You're in a restaurant or a wine bar or a café. Your sommelier recommends a wine to you. They pour the wine for you. You taste the wine. You love the wine. And you wonder to yourself, Who becomes a sommelier? What makes somebody devote themself to the sommelier’s art and skill? What makes somebody travel around a city or a region or a country or the world to serve wine to people in restaurants and wine bars and cafés? What makes somebody fall so deeply in love with wine?
This is the story of Anna Hutcheson, an American sommelier in Vienna, where she oversees sales and distribution for a boutique Champagne distributor. Anna grew up in rural Montana, studied art in Seattle, fell in love with wine in Chicago, and fell in love again with her first love in the Arctic Circle.
“I did not grow up around wine or good food,” says Anna, “I grew up in very rural areas of Montana, in a time and place where red sauce Italian restaurants were the most exotic dining options, and mostly seen as pretentious. My Mom has never been a drinker. I think she’s had the same box of Franzia White Zinfandel stored on the back porch for ‘special occasions’ since the early Eighties. She refuses to believe that wine goes bad. Do not, and I can’t stress this enough, ever accept a glass of wine from my mother.
“In 1998, I moved to Seattle to attend art school, and my roommate got me a job as a busboy at the fancy Italian restaurant that she worked at near Pike Place Market. It had everything. Celebrities, opera singers that would sing at your table, expensive wines, and I hated it, but I’d never made so much money in my life.
Pizza Parlor Waitress
“I moved to Chicago in 2003. I was sure I would find a job working for some cool, independent art gallery, and I ended up getting a job as a waitress at a pizza parlor and was then promoted to manager when the acting manager died. It was here that I won some sort of contest, and the owner gave me a case of white wine from Italy. I wasn’t much of a wine drinker, maybe a bottle of something like Yellowtail for a special occasion, but never white wine. I ended up opening a bottle of that wine eventually, and it was delicious, I had no idea that wine could taste like that. It was Feudi di San Gregorio, Falanghina, and I have put that wine on every menu that I have had the chance to since, because looking back, this was the moment that cracked open the wine door for me.
“I got a job at the fanciest place I’d ever worked. There were tasting menus, so many different glasses for all the different wines. I was overwhelmed, but dove in. We had to take weekly wine classes, that were taught by the amazing Alpana Singh [a Master Sommelier, restaurateur, and television personality], and I grew more and more interested in the restaurant’s all-Italian wine list and started asking her for recommendations for books on Italian wine and found myself going home after my shift and studying those books and maps and making flash cards. I studied and passed the first exam for the Court of Master Sommeliers. I realized that I really liked learning about wine. It was everything that I’d always been interested in. It was art, history, science, passion, friendship, love, literature, and so much more! And I realized I could make it a career.
“Over the next several years, I immersed myself in wine and food. It was wonderful. I worked at a lot of different places and learned a lot of different approaches to hospitality and service, and I met so many characters in the Chicago restaurant industry that I still cherish to this day. I worked at a three-star Michelin restaurant with a terrifying French chef, I worked at the hottest new small plates restaurants with the coolest wine lists, I worked at a Latin restaurant that turned into a crazy nightclub after eleven, and then, just before 2010, I somehow got a job with Domaine Select, a wine importer and distributor.
“After three more jobs with three more wine importers and distributors, out of the blue, an old friend from high school reached out to me on Facebook. He was working as a chef for a hotel group up in Norway, in Svalbard, and they were looking for a sommelier. Would I be interested? I didn’t really have much desire to go back to restaurants, but I couldn’t turn it down. Then, there I was in Svalbard, taking care of one of Norway's largest wine collections in the middle of the Arctic, riding snowmobiles and minding my own business, when I ran into my high school sweetheart while he was vacationing in Svalbard. A year-and-a-half later, we were married, and a year after that, I moved to Vienna, where he was living, and here we are!”