This week on sommelier Levi Dalton's I'll Drink To That podcast, he sits down with New York Times chief wine critic and former interim restaurant critic Eric Asimov to talk about everything from how he approaches his job to why he loves wine to the evolution of the NYC sommelier.
Asimov explains how he got his first gig writing about food, and ultimately wine, at the Times (hint: he was bored working the graveyard shift at the national desk) and reveals that while he doesn't object to being called a critic, he believes that we, as a wine country, place far too much importance on wine critics:
One of the real problems in our wine culture is that we treat wine critics as omniscient authorities. The point of being a wine authority is not that someone can hand you a glass of wine blind and you can identify it; the point is to explain what's beautiful about wine in a way that people can understand it.He goes on to explain that our slow escape from depending on these omniscient critics—and what he refers to as the "centralized system of wine approval"—is one of the key ways sommeliers, and ultimately consumers, are moving forward:
It's a great thing when people can escape the centralized system of wine approval and do their own thing. It's the same thing for a restaurant chef. If you take a focus group and you decide that your menus should have a salmon dish and a steak dish and pasta dish and chicken breast, it's a recipe for mass slumber. It's so much more interesting when chefs have their own vision and can sell it. I think that's true with sommeliers as well.
While Asimov is excited about how far the sommelier profession has come, he offers a final word of "paternal advice" for the sommelier community:
I will qualify that also by saying that sometimes I notice an absence of humility among sommeliers. People are hungry and passionate to learn, but they should never stop learning and always be aware of what they need to know. There's a desire to get ahead and be in charge of a program, or become a Master Sommelier or whatever, and sometimes the community gets ahead of itself when the goal is to get recognized for one's achievements.The full podcast is available online and via iTunes.
· I'll Drink to That [Official Site]
· All Coverage of Eric Asimov [~ENY~]