This series highlights hospitality professionals who are responding to the industry crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic in particularly creative, conscientious ways.
Even before March 17, when restaurants and bars across New York City ceased dining-room operations, business was looking bleak at the The NoMad New York. “It was insane how quickly our coverage dropped off,” recalls Rosemary Walker, a sommelier at the hotel. “We have six somms on our team—all females, by the way—and we usually run with four somms a night because we’re so busy and sell so much wine. But we’d reached a point where we were running with one somm on a Friday night.”
Once the shutdown began, management pivoted to takeout service. “We’re famous for our roast chicken with foie gras and truffles, and we were trying to do that to go,” Walker says. “But NoMad’s just not that kind of place. People come for a dining experience, not to get food to go.” Batching up their most popular cocktail for home drinkers—the bourbon- and rum-based Start Me Up with Strega, honey, ginger, and lemon—didn’t work much better. So the hotel suspended food-and-beverage operations and furloughed the employees.
Like countless Americans in the same boat, Walker was determined to remain productive. “I’m taking my Advanced exam [for the Court of Master Sommeliers] in October,” she says, “so I’ve been trying to use all this time to focus on studying. But there’s only so much you can study before you lose your mind.”
Enter a friend of hers back in Los Angeles, where the Oklahoma native had lived for 15 years. “He reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I [told] a group of friends I thought it would be fun if we got together and did a virtual wine tasting. Would you be interested in leading it?’”
She was, and on March 28, she conducted her first Zoom tasting. Preparation, she says, had to be done “last minute, so I didn’t have a lot of time to curate the wines”; what’s more, they had to be available at an approachable price point across the country for some 20 participants in different states. Just in time, she turned to that old reliable, Trader Joe’s, choosing a Pinot Grigio, a GSM, and a Cabernet for under $10 each.
Walker describes that initial session as “super-casual. I wanted to give them the tools to understand what is important in a wine: Why are you going to spend $20 versus $30 versus $40? I took them through the Court’s tasting grid and explained deductive tasting. They asked a ton of questions about being a sommelier, ordering wine in a restaurant, buying it in a shop—it was like a two-hour thing.” At the end, she asked, “‘Do you want to do this again? I’m happy to do it once a week.’ Everybody was on board, and from there it just kind of grew by word of mouth.”
In fact, Walker has in a matter of days found herself leading Zoom tastings for not only that group but three others. “I’m just curating different lists for them based on what they’re interested in,” she explains. “There might be a younger group who’s really interested in natural wines. Or a group of women who want to try wines made by women. Or maybe they want to keep it super-classic,” starting with France and Italy. Whatever the case may be, she has enlisted the help of an old friend at Esters Wine Shop & Bar in Santa Monica to procure and ship the selections: Though Trader Joe’s did admirably in a pinch, she says, “I think it’s important to support local, independent businesses” rather than chains or DTC websites.
With the exception of one large company she’s working with, Walker isn’t charging for her services at present, for two reasons. One is that the project “is so new, I’m still navigating which way I can go with it,” she says. Certainly it’s proving a useful exercise: “I’ve already learned so much about doing something like this in terms of how much lead time you need, how to make the process go smoothly, how to ensure a small shop isn’t left with too much inventory if people drop out.” Whether it’s a career in the making remains to be seen, but Walker does envision a new normal for the industry post-pandemic. “I think the role of the somm is going to change,” she says. “People may not be going to restaurants as much. They may be hosting dinner parties and bringing somms into their homes to create experiences for them” in addition to engaging in the virtual space.
But the second reason for donating her time and energy to online tastings is more important in her eyes. “One of the reasons I love wine so much is it really does create a sense of community; it really does bring people together,” she points out. “Connecting people through my knowledge of wine” is, after all, why she got into hospitality in the first place.—Ruth Tobias
