whirlwind tour of the world of wine. France, of course, took up a large portion of the discussion. Unfortunately, many areas were necessarily overlooked, due to lack of time and lack of interest for our Western-biased minds. But I was unimpressed that the section on “North American” wines really just meant “American” wines. Canada’s wine industry was mentioned in one sentence, in a digression from German ice wines. Granted, I did walk into it with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, especially after playing a few games of “count the American flags along the highway.” (The banners of red, white, and blue are more widely planted than Chardonnay.)
Happily, the teachers (all Master Sommeliers), were not the stodgy elitists I had feared (and have almost come to expect from people sporting the “sommelier” title). Because the Court was founded in Britain by stodgy elitists, however, they are forced to follow certain practices. This was most evident in the service demonstration, which they conducted to show what is expected for the Certified Sommelier exam. It was the epitome of wine snobbery and pretension; they fully admit that the procedure is completely unrealistic, yet it must be followed nonetheless.
Next up is the Certified Sommelier exam, which grants one the right to use the title “Certified Sommelier” after receiving a passing grade. The ultimate goal of the program is to become a Master Sommelier—the über-prestigious title that only a handful of people in the world have achieved (167, to be precise). The 70-question multiple-choice exam was fairly straightforward, and almost everything had been covered to some degree in the class.
I left the CIA with my congratulatory certificate in hand, feeling somewhat dazed, squinting in the sunshine. The course came and went so quickly that I knew it would take some time to absorb its full significance. In the meantime, there was only one thing to do after two days of wine mania: visit a local pub and guzzle several ice cold pints.
