Tips From the Top Sommelier

Le Bernardin's Aldo Sohm reveals how to get the most from a restaurant wine experience and tells how he earned the title `World's Best.'

By Elin McCoy
Bloomberg Markets, October 2008

While jogging around Manhattan's Upper West Side one weekend, Aldo Sohm dreamed up an unusual food-and-wine pairing: the little-known Domaine de Montbourgeau Savignin l'Etoile vin jaune from France's Jura region with a tangy French blue cheese, Fourme d'Ambert. The wine's high acidity would break the sharpness of the cheese, he decided. When he tried it later, it worked.

Matching food and wine is always on Sohm's mind. And what else would you expect from the Best Sommelier in the World? The Worldwide Sommelier Association gave him that title on May 24 at La Pergola, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in the Rome Cavalieri Hilton, after a grueling two-day competition. When he learned he'd won, ``I just started screaming,'' the 37-year-old native Austrian says. ``We toasted with champagne, of course.'' Then Sohm headed back to his day job as chief sommelier at New York's Le Bernardin, which includes the blue cheese-vin jaune pairing on its tasting menu and which has three Michelin stars of its own.

Though Le Bernardin is noted for its innovative fish dishes, many of the 700 wines on its 52-page list are red, with an emphasis on Burgundy and low-oak pinot noir. ``People still think you can only drink white, but you have to look at the sauce,'' Sohm says after I meet him in the restaurant's upstairs private dining room on a warm July morning. He's in a partial uniform, wearing his long black sommelier apron over a white shirt and tightly knotted black tie, his punkish hair combed forward. In his pocket is the primary tool of his trade: a Laguiole waiter's corkscrew.

With Hawaiian escolar dressed with red wine béarnaise sauce, for example, Sohm suggests the 2003 August Kesseler Assmannshauser Hollenberg Spatburgunder ($180 on the list) from Germany, a light but lush pinot noir whose acidity cuts the fish's oiliness but doesn't overwhelm its delicacy. Few people have ever tasted a German pinot noir, so Sohm sees this as an adventurous choice. ``I always ask if a diner wants to go classic or adventurous, and 90 percent of New Yorkers say `adventurous,''' he says, laughing. He likes to point out that people aren't afraid to sample new dishes at a great restaurant, so they should consider trying new wines, too.

Every sommelier has favorite styles of wine. ``I love mineral- driven wines with oak way in the background,'' says Sohm, who advises picking from the largest category on a list. Those wines reflect a sommelier's passion and will be the ones that he or she thinks go best with the restaurant's food.

Sohm, who drank Bacardi and Coke before he became interested in wine, says people can still be intimidated by sommeliers. He always asks for their advice when dining out, convinced it's the way to get the restaurant's most interesting wines. ``Last Sunday, eating downtown, I asked, `Can you give me something crisp, fresh and light to go with hamachi?' The sommelier brought me a Vina Godeval Godello,'' he says. ``It was great. After all, sommeliers know the wine and food in their restaurants.''

To get the best service, Sohm says, mention your price range and the wines you like to drink on a daily basis. And be sure to ask for an explanation of the recommendation.

A four-time Best Sommelier in Austria, Sohm won the Best Sommelier in America title in 2007, which qualified him for this year's worldwide event in Rome. But after failing to reach the finals in last year's rival International Sommelier Association contest, he quit competing.

Sohm changed his mind after a damning review from Wall Street Journal wine columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, who panned the wine service they experienced when ordering Le Bernardin's tasting menu. ``That was painful,'' says Sohm, who made changes in his team and the tasting-menu wines as a result.

When the second-place American sommelier decided not to compete in Rome, Sohm reclaimed his rightful spot to try to redeem himself. ``The training for the competition is so intense, it almost kills you,'' Sohm says. To boost his performance on the written exams of wine knowledge, in blind tastings and at public food-and-wine- pairing tests, Sohm trained as if for an Olympic event. An Austrian ``mind coach'' helped him overcome his fear of failure via frequent online chats, an acupuncturist needled him to lower his stress level and the president of the American Sommelier Association drilled him on identifying a wine, describing its character and coming up with a food match, all in less than three minutes. Sohm also used MindManager software to help him memorize key information on wine regions.

When Sohm was once asked about the most annoying habit of customers, he said he couldn't come up with one. He admits to wincing, though, when a diner orders a great cognac on the rocks. Still, he doesn't fight customer preferences. ``A big cab like California's Screaming Eagle will kill the flavors of fish, but people expect to see that on our list,'' he says. ``Wall Street guys love those powerful cabs from the Napa Valley.'' (And at $2,100, or about retail price, the 2002 is a steal.)

As lunch guests start to drift in, Sohm slips into his formal black jacket, slides a chain with a silver tastevin over his head and pours me a glass of 2000 Domaine Daniel-Etienne Defaix Chablis Vaillon 1er Cru to sip with my tuna tartare. He moves purposefully from table to table, and his tastevin bounces slightly as he bends to pour from a magnum of nonvintage Louis Roederer Brut, Le Bernardin's house champagne.

Regular customers stop to congratulate him on his win. He smiles. ``New York loves winners,'' he says.

Columnist Elin McCoy is based in New York. emcwine@aol.com

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