North of Boston Career Fair
More young women in Hub
pursuing careers in wine
By Caitlin Curran, Globe Correspondent, 2/20/05
Cat Silirie remembers being interested in wine when she was 14 and a busgirl at a small restaurant in South Florida, where she grew up. "At the time, I loved to talk about wine," says Silirie, how old?, as she sat at the bar in The Butcher Shop, a South End restaurant where she is the wine director. "I never thought it would become my career."
Nina Seymour, 31, became interested in a career in wine after working for one year in sales at an Internet company. "The problem was that I wasn't in love with what I was selling," says Seymour, a 1998 Northeastern University graduate with a degree in business and international languages.
She is a cellar master at Grill 23 & Bar, part of a three- person team that orders and stocks wines, and helps customers select the right vintage to go with their meals. "It's easy to sell wine - I love it," she says.
Silirie and Seymour are part of a growing number of young women in Boston opting to turn their passions for wine into a career path, and enter a field traditionally dominated by men. And aiding some of them, in part, is a Boston University certificate program that offers night courses to anyone looking to make a living in the wine world.
"There's a big increase in women in the wine industry in the past 15 years," says Lisa Airey, owner of The Wine Key, a Maryland organization that provides wine consulting and training services for corporations. Airey believes that since wine careers often involve irregular schedules, women are sometimes discouraged from working in the industry. "Whether you are working in a restaurant or wholesale, there is no routine or regularity, and this curtails women, especially if they are mothers," she says.
Though it's not necessary to pass an exam to become a sommelier, or wine steward, the Court of Master Sommeliers awards the titles of "master sommeliers" and "masters of wine," two very high distinctions in the wine industry, to those who pass three levels of difficult examinations. Master sommeliers are more service oriented, while masters of wine study a broader range of wine topics. Of 56 master sommeliers in the United States, 11 are women, according to the Court of Master Sommeliers website. This is a significant increase compared to 1996, when there were two American female master sommeliers, according to an article that year appearing in Restaurants USA magazine. Before 1988, there were none. Of 246 masters of wine, 55 are women, according to the Institute of Masters of Wine.
As a corporate wine educator, Airey says she sees more women wanting to learn more about wine and make it their vocation. "Women are good at it, because they are detail- oriented - you have to be able to juggle many things in this industry," says Airey.
Each restaurant varies in terms of the official name for their wine expert, and his or her specific duties.
Some wine experts are called wine stewards or cellar masters. Many are referred to as sommeliers, which is a French term for the person whose primary function is to make recommendations to customers about which wines to drink. "It's a very service-oriented definition," says Silirie, "The main goal of the sommelier is to be a wine waiter. But the American version of this job tends to be a lot more than that."
Most sommeliers in the Boston-area have duties in addition to service, including creating the wine list, ordering wines and keeping inventory in the restaurant's cellars, and stocking them. These are all a part of Silirie's job, as the wine director for three Boston restaurants, all owned by chef Barbara Lynch: The Butcher Shop and B.&.G Oysters, both located on Tremont Street in the South End, and No. 9 Park on Beacon Hill.
Like Silirie, Tanya McDonough worked in the restaurant industry for several years before becoming a wine steward for Plaza III The Kansas City Steakhouse, in Faneuil Hall, three months ago. McDonough graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a bachelor's degree in social work in the late 1990s.
Like many other wine experts, she got her start in the restaurant business as a server. She moved through the ranks to manager at the Plaza III, leaving briefly to work at Radius, before a former manager at Plaza III suggested she become a wine steward.
"This is definitely something I want to do for the next few years, but I'm not sure if I think of it as something I'll be doing long term," McDonough says. The BU program has four levels, and McDonough, who is enrolled in level one now, plans to continue at least through level two. "But it depends on how much it costs, and if Plaza III will pay for it," she says.
Established in 1999, BU's Elizabeth Bishop Wine Resource Center offers night classes for those looking to pursue a career in wine.
According to Bill Nesto, a senior lecturer at the center, about half of his students plan to become sommeliers or wine stewards, while others want to work for wine sellers or vineyards, and some are chefs.
Nesto, who worked as a sommelier from 1978 to 1995 in several Boston restaurants, says that, in Boston, attending school to become a sommelier is a fairly new concept. "Schools for wine didn't exist 10 years ago, because there wasn't enough interest in it," says Nesto.
Working as wine steward for three restaurants, Silirie found it increasingly difficult to speak with customers. So she created a program to teach the waiters and waitresses at each restaurant more about wine. Called "Wine Words," Silirie meets with the staff of No. 9 Park for 45 minutes each afternoon, and with the staffs of B&G Oysters and The Butcher Shop on Friday afternoons, to teach them about wine, and offer them an opportunity to taste the wines sold at the restaurants.
"Once the waiters and managers know the wine list, it's like having 10 sommeliers working at each restaurant," says Silirie.
Sommeliers and wine stewards are split about whether formal training is necessary for a career in wine. "I would recommend schooling," says Silirie, "It wasn't available when I was training to be a sommelier." However, she says that it is also important to be reading and tasting on one's own.
Seymour suggests that self-teaching may be the best method.
"The classes can be so expensive, and I have found better reading materials on my own - plus there are so many opportunities to find good mentors in Boston."
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