welcome to another edition of Barrel to Bottle with Binny's Beverage Depot. I'm Jeff Carlin. Of course, as always, Kristen Ellis from Binny's here to teach me everything I need to know about wine, spirits, and then some. Kristen, how are you today? I'm well. How are you? Very well. And we got a very special show today, don't we? Yes, we do. Absolutely. What's on the docket? We've got a Master Somme with us today. Really special chance to ask all the questions you've ever wanted to to a Master Somme. I'm rearing to go. Who is our special guest? Who are you? Hello, it's Fernando Beteta, Master Somme. Thank you for having me today, Kristen, Jeff. Very excited to be here. Thanks for coming. Yeah, we're really happy to have you. I like your jacket. I dressed for the occasion. I always wear a pin, a double Windsor tie, the hipster socks, if you can see them. You can picture my hair is combed very neatly. Where's your mustache? My mustache is currently waxed in upwards. So picture of a sommelier, you got to picture a sommelier in your mind. That's exactly what I look like and I dress for it. Well, and you dress very well, my friend. That's a nice ascot. It's touching. Yes. I will remove the double Windsor tie and wear the bow tie in the middle of the segment. Does it have polka dots? No. I'm not interested then. No. It must have polka dots. I have a question. You said picture sommelier. A lot of people don't really know how to define that role. Could you give us a short definition of what you do? I think that's what I wanted to say. When I pictured a sommelier, I pictured a stuffy wine expert in a dining room who knew everything about wine and was just really intimidating to talk to. But today's sommelier is very different. I think somebody that's supposed to help you select the wine to go with your meal, has maybe the knowledge, but also just has hospitality. So I've always worked in restaurants and it's been my mom, my dad, it's been the restaurant mentors who taught me about service. And then when I got into wine, I just pictured the same thing. It should be somebody that you trust, right? And that can kind of understand your palate. So the sommelier kind of in my world is the person that is the bridge between the chef's creations and the wine list. And their job is to sort of link those two together for you at the table. Do you think that that's correct? Absolutely. I think one of the best analogies I heard is that you're like an a broker, an artist broker, because you may be willing to invest in art, but you just don't know. So you you put your like trust into, you know, an expert says, you know, you have to buy this. This is 22 million dollars. Similar to a restaurant wine list that you see these wines are 200, 400, thousand dollars. And that person needs to be able to understand what you like and what's a good value and whether it's worth collecting and holding on to or drink now and enjoy it. So you work as a SOM and it's quite a prestigious situation to be in, but you're still working in a restaurant. So there's got to be some crazy stuff that happens. Well, often it is to be just at the very beginning of the experience when the language barrier or the wine list was too daunting for some people. I worked at the wine list that had 50, 60 pages sometimes and you'd hand them the business big book, and then they take a look, you come back five minutes later, and then the host would just casually look at it and say, I'll have the Bordeaux and then he points to it and says 17. You think, that's the page number of the table of contents. So he's just looking at the table of contents, he's 50 different regions and he assumes that's the wine list and the page is the price, and he went to 17. But you get stuff like that all the time. The situation in a restaurant is very quick. You have a server talking to you, you have somebody else pouring you water, they're ready to take, maybe you've had a cocktail. Right. And you're a master's son, so how long did it take you to get to that level? So the master sommelier diploma is over 40 years old, and in its history, there's only been around 230 in the world. I was the 99th person to pass in North America in 2009. So it was just a very difficult exam. It has many different levels. You don't have to do it, but I say that the four levels are introductory, certified, obsessed, enraged, and then uncontrollable sobbing. Because there's more people that have probably failed the exam than have passed it. There's like a 3% pass rate. So it's somebody who's very engaged and also committed to passing this exam. So I got into it because I think my paths in my life, I lived in Europe, I worked in many restaurants, I had four languages under my belt. I thought this is a path that I should just pursue to become an expert in sommeliers. But for other people, their path is different. They don't have a clear path to get there because there is no school, there is no like sign me up and I'm going to take a class on Tuesday. You pretty much show up, take this very difficult exam, blind taste wines that can be from anywhere in the world. And you have to just you smell them and you have to tell them the grape, the country, the region, the appellation and the vintage. So imagine how many wines I have to drink. I drink a lot of wine. Life is hard. And a lot of spirits and a lot of beers and a lot of smoked cigars and you had to do everything else. So when you sit down for the blind tasting, you could have potentially a flight of spirits and a flight of beers. Is that normal? Well, you paid for it. So this is the most expensive flight. Yes. And you drink all of it. But okay, you picture you walk into a room, you have the judges who are master sommeliers, and they'll have a flight of six wines, three whites, three reds, and you have 25 minutes. So you have to talk, it's all oral, and you have to say what you smell, if there's oak, if there's