There is a moment in every wine service when a guest asks the question they think is small talk:

“What is your favorite wine?”

For many sommeliers, this is easy. For me, it is the most honest moment of the day because the true answer is that I have not swallowed a glass of wine in over a year.

I am a sommelier with WSET and ISG Diplomas, a wine consultant, an importer of grower Champagne and small producers, and I am sober. I taste for a living and I do not drink.

Across two decades in restaurants and wine, I have opened programs, advised operators, and consulted for rooms and collectors. Somewhere in that career, I stopped swallowing entirely.

This is not the contradiction it sounds like. It may be the sharpest professional edge I have.

The myth of the drinking sommelier

The wine industry runs on a quiet assumption: that loving wine means drinking wine constantly, socially, and professionally, until the line between palate development and habit disappears.

Every sommelier knows colleagues who crossed that line. Industry dinners that end at 3 a.m. The “staff taste” that becomes four glasses. The post-shift bottle that becomes a ritual, then a problem nobody wants to name.

We avoid the subject because the profession is built on appetite. We sell pleasure for a living. Admitting that pleasure can hollow someone out feels like an indictment of the product.

It is not.

What I learned when I stopped swallowing is simpler: tasting and drinking are different activities, and the industry has confused them for too long.

What sobriety did to my palate

Spitting is not a compromise. It is the professional standard.

Serious critics, buyers, competition judges, and candidates tasting dozens of wines before lunch spit. What changed when I committed to it completely was not my technique. It was my attention.

When the glass is information rather than reward, you taste differently. You stop chasing warmth and start mapping structure: acidity, phenolics, lees texture, balance, development, and the point where a wine’s volatility shifts from energy into flaw.

My blind tasting became better sober. I had feared the opposite.

On the floor, something else happened. I started reading guests more clearly. A sommelier’s real job is not simply knowing wine. It is understanding people quickly with incomplete information: budget, occasion, confidence, who is deciding, who is performing, and what the table wants versus what it says it wants.

There is no end-of-shift fog anymore. There is just the work in higher resolution.

The operator’s case for clarity

I operate restaurants in Western Canada, consult on wine and hospitality projects, build an independent import business, write, train, and spend part of my nights learning to build AI tools.

None of that works at the level I expect from myself when the next day begins in recovery mode.

I do not need a speculative productivity percentage to explain what changed. I got my mornings back. My sleep became more dependable. Training became consistent. Ideas stopped dying in notebooks because I had enough clarity to execute them.

The time and attention that once disappeared now go into a second business, consulting work, physical training, and a body of writing that can compound.

Sobriety, for me, is not a wellness aesthetic. It is an allocation decision.

What this means inside the industry

I am not going to tell anyone else to quit drinking. I will offer three things I wish someone had told me.

Your palate is not your liver. You can be a serious taster without swallowing. The spit bucket is not a walk of shame. It is a professional tool.

The industry will not build your guardrails. Hospitality is organized around alcohol access, late nights, and a culture where “no thanks” can somehow require an explanation. If the environment is becoming dangerous for you, the room will not automatically protect you. You need support and boundaries that exist beyond the room.

Clarity compounds. In an industry with tight margins and high attrition, becoming the person who shows up present every day is not a small advantage. Guests notice it. Teams rely on it. Clients hire it.

The operators who seek my advice, the restaurants that trust my judgment, and the collectors who ask for my read are not buying consumption. They are buying attention.

Clarity is not merely how I taste now. It is part of the product.

The honest answer

When a guest asks for my favorite wine, I tell them it is whatever bottle teaches me something that night.

I taste everything. I swallow nothing.

I have never respected wine more because the relationship is finally on my terms.

The floor taught me to read people. The terminal is teaching me to build leverage. Sobriety makes me better at both.

Woody

Woody Wu is a Western Canada-based restaurant operator, sommelier with WSET and ISG Diplomas, wine consultant, importer, and AI builder. He writes The Floor and the Terminal and advises selected restaurant, hotel, collector, and hospitality projects.

Learn more at woodywusommelier.com.