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There are only 20 female master wine experts in North America. Carlin Karr (Comm'08) wants to be one of them. 

“There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not thinking about wine,” Karr says.

Karr, 27, is a sommelier at Boulder’s Frasca Food and Wine, a James Beard Award-winning restaurant on Pearl Street with a menu inspired by the cuisine of northeastern Italy and co-owned by master sommelier Bobby Stuckey. Karr works directly with Frasca’s wine director and sommelier Matt Mather to provide customers with perfect wine pairings, sometimes visiting with them for 20 minutes before determining an ideal wine for their tastes from the restaurant’s 65-page wine list. She is in charge of the $250,000-$500,000 wine budget, choosing wines to sell in the restaurant and keeping track of inventory.

“To be able to focus on wine is truly a luxury, and there are so few restaurants that can provide it,” she says. “It’s the coolest job in the world — communicating the experience of taste.”

A large part of a sommelier’s work is being hospitable to guests. Hospitality often can be the most difficult part of the job, especially when a customer is spending $200-$300 on a bottle of wine and expectations are high, Karr explains. In order to remain as professional as possible, she keeps notes on each customer and their wine orders to remember them the next time they come into the restaurant.

“There is a romance in wine,” she says. “It can be very elusive.”

Prior to graduating from CU, Karr had never had an interest in wine. She was introduced to the complex world of wine while attending culinary school in San Francisco in 2008.

“Once I started learning about wine, I became obsessed with it,” she says. “I dropped out of culinary school and started studying wine on my own.”

She passed her first two sommelier exams, but having no previous restaurant experience she had difficulty finding a job. Friends from CU introduced her to Matt McNamara (Mgmt’04) and Teague Moriarty who were opening Sons & Daughters, a restaurant in San Francisco’s Nob Hill neighborhood in spring 2010. New to the food industry, they took a chance on hiring Karr as their general manager and wine director. With the trios’ collaboration, the tiny restaurant earned a prestigious Michelin star.

Ready to rid herself of the long hours and stress of restaurant management after two years, Karr decided to focus solely on wine. In early 2012 she was connected with Stuckey — who left renowned California restaurant The French Laundry in 2003 to open Frasca in Boulder. He was impressed with her talent.

“She is one of the most motivated young people I’ve ever been able to work with,” Stuckey says, adding that he wouldn’t be surprised if she became a master sommelier by the time she is 30. “She’s the real deal.” 

The word “sommelier” translates from its French origins to mean a restaurant steward or server in charge of wine. However, the Court of Master Sommeliers was established in England to improve the standards of wine knowledge and service, and exams were created to grant certification to sommeliers. The first successful master sommelier examination took place in 1969, and today there are only 201 master sommeliers worldwide. Four rigorous exams are required to become a master sommelier, and each one takes years of daily studying.

After three years of prepping, Karr passed her third exam in April on her first try, a rare feat. She immediately began studying for the final invite-only test, which she believes could take her up to five years of preparation. For exams, Karr must know everything about a bottle of wine — from the history of its region and the soil in which its grapes are grown to its producer and the exact flavors that should compose the wine. She also needs to be able to blind taste the wine and correctly identify it. 

Karr, one of Wine & Spirits magazine’s “Best New Sommeliers of 2013,” practices blind tasting weekly at Frasca to be up-to-date on the ever-changing world of wine. At home, her walls are plastered with maps of the world’s wine regions, and the floors are littered with boxes of meticulously written flashcards. Dozens of wine journals, books and articles fill the rest of her downtown Boulder apartment. Every wine she has ever tasted is dutifully archived in one of her many notebooks.

“There are people who spend their entire lives trying to become master sommeliers,” she says. 

Despite the difficulty in becoming a master sommelier, Karr believes that anyone can learn how to taste and recognize wine. It’s about being open to trying a variety of foods to expand your palate and committing taste to memory, she explains, adding that taste and smell are subjective. A certain wine that smells distinctively like peach candy to her, for example, smells completely different to her colleagues Stuckey and Mather.

“It’s not an elusive talent,” she says. “It’s just identification [of taste].” 

As a young woman in a male-dominated industry, Karr feels she brings a fresh perspective to the wine world. She hopes someday to expand her talents in other ways, perhaps getting into the media aspect of food and wine and becoming a food writer.

“The wine world is my oyster,” she says. “There are so many stories to tell.”

Photos by Glenn Asakawa