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Taking off from where I left the last time then here are a few quick ways how you can become a sommelier.

Start a Wine Club: Nothing can announce you as a veritable vino faster than this. Gather some friends, get a gaudy business card proclaiming yourself king of all things wine this side of Alpha Centauri, fool some unsuspecting wine supplier into handing you a few bottles, serve some, sell the rest, click lots of pictures, put it on a website or Facebook or both, and wait for the invites to turn up.

Organise a Wine-something: Dinner, tasting, soirée, gala, fest — let’s just collectively call them ‘shindig’. So what if you started out being an event management outfit; all is acceptable, unless it is unacceptable, in which case reword it.

Buy a Pin/Badge: I am sure that pet shops sell sommelier pins. If not yet, then they soon will and it would lie right next to the warning signs: “Warning, sommelier on the loose in this restaurant”. The social animals wouldn’t mind getting themselves a nifty little wine badgeroo while getting some Fido-feed. In fact, they have a great deal in the offing where in exchange for your soul and integrity they give you a shiny pin shaped like a corkscrew, an euphemism for what verb-action you are meting out to the real sommeliers.

Print a Certificate: The fake passport/driver’s licence/ration card racket will soon be found to be less lucrative than this one because the agents stand to make far more money for much lesser work. Aim for gothic fonts; they always look more convincing. Claim titles that make it seem as if you don’t just taste wine but create the grape itself.

Travel Abroad: I think it is accepted in India that if, during your foreign travels, you cross a wine shop or transit through a wine-making country or just somehow manage to touch the in-flight drinks service trolley which had some wine stocked in it, then you are, for all purposes, a sommelier. If you have worked on a cruise then you are a grand sommelier. And, if you studied abroad, then you are definitely good enough to teach others back here.

Cross-mesh References: This is a neat trick. Once you have anything that could remotely connect you to wine, join a modest set-up. A small winery, an importer, whatever. From there, the rise is easy. As long as you come from something that resembles a wine outfit, people will hire you. Why? Because there aren’t many qualified wine professionals around, so anything half resembling a sommelier will do. If you ask me, the only thing in greater shortage than such self-baked sommeliers are prostitutes and drug-peddlers with a sense for honest business practices. Oh wait, you never asked. Now you know, nevertheless.

But you know what folks, I laud each and every one of these “counterfeit catadors” (Spanish for ‘taster’ and I had to use it for reasons of alliteration). Consider this the epiphany of one of the dying species, but if they managed to turn even one non-vino to wine, no matter how much they cheated the system or true sommeliers, they still unknowingly rendered a service to the wine world. But I just thought that you, dear reader, should know the difference. Next time you attend a lousy session, don’t be too quick to blame wine. Instead, just know that you have been served a tasting portion of un-sommellerie!