Smoking Somms

How much does smoking cigarettes hold your palate back?

I quit smoking when I decided to “take wine seriously”. Embarrassingly, my main motivation for quitting was not the health benefits or something sensible like saving money. It was due to the fact the next level of my wine examinations would involve a blind tasting exam and I did not want to enter into it with a disadvantage. I also didn’t want to look unprofessional; to be puffing my Marlboro Golds outside the wine fair wasn’t really giving off the desired serious sommelier vibe. Although that doesn’t show me in the most favourable light, that is the truth; I was worried about what people would think of me as a smoker in the wine industry.

Someone once described blind tasting to me as like a parlour game - it’s fun to play, and exhilarating to win, but not necessarily a valuable skill for every day. There are plenty of wine professionals for whom blind tasting is not an activity that will crop up often in their careers. Where blind tasting becomes more integral is during the examination process for qualifications or competitions within the wine world. It’s easy to picture a scene from a film perhaps, the sommelier picks up and swirls the glass, takes a sniff and then a sip before a light twinkles in their eyes “Lafite… 1982…. A particularly iconic vintage” - this doesn’t tend to be the way it goes. When blind tasting wines, the colour, aroma, structure and characteristics of the wine will be assessed out loud following a template that has been memorised, is it a dry wine? How is the acidity? The tannin levels? And so on. The final call is to guess the style of wine, where it is from and the vintage. This will generally only account for a handful of marks out of the assessment and quite often, it’s guessed wrong. The sommelier must use clues from the wine’s profile to sort it into its correct box. It is in these moments that the sensitivity of your palate is pretty key.

Contrary to what might seem logical, so many wine professionals smoke. The higher up I got in the industry, the more prolific it seemed to be. When I staged¹ at a Michelin Star restaurant in Mayfair which will remain nameless, I’d say about half of the very prestigious sommelier team (who regularly took part in competitions & tastings) were daily smokers. The similarly revered team at the fancy wine shop I worked at fostered even more of a smoking culture. Hospitality is a stressful, draining job at times and many within it use smoking as a crutch or at least a chance to get a meditative five-minute break.

One of the boujier tasting venues - China Tang at the Dorchester.

Study results have shown that chronic exposure to cigarette smoke affects the taste function in humans. “Smokers exhibited significantly lower taste sensitivity than non-smokers - the higher the nicotine dependence (Fagerström scores), the lower the taste sensitivity.” Participants in these trials will not have been professionals with trained palates, however - could a sommelier with a smoking habit out-taste an angelic civilian? It can be particularly hard to measure and quantify the quality of one’s palate as taste is such a subjective experience and so many other factors play a part in how we perceive taste.

I cannot even offer anecdotal evidence to the matter as, while my palate has improved dramatically since I quit smoking nearly three years ago, I have also undertaken quite significant tasting training over recent years so it’s hard to know how much improvement can be attributed to the lack of cigarettes and how much for the education and practice I’ve received.

A snap from one of my classes at Le Cordon Bleu.

There are plenty of factors that can affect how you taste; your natural ability to taste (biologically how your brain/nose/mouth performs), the time you spend training your palate, what you’ve eaten/drunk, whether you have a cold (my teacher at Le Cordon Bleu used to only drink his water hot to prevent any lurgies coming on), your mood, the lighting, the music you happen to be listening to at the time. Perhaps the extensive training sommeliers put into their palate can outweigh the detrimental effects of smoking on their tasting abilities, which might explain why so many somms can still perform well in their careers while smoking.

I think it may be possible to train your palate around the fact you smoke. If you learn how your palate reacts to certain stimuli (despite any insensitivity) it’s possible you could learn to taste and identify wines well using your own indications. The Master Sommelier who ran my diploma course (which involved 6 months of full-time classes in which we tasted at least 20 wines a day) suggested if we smoked to either quit now (at the beginning) or not at all, as if we were to learn how to taste while smoking and then quit, all that knowledge would no longer be relevant as our palates would change so dramatically we would need to relearn the tools from scratch.

I’m not here to tell you right from wrong, I know plenty of somms that are fantastic at their jobs and smoke like chimneys. I know even more civilians with dulled palates who have never smoked a cig. Obviously, we know that smoking has far more significant detriments to our health than just gastronomic factors - do not smoke, it is terrible for you - and thus the research necessary into smoking sommeliers and their seemingly magical palates just hasn’t been done and probably will never be. There are plenty more vital causes to put our scientific time and energy towards. For me, it’s an interesting thought to ponder… let’s try asking the same question in the rebellious cloud of smoke at the back door of the next trade tasting.

1. A stage (short for stagiaire) is essentially a hospitality term for an internship.