sommelier

noun

1. 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.”

   “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.”

   “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.”

verb

1. (intransitive, rare)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.”