Illicit snogs, blocked bogs and wine snobs: the unglamorous life of a top sommelier

It is 10.30pm and I have my hand inside the toilet. There are two bin bags and a marigold glove between me and the contents of the toilet – but it’s a toilet nonetheless. It’s the same toilet I dry-heaved into at eleven o’clock this morning after a long night in Soho with a journalist of ill-repute.

In the last hour I have sold a few thousand pounds’ worth of wine, been snogged sloppily on the neck by a customer, in front of his mother, and now I am here – elbow deep in the loo – trying to locate and retrieve whatever’s blocking it. In all honesty, I’m quite relieved to be here. The toilet is dark, and cool, and quiet. It smells incredibly good in here because of an endless supply of badly branded and absurdly expensive scented candles called things like “Hazy Kush” and “Boyfriend’s Bedsheets”. I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving the restaurant floor to do this, so nobody knows where I am. I can hear someone in the corridor asking after me. They say something about wine and then ask again, their tone becoming increasingly anxious and annoyed. It’s not been a good service. They are, to use an industry term “in the s***”, but then again, so am I.

This evening has been as bad as all the others. Inevitably there aren’t enough people rota’d on to comfortably undertake a restaurant service. This is a regular occurrence: a manager will look at the run sheet for the day and declare “There aren’t enough people on the rota!” as if the rota wrote itself incorrectly. From 7pm to 8.30pm I didn’t open a single bottle of wine, I just put plates on tables and picked them up again; “Yes, your steak is medium-rare”, etc. I don’t mind this kind of work, I actually quite like it – it’s just that me doing this means that occasionally a 40-year-old bottle of Pomerol might be poured onto a customer’s lap by a nervous teenage waiter.

I’m hauled off of food-running when Jake arrives, a few minutes early, for his 8.45pm table. Jake is a regular and we get on well. He is annoying and warm like a puppy and the type of customer who buys expensive things because they are delicious (the inverse – the customer who buys delicious things because they are expensive – is more common here and much, much worse). Jake hugs me for too long, and says his mum and brother are coming to join him. He’s going to tell them that he’s finally begun divorce proceedings. He’s going to ask his brother to look after his son for a few days whilst they’re really “in the thick of it”. We both agree he needs a drink.

Two hours later, Jake is standing in front of me, with his coat on, in the very middle of the restaurant floor. He is swaying slightly, having drunk most of a Premier Cru Chassagne-Montrachet made by a talented young Burgundian winemaker and a delicious, old-vine Etna Rosso. The wines were not on our wine list, but they’re things I’ve saved for Jake and people like him. They’re wines that lawyers, bankers and consultants would order to impress their clients, wives and mistresses: not because they know them, but because they’re expensive enough without being inexpensible, and because those people are attracted to the words “Premier Cru” like flies to a picnic. I order wines for these people to order that I actually put on the wine list. They are produced in a great enough volume that I do not run out of them too quickly, but they are not so readily available that they seem inclusive. They are lovely to drink and mostly overpriced.

The truly special things, the things that are produced in tiny quantities where the price asked for them is reasonable and the quality is outstanding, are not listed. I save them for people who will love them: other young sommeliers who don’t make much money; people who love good wine and who have been saving up for the privilege of drinking it; young couples who feel like big London restaurants are too fancy for them; my friends.

I watch Jake. I have probably let him stray too far onto the off-list. He is trying to talk to me about Burgundy and also trying to talk to me about his wife. His mother and brother stand behind him, distinctly sober. I too am distinctly sober. His mum pulls on his coat and tells him, quite sternly, that it’s time to leave. I watch as this fully grown man twists out of her grip as I am sure he has done for the past 40 years. He leans in to hug me (too long, again) and nuzzles into my neck. I pat his back gingerly, feeling something hot and wet. It takes a few seconds for me to register that Jake is open-mouth-kissing my neck and then, more alarmingly, my chin. This is the moment I hear someone – a customer – mention a blocked toilet. Jake’s mum hears this too. She nods at me, this is my chance to escape, and then yanks Jake away from me. I look at her and mouth “thank you’’, wiping her son’s saliva off of my chin as I walk down the hall and into the loo.