The Sommelier Exam – Part 1: Blind Tasting

"Pinot Noir," said Delphine. "Côte de Nuits. Nineteen ninety-nine."

"Pinot Noir," said Laurent. "Côte de Beaune. Two thousand and five."

"It cannot be."

"It can."

They stood side by side in the candlelit cellar of a Burgundy wine school, each holding a glass of garnet liquid, each swirling and sniffing. The vaulted ceiling was low and stone. Rows of barrels slept along the walls. A dozen students stood at tasting stations, scribbling, spitting into copper buckets. The instructor, a white-haired man with a rumbling laugh, prowled the aisles.

Delphine was thirty-one, a former pastry chef, with dark curls and a fierce intensity. Laurent was thirty-six, a career-changer from a bank in Paris, tall, elegant, with a black cashmere jumper and sharp grey eyes. They had been rivals since the first week.

"You hesitate," said Laurent. "On the nose."

"I analyse."

"You overthink."

"And you guess."

"I know."

"You are always wrong in the finish."

"You are always wrong in the village."

The instructor read out the answer. The wine was a Pommard, 2002. They had both been wrong by two years and a village. They stared at one another in appalled silence. Then Delphine began to laugh, helplessly, and Laurent, to his own surprise, laughed with her.

After class, they stayed on in the cellar, sipping the leftover wine, sitting on barrels. It was cold and fragrant. A single candle flickered.

"I thought you hated me," said Laurent.

"I thought you were insufferable."

"Both can be true."

"Can I ask you something?" said Delphine.

"Yes."

"Why did you leave the bank?"

"Because nothing there ever tasted of anything," said Laurent.

She looked at him over the rim of her glass. His face, in the candlelight, was open and rueful.

"Green?" she said, a vine, a cork.

"Green," said Laurent, smiling. "Very green. Again. Shut your eyes."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Final Glass.