UNCORKED
It’s dark, but you’re in the spotlight. Four thousand people are watching you. Intently: they can see every bead of sweat, via a giant screen. You’re miked up. The audience hears every short breath you take, every gulp, every stumble, every mispronunciation. You’ve been handed two anonymous glasses of red wine (which just happen to be Petrus 2012 and 2003). Is the former, you wonder, a top Ribera del Duero? Could the latter, um, be a Hermitage from the 1990s?
Well, probably not – if you’ve got this far. Welcome to the sole moment in the wine calendar (and this one only happens every three years) when wine truly becomes a spectator sport: the final round of the Best Sommelier of the World competition, organised by the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale (ASI). Wine’s gladiators are then thrown to wine’s lions. The latest (17th) edition took place on 12 February 2023 in Paris, and the winner…
… grew up in a flat in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, in a port city called Roja. His mum ran a hairdressing salon from one room in their flat; his dad worked as a fisherman, and then an electrical engineer in the port. As a life journey, that’s epic. You’ll have to tease it out of Raimonds Tomsons, though; this tall, calm, quiet Latvian is modesty incarnate (see ‘A drink with…’ in Uncorked, p12). Does he have a secret?
Before that, I need to stress how traumatically challenging this competition is. You must learn the entire drink lexicon (this year’s contenders had to blind-taste five non-alcoholic drinks, then suggest vegan dishes to pair them with). They also had to proof-read error-strewn wine lists, name the northernmost commercial vineyard in the world, and suggest how to make an Aviation and a Sazerac cocktail when one of the key ingredients for each had gone missing.
The blind tastings are cruel (including, at an earlier stage of the competition, an identical wine with three different wood finishes in three glasses to ‘identify’); you’ll have to pour glasses of Champagne from a magnum one-handed without trembling, dripping, or sending the wine foaming over the top and all over the tablecloth. The celebrity dinner guests seated on stage in the mock restaurant used for the competition final are there to be demanding (they included, in 2023, the UK’s Robert Joseph, a wine journalist known for turning devil’s advocacy into an art form).
Is that it? Sure isn’t. The final blow is that you aren’t allowed to compete in your native language. If you grew up in Harrogate, get ready to compete in French or Spanish.
Tomsons first took part in 2010 (the year in which our much-missed Gérard Basset won, on his sixth attempt). He came seventh in 2016, then third in the 2019 competition. ‘I was very well prepared factually, but I couldn
