Ronan Sayburn MS is Chief Executive Officer and Treasurer of the Court of Master Sommeliers. He comes from Yorkshire, in the north of England, and passed the Master Sommelier examination in 2005.
Here he traces his path from catering college to running the Court, and explains what the job asks of him.
01From catering college to a two-star cellar
Sayburn started at catering college, on a hotel-management course that covered the kitchen, housekeeping, reception, the restaurant and the bar. The restaurant interested him most, and then wine captured his imagination.
As a restaurant manager in various places, he looked after the wine lists. Wanting to go further, he wrote to Gerard Basset MS MW OBE. He introduced himself as a young man from Yorkshire who wanted to be a sommelier, and asked whether that was possible for someone who was not French.
Basset replied that of course it was. His advice was to work in a nice place with a good head sommelier and a big wine list, and he suggested writing to a friend who ran a restaurant's wine programme.
Sayburn wrote to that head sommelier. In 1995 he found himself at a two-Michelin-star restaurant run by Raymond Blanc, where, after a trial dinner and a trial lunch, he was offered a job as a very junior commis. Everyone else was French, and he recalls that there were no English sommeliers then.
The work was mostly junior: mopping floors, cleaning the cellar and polishing glasses. He paid attention, studied all the wines and moved up rank by rank. When the assistant head sommelier left, he became the number two.