minerals, if it has high sugar or high acid, and then they take the points and they'll never tell you what the wines are. There's no buzzer when you get around. There's no buzzer. Yeah, there's this trap door in the bottom. That's exactly how I felt like, because I took this exam four times, and my Achilles heel was the blind tasting. So you just have to come back and wait a year and taste more wines, and one year can be like dry German wines. Another year has some oddballs from South Africa and some interesting grapes from Canada. They can do any wine in the world, so you have to really kind of broaden your palate. So how many hours a week would you dedicate to studying for this exam? Besides the 12 hours a day that I was working in a restaurant, that's what I mean. If you're not working in a restaurant, having the interaction with customers, ordering wines and buying wines during the day. You usually get tired by the time you get home. Your brain is like, think of something else. I'm going to watch Game of Thrones and Binge on it. Last thing you want to do is pick up this big encyclopedia, but you need another two hours, maybe an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, and then a couple hours on the weekend. And then I spent my vacations traveling to wine regions and any living moment open to learn. So you've got to be a bit crazy to want to be a Master Sommelier. Every Master Sommelier that you can meet is crazy, certified. They have some obsession, crazy about wine. They are certified masters. Around 800 AD, Emperor Charlemagne's wife hated how red wine stained her husband's white beard. So she ordered white grapes be planted in the vineyards in Burgundy, on what is now known as the Grand Cru Vineyard, called Cortan Charlemagne. So when you passed, did they tell you that you passed immediately? How did that work? So the results, if you've ever seen the documentary Somme, it shows a quick glimpse. I always say it's grown men crying over wine. It's pretty not sexy at all. It's uncontrollable sobbing. You're like hugging somebody, and then you see somebody with tears. You don't know if you should congratulate them or just stay away. Because they've put so many hours in life. And you've been on both sides of that too. You've been on the fail and the pass side. Yeah, you don't want to sometimes see some of these people you've mentored and have to give them bad results. So they have to wait or they have to reset the exam. But basically, it's whoever was there for maybe the three days of your exams, and saw every part to sit with you and immediately give you feedback. And one of the notorious things about the Court of Mass. So many is that it's very secretive. They never share or publish the exam. They never reveal the wine, so they never told me what they were. And I guess you just kind of feel if you pass or you did it during the service being how many times you had to apologize. I'm sorry. I don't know. I'm sorry. And they're like, oops. But I think there's a feeling they take all the points and then they sit down and talk with you. And they'll say, you know, work on Hungary, work on your regions of Willamette Valley that you didn't maybe answer. You knew you knew that in the exam. But then when you go about to talk about the wines, they'll say the same like, you should taste more old wines with age. You should probably think of New World, old world classic grapes. Maybe thinking for me was, did I confuse that Pinot Noir from Burgundy and that Pinot Noir from Russian River Valley? That happens to me all the time. That's how one grape can taste pretty much the same. But once you start getting those nuances, they may seem similar, but they also have these very clear opposite profiles. Do you feel that you are very strong in geography because of your background in wine? My geography teacher in high school would not believe it. Yeah, I know. I feel the same way. History buffs. I just met a parent from my daughter's school who teaches high school history. I said, we need to sit down and go through the 18th and 19th century because I'm talking about wine all the time, and I always start about picture France, 1855, Napoleon III request. It's so amazing to look at the history books and put them together with how wine and why it's there today. In the context of wine. Yeah. You see all those champagne names like Roederer and Krug and Bollinger that have German last names, and then you go back in history. I think I learned a lot about history through wine, and I'm also looking at maps and revisiting every river and every mountain range of Europe just because it's so important to viticulture. Jeff, wine makes you smart. Apparently, or you have to be smart to really like wine? Well, to do this. To do this, right, at this level. After 12 glasses of wine, I don't feel the same as the beginning, so I might. Well, you're on 11 right now and you sound fantastic. I have to. Don't worry. Yeah. So we were talking the other day, Fern and I about, can I call you Fern? Yeah, you can call me Fern. About, people ask you the best wine to buy when your child is born, and people, this is a big trend, is to buy the wine of the year, the vintage. The birth year. Yeah. So what are some no-brainer wines? Well, no-brainer wines, Riesling. German Riesling can age for decades. So you obviously want to have something that's going to hold off. So the idea is to buy a birth year wine and drink it in 20 plus years, right? So California, Cabernet's with some oak, so Cabernet Sauvignon, dark skinned grapes, Bordeaux from France. These are the collectibles. I wish my parents would have saved the wine for me, but I was born in 1976, it says my age, but I want to change my birth year to a better vintage. I was born in 82. Oh, you see, you have a great vintage, but very expensive. 