A recent thread on beer sommeliers made me wonder about the question in the subject line. After some digging, I found an article in Men’s Health that reported on sommeliers for these items:
[ul]
[li] beer, also called cicerone[/li][li] donuts[/li][li] juice[/li][li] water[/li][li] hot sauce[/li][li] milk[/li][li] bread[/li][/ul]
OK, you may think that was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Au contraire, mon frère. There are others, of course. Here’s what I’ve been able to find with some googling:
[ul]
[li] tea[/li][li] coffee, also known as a cupper, I think[/li][li] cheese, also known as a fromager[/li][li] marijuana (interpener)[/li][li] fruit and vegetables – seems to be a Japanese thing[/li][li] salt (selmelier – seems to be one guy in Portland, don’t think there’s any others)[/li][/ul]
After this, I thought “lets take this to the extreme, how about air; is there an air sommelier?” Well it turns out there are such beings, but they’re not employees of oxygen bars. Instead, they’re employed by airlines. They’re wine sommeliers, but for airline food.
I have a feeling there’s more. What have I missed?
You’re missing the profession with probably the best noses and most arcane olfactory sensory knowledge of all: perfumers. Great list, and I really liked your cicerone thread.
Other uses of the word are at best unimaginative and at worst pretentious bullshit.
If a thing - eg beer - can support a sommelier-like expert then it stand on its own two feet and invent/revive its own title. If sake can support sommelierosity then there must be a japanese word already.
Ha, ha, but like toilet paper, perfume is a consumer good that is purchased and used, with each use diminishing the amount of the total good remaining. So, ‘consumable,’ if not food and drink. Or smoke, in the case of the interpener (“Weed guy” if you’re a classicist.)
Where perfumer doesn’t meet the sommelier description is that a perfumer usually isn’t making recommendations to you the terminal consumer on which type of scent to use, or what scent will go best with the primary activity you’re engaging in, nor are they receiving compensation from that consumer for their services. The salesperson working the perfume counter at Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdales might be doing all of those things, but they don’t have a snazzy title for their position. That I know of.
Some of them have new names, and I’ve mentioned those I’m familiar with. But there doesn’t seem to be a new name for a tea sommelier, for example. And I’m sure there’s a Japanese word for a fruit and vege sommelier, but I didn’t run across it. Etymologically, there’s nothing about the word sommelier to indicate it’s about wine, so you’d think purists wouldn’t object to its extension to other things. But of course, they will anyway.
As for the argument about perfume, I guess I used the wrong term. I should have said ingestible instead of consumable. I can’t change the subject line, so let’s just assume I said that.
Not all the sommeliers actually interact with the final consumer. The air sommeliers do not, for example. They just decide what kind of wine the plane takes along to go with a specific meal.
It’s like brandy, where the unmodified word is understood to stand for grape brandy but there’s also apple brandy and pear brandy and plum brandy etc. Why memorize a bunch of obscure words when saying “beer sommelier” is infinitely simpler than “cicerone”?
To answer the original question, farts. No one goes around sampling them. “Hmm, a delicate rot on the front with a putrid middle that leaves a lingering hydrogen sulfide on the tongue…” Yeah, I know it’s not a consumable.
I think this is just kind of a pretentious misuse of the word, like I’m also seeing with the word “curated” these days. Everything is curated. Hamburgers, decor, collections of kitsch in somebody’s show home.
Maybe it’s not pretentious, and maybe it’s not a misuse. Maybe it’s just the new normal where you have donut sommeliers who bring you donuts. Curated donuts.