How to Become a Sommelier: Here’s the Training and Experience You’ll Need

Four experts share their steps to earning this special designation.

If you're looking to break out from behind the bar where you work, or if reading about the latest Bordeaux released from the wine caves in southwest France is your idea of light reading, then becoming a sommelier might be your dream job. A sommelier is the person who chooses the wines served at a restaurant or wine bar, tasting and developing the wine list, pairing wine with dishes, and training the staff. Other enthusiasts and professionals simply earn the certified honor of knowing  everything  about wine for professional development or writing about wine.

To get started on the path to becoming a sommelier, we turned to four professional sommeliers for a step-by-step guide.

1. Start small: If you ultimately want to flex your wine-knowledge muscles in a restaurant, then meet Lauren Friel, an advanced sommelier and the owner of Rebel Rebel , a natural wine bar in Somerville, Massachusetts, that's been nominated for the James Beard Award for Outstanding Wine Program. She recommends getting a job as a server. "Understanding how service works, tableside, is invaluable," she says. "As a sommelier, you're part of the service team, no matter how high up you get." Working in the back of the house, where you can glimpse how the restaurant operates, will also give you a 360-degree service view.

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To excel, Friel says, "get a job working for someone you respect — someone who has time to teach you." That's because being a good sommelier comes down to knowing more than soil types and appellation d'origine contrôlée designations. "There are tricks and tools of the trade that you're only going to learn in the field, working under someone who knows what they're doing and is invested in teaching you."

2. Choose the right program: Google "sommelier certification," to see dozens of results, with most programs arriving at the same outcome: earning a certificate that says you can work as a professional sommelier. The path to achieving that certification differs from program to program.

"We all learn a little differently," points out Coly Den Haan, owner, wine director, and sommelier at Vinovore  in Los Angeles. For Haan, that meant attending classes through the Italian Sommelier Association, which broke classes down into viticulture, enology, and regions, as well as tasting,  food pairing , and service, she says. For Nick Morisi, sommelier and general manager at COJE Management Group's  Coquette  in Boston, a 12-week intensive course at Boston University did the trick. The course covered about 150 wines and gave an in-depth look at every major wine region in the world, Morisi recalls.

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Whatever course you take, you'll need to take a test at the end to earn the title "sommelier." There are four tests in total, with the last (and most difficult) test earning takers the highest sommelier designation: master sommelier. These tests are available through the Court of Master Sommeliers .

3. Network: Andrew Rich, sommelier and former beverage director at  Woods Hill Table  in Concord, Massachusetts, humbly admits that "making friends and meeting colleagues already in the wine world has been one of the single most important factors to [his] development."

Like any career or dedicated hobby, "it's important that you have a mentor that has been in the industry longer [than you]," Rich explains. To get better yourself, he suggests finding someone "who is a better taster and brings a different insight into wine." 

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"People who enter the field at the same time as you are people you should also pay attention to — those relationships will be quite beneficial as you work together to gain knowledge and try new wines." Rich remembers a special wine shop visit early in his career with comrades. "They let us open bottles and taste," he says now. "Those are still individuals I admire and whose opinions I respect.

4. Travel: Your wine education isn't over after you've earned a certification and a dream job. It's ongoing, and it's everywhere — at least everywhere wine is produced. Friel says you should "get on every wine trip you can. Spend all of your vacation time going to wine regions , meeting with winemakers, eating in the local restaurants, and absorbing the wine culture. You can't fully understand a region — and, thus, a wine — until you've been there."

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