What it’s like to be a wine trainer

We shadowed Camilla Nash, one of Corney & Barrow’s wine educators while she gave service staff on a P&O’s cruise ship a run-down on the essentials of selling wine to the masses.

Nash has worked with Corney & Barrow for three years, one of the UK’s oldest established merchants, although her journey into the world of wine started when she was just 18. Like most vino-veterans, she fell into her first role.

There are many ways to receive an education in wine. Some hospitality firms in the on-trade offer to subsidise their staff’s enrolment in WSET courses, while others offer in-house training.

As an educator for C&B, Nash travels across the country each week, visiting hotels, bars and restaurants that buy their wine from the merchant to brief them on exactly what they need to know about their range. We asked her why she loves her job, and the lessons she’s learnt along the way.

Travel

Nash’s work takes her all over the UK from country manors to cocktail bars, but today we’re aboard the Ventura — a P&O cruise ship which recently underwent a major refurb.

“No two weeks are the same for me,” she said. “One day I could be up in Scotland for one of our clients up there, and then I could come down to somewhere in the Cotswolds, and then I could be doing somewhere in London.”

Looking at the sales figures, P&O’s staff have one of the toughest jobs of all of the merchant’s clients. On an average two-week cruise, guests get through 3,900 bottles of sparkling and white wine, 1,800 bottles of red, 2,500 litres of whiskey, 1,800 litres of gin, rum and vodka, 600 litres of cognac, and a staggering 50,400 bottles or cans of beer.

A different kind of education

Camilla gives a run-down of the wines served on-board.

We pile into a side-room just off the main restaurant. There are roughly 30 servers in today’s training session, all of whom are based overseas. Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines are all accounted for.

Nash starts the session and asks for a quick show of hands for who is genuinely interested in wine. The response is a little lukewarm.

Next we get to the wine tasting. P&O recently started selling a specially-commissioned wine label. There are four — one white and three reds — all of which were blended and overseen by wine-writer and Saturday Kitchen regular Olly Smith.

“Do any of you know who he is?” Nash asks the room, but again, the response is a little flat.

“If you mention his name, your guests will be very excited,” she laughed.

While the servers are given key characteristics and aromas to pick out on the Merlot (“soft”, fruity” etc), the focus is less on the terroir and affect of the climate on the grape, and more on the branding. In fact, the staff are warned not to go into too much detail with the grape variety.

“The premise isn’t just education, it’s also about making it exciting,” she said later.

This, Nash explained to me later, is one of the things she loves about her job. C&B work with a wide range of bars and restaurants, from gastropubs to Nobu, so while there is a “core” wine school rooted in the WSET’s programme, which also teach staff how to up-sell a wine, each lesson is tailored to the client, with the consumer always in the back of their minds. The following week, she was heading to one of Drake & Morgan’s London bars to give the staff a deep dive into Pinot Noir expressions.

By the end of the training session, one server comes over to ask Nash more about sparkling wine, something which wasn’t covered in her Olly Smith run-down, with that glint in his eyes that hints that it’s all suddenly clicked. He loves wine.

“That’s the best bit about it for me,” she said.

Spotting up-selling

C&B’s wine educator pours at a festive Champagne tasting.

An unusual perk of the job is that now, Nash knows when someone is trying to upsell her on something, and she uses what she notices in the training process.

“When I went to buy a new pair of trainers for running, it’s not something I know anything about. I had my data analysis done to measure my feet in the store, and this guy was talking me through the trainers. All I could think about was my own wine training.”

The first thing she asks her students to think about is the price itself. Why should one bottle of wine cost more than another?

“I tend to link it back to the trainers. We talk about brands, and why a pair of Nikes would be more expensive than a lesser-known make. The guy in the shop was also telling me about durability, and in the same way we talk about the technology that goes into producing a wine, different types of equipment etc. I’ll encourage them to talk about a more expensive bottle in depth.”

Learning tact

One of C&B’s wine trainers in action.

Of course, some guests want to show off whatever wine knowledge they have, and learning to deal with a confrontational customer with tact is all part of the experience. Occasionally, you have to learn the hard way, as Nash found out.

“Generally speaking it’s not best to correct people, but in my younger days I recommended a wine to a guy who wanted a cheaper version of Chablis. I gave him a chardonnay and he kicked off. Then, in my lack of experience I corrected him…”

A little bit of knowledge, she said, can be a dangerous thing.

“If you meet people who make the wine, they’re typically fun, down to earth, creative. And you get consumers they often enjoy wine in a fun environment and somehow in the middle it goes wrong.”

Nash’s advice is to remember that, no matter how far along you get in your career, you are always, always learning.

“What drives me is demystifying things that sometimes I haven’t understood in the past, and bringing that information to someone else is really rewarding.”