New Best Friend: The Sommelier

It’s potentially the most distressing moment of the restaurant meal, when doubt and dread combine to make cowards of us all. One person stands between us and humiliation, one who can smooth the way for success, whether on a first date, in closing a deal, at a family gathering or in a meeting with the boss.

That person is the sommelier, the smiling ambassador who hands us a wine list, an index of potential pleasures that instead is so often seen as a tool of destruction, wielded by restaurants to extract more money than we care to spend for reasons we don’t understand.

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