WINE SMART

Wynn Macau has taken the lead in employing tea, wine and sake sommeliers at its Chinese, Japanese and Italian restaurants. Sommeliers provide professional wine and Chinese tea recommendation services, not only raising the service standards of Macau’s hotel and food and beverage industry, but also creating more non-gaming positions for Macau’s job market and opening new career paths for hospitality management students.  

Cultivating Local Talent

As a hospitality management student, Aggie Ku attended two bartending courses in college. After graduation, she joined Wynn Macau and worked as a telephone operator at the guest services center. An unexpected opportunity arrived when the director of wine, knowing that Aggie was familiar with liquors and cocktails and keen to develop a career in this direction, and knowing the scarcity of local sommeliers in the industry, took the initiative to ask Aggie if she would be interested in a transfer to food and beverage and training to become a sommelier.

Speaking of her learning process, Aggie said, “In my first week on the job, my boss let me try the drinks and get a real feel for the special qualities of every type of grape wine. My boss, who is also my mentor and my senior, taught me everything he knew. He did not hold anything back. How can I not fully commit myself?” After eight months of learning, Aggie’s outstanding performance won her the title of Macau’s first female sommelier.

Taste over Price

Aggie may be one of the women who drink the largest varieties of table wine in Macau every day, but she is never drunk. “Actually, I cannot drink much, but I am able to determine a wine’s category and quality by its aroma and texture. Because my daily job is to recommend wines and provide my professional opinions to customers, it is particularly important for me to keep a sharp sense of taste. That is why I drink water after each tasting.”
    
Aggie believes that sommeliers are somewhat like chefs, who use their professional knowledge of food and grape wines to provide guests with gustatory experiences that are out of the ordinary. The difference is that sommeliers walk among guests and make all types of wine recommendations. “Price, origin and age are all objective factors in wine selection, but it primarily depends on the guest’s taste. If a wine isn’t to your taste, or if it doesn’t suit the dishes, then it is pointless, no matter how expensive.”

Though recognized by her company and elevated to a sommelier’s position, Aggie is not intoxicated by her success. She is sober in the knowledge that she has just entered the introductory phase of the profession. Since wine-tasting is a global profession, sommeliers need to obtain internationally recognized certificates and continually take part in sommelier contests to accumulate experience and qualifications. Only then can they join related associations and become internationally recognized sommeliers.
  
With fortunate support from the company, Ku is now attending a certification course by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET). In the future, she hopes to attend overseas contests and win high scores. “Eventually I would like to become an international-level sommelier. What’s more, I hope to share what I’ve learned about wine culture with more people.”
  
Thirst for Sommeliers

In recent years, Macau has seen a mushrooming of five-star hotels and a rapid increase in the number of both wholesale and retail wine cellars. But professional expertise in management and wine selection is extremely scarce. In fact, even Hong Kong currently has fewer than 100 certified sommeliers despite its relatively mature food and beverages market.
  
Currently, the Institute for Tourism Studies is the only place in Macau that offers WSET courses. One needs to go to Hong Kong to take a test for a registered sommelier’s certificate with the Court of Master Sommeliers (CMS).  

Beyond that, mainland China’s table wine market has grown rapidly in recent years. Statistics show that, at the current speed of growth, China will become the world’s seventh largest consumer of table wine by 2013, drinking up 1.26 billion bottles per year. Because wine wholesalers and retailers, caterers and winemakers all rely heavily on experienced wine-tasters, many Hong Kong sommeliers are being offered high salaries to work in other parts of China – an indication that the sommelier’s career prospects are neither short-term nor limited to Macau. For Aggie, they stretch across all of China.  

With so much wine to explore, and not enough sommeliers in this part of the world, Aggie is, and will continue to be, a tremendous asset to the food and beverage industry.

關鍵字:  Career, Wine Smart, Macauhr, Job, Talent