If you follow the wine world, you know that it’s not an easy place for women to build a career. “Working as a Woman Sommelier Seems as Bad as You Might Imagine,” said one recent story from New York’s Grub Street. “NYC Restaurant Wine Buyers Are a Fratty White Blur,” opined Eater. And the stats don’t lie: Just 16 percent of master sommeliers are women. But there are a few bright spots, like on the floor of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, a three-Michelin-star seafood palace lauded as one of New York’s best restaurants. Its wine director, Aldo Sohm, has one of the most gender-balanced teams in the industry. “I’m a firm believer that women taste wine better than men do,” Sohm told the Daily Beast in 2019. Sarah Thomas is one of several women on his team, but she’s representative of a new type of somm—those who make a name in the food and wine world outside of the restaurants in which they work. Thomas, who was brought up in western Pennsylvania by Indian immigrant parents, appeared in Somm 3, a documentary about wine tastings inspired by the famous Judgment of Paris in 1976. In addition to her role at Le Bernardin, Thomas is the author of three children’s books and cofounder of Kalamata’s Kitchen, a company that aims to get children excited about food. At one of her readings, Thomas told Pittsburgh Magazine, “There was a little Indian girl in the class, and she said, ‘Wow, Kalamata looks like you.’ And I said, ‘Actually, she looks like you.’”
