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''sommelier'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔

sommelier - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

sommelier (plural sommeliers)

  • The member of staff at a restaurant who keeps the wine cellar and advises the guests on a choice of wines; a wine steward/stewardess, a wine waiter/waitress/server.
    • ✤ The sommelier recommended the perfect wine, opened the bottle with panache, and served it into glasses.
    • ✤ A Sommelier or wine steward organizes a restaurant’s entire wine program, from tasting to pairing of wines with foods the chef might prepare according to seasonal meat, seafood, and produce availability, to ordering and keeping inventory, staying on top of local, domestic, and foreign releases, and educating waitstaff about wines and their nuances. […] A Sommelier must make novice wine drinkers comfortable and explain wine complexities simply, while knowing wines well enough to satisfy the most demanding customer.1
    • ✤ There’s a new kid on the block: the tea sommelier. […] In the Western world, the first acting tea sommelier on the scene was Helen Gustafson, although the title was never bestowed her. […] She stayed at the restaurant for twenty years, and although she did not have the formal title of tea sommelier —no one did at the time—many in the industry credit her with leading the charge that has resulted in fine-dining establishments improving their tea service.2
    • ✤ The fMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] brain images of sommeliers show that their brains act very differently from ordinary brains when they taste wine. An Italian radiology research group (Castriota-Scanderbeg et al., 2005) showed activation of the cerebral network in the left insula and adjoining orbito-frontal cortex in sommeliers.3

Verb

sommelier (third-person singular simple present sommeliers, present participle sommeliering, simple past and past participle sommeliered)

  • (rare, intransitive) To act as a sommelier.
    • ✤ The final nerve-wracking task involved “sommeliering” throughout a gourmet lunch for judges and wine writers – and answering the tricky questions which were inevitably thrown their way.4

Etymology

Borrowed from French sommelier (“originally, a person in charge of the beasts of burden carrying wine”), from somme (“pack”) +‎ -ier (suffix forming the names of jobs). somme is from Vulgar Latin ﹡sauma, from Latin sagma (“packsaddle”).

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˌsɒmˈmɛli.ə/, /ˌsɔːməlˈjeɪ/
  • (General American) IPA: /ˌsɔməlˈjeɪ/, /soʊˈmɑːliˌeɪ/
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -eɪ
  • Hyphenation: som‧mel‧i‧er

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 2010, Kathleen Thompson Hill, “Sommelier”, in Career Opportunities in the Food and Beverage Industry, New York, N.Y.: Ferguson, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 44, column 1: ↩

  2. 2014, Lisa Boalt Richardson, “Beyond the Cup: Pairing, Cooking, Cocktails, and More”, in Modern Tea: A Fresh Look at an Ancient Beverage, San Francisco, Calif.: Chronicle Books, →ISBN, page 115: ↩

  3. 2015, Nak-Eon Choi, Jung H. Han, “Technological Advancements Brought by the Love of Flavors”, in How Flavor Works: The Science of Taste and Aroma, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, →ISBN, page 122: ↩

  4. 1993, Hotel & Catering Review, volume 23, page 6: ↩

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