Cristie Norman might be new to Las Vegas, but she’s no stranger to the wine community. After becoming a certified sommelier at 21, Norman spent four years at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills, California, managing more than 15,000 bottles of wine. As lead sommelier of Delilah at the Wynn, the 27-year-old now serves in one of the most extravagant rooms on the Strip.
But that’s not all for which she’s known. Norman is the creator of the Online Wine Course, a consumer-friendly “driver’s ed course” to wine. She has hosted master classes for hundreds of sommeliers. And she co-founded the United Sommeliers Foundation, a nonprofit that financially supports sommeliers in need.
We caught up with the young expert to talk Delilah, her wine journey and how tea helped her find her way.
Describe your role at Delilah, and tell us what you’ve you learned there so far. I’m the lead sommelier, so I’m in charge of the list and what goes on, what goes off and really curating the selections for the room. … It’s incredibly fun and challenging. Supply issues that have impacted every single industry have definitely impacted the wine industry as well.
We realized right at the beginning that we needed more high-end wine. We have the greatest wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy in great vintages, because that’s what people want to drink. Distributors have told me that we’re a very unique room, because we are selling so much large-format. … [But] no one was prepared for how much people were going to love drinking great wine in this room. You have an idea of what the room is going to be, but you don’t know until you’re open. It’s beyond my wildest dreams.
What was your first impression of Delilah? It was breathtaking. The room makes you want to drink wine. It makes you want to spend money. It has a supper club feel but with luxurious, over-the-top details. Every day when I go in, I discover something new, something that I never saw before, because there’s so much visual interest.
Which wines are you currently enjoying exposing to guests? There’s something that’s been really popular in Vegas that I was very pleasantly surprised [about]: Amarone from northern Italy, from the Veneto. Amarone della Valpolicella. Amarone producers use a process known as appassimento. The winemakers dry out the grapes for three to four months, turning them into raisins, essentially, press them slowly and then ferment them until dry. Often there’s still a touch of sweetness on the palate and a figgy quality from drying out the grapes.
It’s delicious, and I often introduce Napa Cabernet drinkers to Amarone when they want to start exploring Italian wines. Dal Forno Romano and Giuseppe Quintarelli are two of my favorite producers of Amarone. People really enjoy it.
As a somm, you must be pretty fun at parties.
Yes, I’m very fortunate. I like wine, and I like to share it with people. That’s what’s fun about Delilah. It’s a party. … We have very formal, classically trained, service, but sometimes people don’t want that experience. Sometimes they want it to be a little bit more casual, they want to have fun. Sometimes it can be on the louder side as it gets dark, and in order to speak to the guests, we have to crouch down to get in their ear a little bit. Some people really like that. It feels like you’re hanging out with your friends … It’s not necessarily about stuffy service.
How does one become a certified wine sommelier by the time they can legally drink? And where did that passion come from so early on? My first job was at a tea house. I was obsessed with this tea house; I would go almost every day when I was 14-15 years old. Tea has so much similarity to wine in [that] there’s different varieties from different countries, they have different levels of caffeine, they have different aromas. It’s very similar, if you think about it, except for the lack of alcohol.
So my first job was recommending teas; we had like 400 different teas on the list. [Later], when I was working at a steakhouse, I was paying my way through college, and I wanted to become a server. I was actually a barback. And when I was 19, I told them that I wanted to be the best server they ever had. They kind of laughed at me, but within a year, I was the captain of the restaurant, because I was learning about wine.
When I took the first-level somm exam a couple days after my 21st birthday, I actually had to email the organization to let me sign up, because I wasn’t old enough [yet]. … Through that process of taking the certified somm exam, I attracted a lot of people who were interested in not only learning about me, but also wanting to support [me]. … They gave me the tools and the knowledge to be able to pass the exam at such a young age.
You gave a lot back with the United Sommeliers Foundation. How did that begin? We had a master class that was scheduled for March 16, 2020. Restaurants were shut down in Los Angeles on the 15th. We canceled that master class, and the master sommelier, Chris Blanchard, who was going to fly down, was really distraught. On St. Patrick’s Day, he texted me and was like, “What can we do to help the somm community?”
The bartenders have the [United States Bartenders’ Guild], and they were giving out financial grants and stuff like that. But there was really nothing we saw that was wine-industry focused. I said, OK, let’s start a GoFundMe, and I started calling all the people I knew around the country that I felt were really influential, to support.
We’ve raised over a million dollars in a year, and we’ve distributed about 1,500 financial grants to over 1,000 candidates. … And we supported more than just COVID. We supported those that were affected by the wildfires in wine country, and then also Hurricane Ida—those who are displaced could apply for funding and receive it without a physical address. … We assembled pretty quickly for that, and we hope to be around for a long time.
During the pandemic, you also continued your sommelier master classes virtually. How and why did you keep that going like you did? A couple weeks into shutdown, I was like, we have to start again. In person, people would need to drive an hour to get to a physical location, and it was always difficult. And during the pandemic, I made it pay-what-you-can or free, whatever people could afford. I also purchased bottles and sponsored a lot of it, because it was the right thing to do. Everyone was losing it without tasting wine. Can you imagine being a wine professional and not being able to do the thing that you love?
So for the mental health of our community, I created a captain’s program during the pandemic, because everyone wanted to be in service to their community. You just need to give people a structured way to be involved.
Mentors are clearly a big part of being a successful somm. What does one look for in a mentee? If you nurture and grow people who have a good attitude, they can be the best sommeliers. It’s really just about identifying those young leaders who want to make a difference and want to do good.
I have so much respect for people who have passed these very high-level wine exams, [but] I believe it’s about what you’re doing for others. We should be measured not by the pins that are on our lapel, but by the value that you bring to the world and how [we are] increasing the consumption of wine. How are we supporting wine professionals? How are we addressing some of the bigger issues in the wine world? There’s a lot of other things to tackle. And the first step is really bolstering the community on the ground. Somebody has to do it … and I think I’ll be doing it forever.
