Hot Sauce and Mustard Hijack 'Sommelier' Title for Prestige

— -- Maille’s mustard shop in New York City employs a mustard sommelier, Ray’s & Stark Bar in Los Angeles has a water menu with a water sommelier and Heatonist in Brooklyn is opening a hot sauce tasting room with a hot sauce sommelier.

But the translation of the French word “sommelier” (pronounced som-ool-yay) is a wine steward, someone who typically helps you choose which wine you’d like to drink on a given day. By that definition, the hot sauce, mustard and water experts are sommelier poseurs. So what gives with the growth of other food “sommeliers” around the country?

“It just sounds great: Sommelier. Plus, the word certainly has a more authoritative feel than enthusiast, expert or sales clerk,” Alan Sytsma, editor of the food blog Grub Street, wrote of the trend.

Pierette Huttner works as Maille’s mustard sommelier, traveling around the world as a brand spokeswoman with a deep knowledge of the products, how they’re made and how they best pair with foods.

“We want to educate people to think of mustard, instead of just a condiment, but as an ingredient and to expand that palate. And ‘mustard sommelier’ a very engaging title because it does exactly what we want to have happen, where it really creates a conversation,” Huttner told ABC News. “We wind up talking about and really smelling and tasting the mustard and understanding the different flavors or how you’re going to cook with it. It’s a term that really resonates with people and it’s immediately recognizable, so most often when someone hears the term sommelier they’re linking that to the word expert or having an expertise in something.”

Problem is, that expertise is in wine, and for actual master sommelier Emily Wines, it’s not right to co-opt the term.

“I’m not a fan of it,” Wines, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants’ senior director of national beverage programs, told ABC News. "A sommelier is a wine steward, someone trained in the wine profession. I suppose it’s a little tongue-in-cheek to use sommelier for mustards and hot sauces and things like that, but I spent years training to feel I was deserving of that title. So for someone to say they’re a mustard sommelier is just a misuse of that.

“It sounds like marketing," she said. "It’s catchy sounding, but there are other ways to say you’re an expert in what you’re selling other than saying you’re a sommelier.”

Since Noah Chaimberg revealed in a larger interview with Greenpointers that his upcoming hot sauce tasting room Heatonist in Brooklyn would have a hot sauce sommelier, Eater, Grub Street, DNAinfo, Gothamist and others have written about the phenomenon.

Chaimberg maintained, though, that the title isn’t about publicity.

“It’s just the term we use because we take the position of: We put flavor first," he told ABC News. "So when we consider hot sauce, we consider it in the context of what’s going to go well with a particular dish and complement the flavors on the plate. It’s in that sense of being able to match what’s in the bottle with a particular dish or cuisine, so that’s what was our inspiration for calling it that.

“It’s a position that you work your way into," Chaimberg added. "It’s someone who has tasted hundreds and hundreds of sauces and spent a lot of time understanding the different ingredients, and peppers, and the way peppers grow, and how soil and climates impact the ultimate flavor of a sauce, and a really a strong understanding of cuisine and food and how the two can be paired.”

For some, though, calling these positions “sommelier” is just taking it too far.

“With all these sommeliers running around, we're getting dangerously close to artisan territory: Everyone starts using the word, it loses any actual meaning it has left, and before you know it fast-food chains have co-opted it for their ads,” Sytsma wrote. “We’ve probably got like six months before Pizza Hut launches a campaign built around the idea of a sauce sommelier. Please don’t let this happen. Sommelier is still fine the way it is, but if we don't act now, we might just lose it forever.”