RICHARD WALKER / RWALKER@STARBULLETIN.COM Brian Julyan, chief executive of the Worldwide Court of Master Sommeliers, addressed a group of about 35 wine-service professionals at Vino yesterday.

A wine education
never ends

When Brian Julyan reached college age, he started drinking wine, and then all became clear -- everything his teachers had been trying to drill into him since grade school.

"Geography, history, languages -- this is all in wine. Chemistry, cultures ... all of a sudden it all started to make sense," Julyan said.

And so his real education began. All those topics that had never mattered to him before, he began studying in earnest -- through wine.

Julyan, chief executive of the Worldwide Court of Master Sommeliers, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Kapalua Wine & Food Festival on Maui over the weekend, a testament to how well those lessons were learned.

But he said the education was hard-won. It was the 1950s in Great Britain. "We didn't have classes, we didn't have books. You just had to get on with it."

So he read magazines, tasted, shared information. In the late 1960s, the Guild of Sommeliers was founded in London, and Julyan helped establish a branch in southwest England.

When the guild began offering examinations and certification of master sommeliers, Julyan put himself to the test and in 1972 -- he remembers the exact date, Oct. 16 -- he became the 17th master.

In 1977, he gathered his fellow masters to form the Court of Master Sommeliers, expanding to the United States in the mid-'80s.

The court now lists 138 masters from all over the world.

So what's in that name, "master sommelier"?

The certification process was developed, Julyan said, "to get people to learn, to give people something to strive for."

It consists, then as now, of a three-part exam -- an oral test of wine theory, a test of wine-service expertise and a blind tasting of six wines.

"But there are a lot more wines in the world now, aren't there?"

Which is to say, the tests are continually updated and Julyan plays a large role in that effort.

His textbook, "Sales and Service for the Wine Professional," was published in 1999, but has undergone several updates.

Julyan carries a copy of the 2003 edition with him everywhere and it's full of handwritten notes on passages that must be updated in the next edition.

Learning is forever, is the message he brought to a group of 35 Oahu wine professionals who attended an informal tasting session yesterday.

"I'm just an ordinary guy. I don't know everything. I learn every day of the week."

This attitude is expressed in restaurant service, he said, and shows when a sommelier helps a customer select a wine.

"The sommelier should not be looking down his nose at them because they haven't ordered the most expensive bottle of wine."

It is important, he said, to approach the profession without self-importance: Don't be a snob.

"There's a lot of arrogance about, but not in our group. We knock it out of them."