76 is a terrible vintage. I have an 83 bottle of Chianti. Yeah, so good luck with that. Keep that on the mantle one day, like open it at somebody's. But that's what I collected, some German Riesling for my daughter, and well, the 2016 vintage for my son is not really out yet, but I hope to maybe find something, something worth aging. You'll be good with Bordeaux, I mean, killer vintage. You don't have to buy a lot, but buy a Barolo, something that's a hundred dollars, because these wines are tested and tried that they can age. Don't experiment with something like Sauvignon Blanc with no oak, it's going to be brown in two years. So we're looking for wines that got good acid and good tannin to let them ride through the decades. And also, in 20 years, you want to open something that is appreciated value, don't get something that's cheap, get something worth it, so it would be a nice gift. Okay, good advice. Any other questions, Jeff, for you? I have a question for you. So someone just getting in the some game, if that's what they call it, they call it that. They do now. They do now. What's an advice for somebody who's like, you know what, I'd love to get more into this. Well, for sommeliers, you have to work in a restaurant. So get with a restaurant group or somebody that's passionate, that has a wine program. So you know you're going to be working with some great wines on a daily basis, not necessarily a beer and a cocktail place, but a wine bar. And then you can visit many different websites that teach and build community. My favorite is guildsomm.com, which is a community. It's about 8,000 people that are in this program. And then there's different educational groups. The one I did was the Quartier Masses Mouillet, but it may not be the best to learn. Something like WSET is a much better program. So you can take one academic route. So you learn your theory and then you get on the floor and you work and you pop bottles of wine every single day and quarks and come home with a jacket and purple stains around your clothing, like I did. And that's how you become a sommelier. Cool. I do WSET, Jeff. So that's kind of where Fernando and I are different. He does the sommelier certifications and I do the wine and spirit education trust. One's not better than the other, just different, but Master Somm obviously is the most difficult examen, exactly. Cabernet Sauvignon is a cross of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. It's a happy accident, likely taking place in the 17th century in southwestern France, most likely in Bordeaux. Now, Cabernet, along with Merlot, is one of the most widely planted red grapes in the world. All right. As we wrap another edition of Barrel to Bottle with Binny's Beverage Depot, we can't go without our Q&A, Kristen. We can't. What do we got this week? We're here. So we've got Chloe from La Grange, and she wanted to know Fern, when she buys a bottle of wine at a restaurant, and let's say the table is four or five people, they've had a couple of glasses each, half a bottle left and they decide they don't like the wine. They kind of want to return it. I mean, is that cool? What do they do? Oh, Chloe, what's wrong with your wine? Was it her fault or that she didn't enjoy it? Or is it the wine is off? Because sometimes this is the big question. We're not sure. We doubt. So we have either the manager or sommelier tasted. If the sommelier tasted and he found out that wine is, that's the style. It happens a lot with baby Riesling. They weren't sure it was going to be sweet. Then it's okay maybe to share the wine or bring it back to your babysitter. If you have something, I always have picked wines that I don't finish and I find somebody that will have it. But if you do need to, then talk to the Psalm and explain why you don't like it, if there's something that is different than what you have, so that you can make sure that the next bottle that they come and they recommend is going to be to your liking. Then they could possibly use that wine for by the glass or use it for a tasting or give it to the chef. A restaurant is not going to lose a lot on half a bottle. I think the correct thing we'll do is to still leave a tip to your server for having to run around and get you all the glassware. And also, you know, just a normal maybe offer to pay for whatever the wine if it was if it was sound. So yeah, so if the wine is off, so if it smells like feet or cardboard or nail polish or any of these things, then you can give that wine back and that's okay. But if it's sound, like you said, but you just don't like it, it's not really cool to return it. Just be charitable and give it to somebody else. Sometimes people return wine to me just because they didn't like it, but the wine was exactly how it's supposed to taste. So I would watch if I recommended it, or if they had just picked it off the list because the name sounded fun. So Chloe's got a gift card coming our way. You're right. So because Chloe, your question was chosen, we're going to send a $20 gift card out to you to spend with us here at Binny's Beverage Depot. So thanks so much Chloe for participating. Really appreciate it. Yeah. If you want to have your question up for consideration, check us out on Twitter at Binny's Bev. Throw us a question and we'll see if we can use it, and the 20 gift card could be yours. Perfect. Thanks, Jeff. That's right. Fernando, you're wonderful. Thank you for coming in today. Thank you so much for having me. And dropping some serious knowledge for us. We appreciate it. Fernando, if we want to find you on social media and whatnot, where do we find you? Easy, at Fernando Beteta. That doesn't sound as easy as you think it is. Spell that for us. F-E-R-N-A-N-D-O-B-E-T-E-T-A. Just like it sounds. Exactly. Give me your ETA. All right, Fernando. Thanks so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for tuning in. Another episode of Barrel to Bottle with Binny's Beverage Depot. I'm Kristen, my co-host Jeff. Keep tasting. See you next time.