World’s Youngest Master Sommelier
Last year at age 28, Roland Micu passed the last of four rigorous exams to become the youngest certified Master Sommelier in the world.
To get a sense of the weight of that accomplishment, consider that since the Court of Master Sommeliers was established in 1969 that only 197 people around the globe have attained that certification.
For most candidates, it takes multiple tries to pass the daunting Level IV exam, in which six wines must be tasted blind in 25 minutes to identify the varietal, country of origin, district and appellation, as well as vintage precisely.
Micu did it on his first attempt.
Now the associate director of wine education at the International Culinary Center in Campbell, Micu has an unusual natural skill to help him remember tastes and structures of certain wines. He got his early indoctrination into wines — not at some high-end restaurant — but by working at Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi Too in Mountain View.
Read all about this remarkable young man in my story in TreeFree, a new online magazine with issues that arrive in PDF form in your in-box. It may be based in Sweden, but its audience and stories circle the globe. Best yet, subscriptions are free.
More: An Insider’s Peek Into A Wine Class at the International Culinary Center
Congrats! So funny how certain words come up over and over again…sommelier is a word I didn’t even know until last week, LOL
The Squishy Monster: Don’t fret about that. Roland Micu will tell you that he didn’t know what the word, “sommelier,” entailed until about seven years ago. 😉
What an accomplishment! 😀 Thanks for introducing him to us Carolyn 🙂
Wow, that’s quite an achievement at that age! There’s so much to learn, and of course one’s sense of taste needs to be spot-on (and you also need quite a memory to remember so much). Good stuff – thanks.