Alistair Myers: Meet the Sheffield sommelier trying to put a cork in wine snobbery

A bit of a self-confessed “jack the lad” who “wasn't a naughty boy but I wasn't the best student”, he left school at 16 and went straight into hospitality. It wasn’t until he was in his early twenties that he even tried wine properly. It was a cheap bottle of Pinotage given to him as a thank you by his boss at a hotel at the end of a mammoth shift.

“Jack Daniels was my poison at the time,” he recalls. “I opened this wine and drank it but I was like: what the hell is this? This is awful.”

Fast forward the best part of 20 years and not only is Myers, 40, a certified Sommelier but he has recently been voted one of the top 100 in the country for the second year running. He is the only person in Yorkshire, and one of only a few in the North of England, to be on this list.

“You have to be nominated and I still don't know who nominated me,” he explains. “I thought: surely no one's nominated a dumb lad from Sheffield for the top 100 Sommeliers.”

So, how did someone with no interest in, or exposure to, wine go on to possess one of the most refined palettes in the country for tasting the stuff? Well, after that bottle of wine was given to him that he hated, he started to question it.

“I was working at a 64-bedroom hotel,” he recalls. “And I'm taking the deliveries in, and I'm humping around a hundred cases of wine a week, so 600 bottles. I thought, if we’re selling this much there must be something to it.”

By this point, Myers was around 24 and Christmas came around. When his grandma asked what we wanted, he asked for a book on wine to see if he could get a sense of what it was about this mystery drink that people liked so much.

“So she bought me Karen MacNeil's Wine Bible,” he says. “I’ve still got it to this day. And basically, I read it from cover to cover. I went through the regions just working my way through this book and having a glass of wine as I went.”

It was simply an expensive hobby at first but through his experience working in hospitality, Myers realised his knowledge often surpassed many people he was working with, including the reps who would bring in wine.

After a stint at Aston Hall, Myers found himself managing Rowley’s in Baslow and shaping a wine list that was drawing in punters. All the while, he was reading more and more on the subject.

“I remember I bought a book about what to eat with what you drink. I was like, oh my God, this is a whole new side to wine I didn't know about. Who knew that Pinot Noir was going to be even better if you had it with a little bit of lamb cutlet?”

In 2013, age 29, Myers took on Rafters and realised that he had jumped up a few leagues.

“I'm starting to work in a restaurant and I’ve not done fine dining before, I’ve just done pubs,” he says.

“All of a sudden, people are asking me a lot of questions about wine, and asking me if I am the Sommelier. This word starts coming up, again and again. Then I start to feel a bit stupid.”

It was around this time that Myers watched the documentary Somm, about four guys training to become Master Sommeliers.

“I watched that and thought: that looks like athletics for wine drinkers,” he says. “I can get on board with that. Let's go.”

There was an introductory course at Liverpool which he took. Then he worked out his next steps: “I said to myself, I’m going to be a certified Sommelier,” he recalls. And so began the intense levels of study required to gain the knowledge to get to that level.

“If you'd have come to my house at the time, there were wine books just littered everywhere,” he says.

“It ate me up. It was a harrowing experience. The whole time I'm just reading and making flashcards and reading more and making more flashcards. I'm not joking, I probably ended up with about 10,000 of these cards.”

And of course, it’s about acquiring tasting skills as well as just knowledge, so Myers was getting stuck heavily into that too.

“I went to Majestic Wine and I bought one of everything,” he remembers. “I had the weirdest shopping basket you've ever seen; I think I bought something like 47 or 48 bottles of wine, a single one of everything from Chablis to Rioja.”

There are three parts to the test, a written theory exam, a tasting test and then one based around service. In 2018 Myers failed the tasting part.

“I was so gutted,” he says. “I needed some time off after that.”

A year later he returned again and passed.

“It was a nice thing to come back to Sheffield and be, as far as I'm aware, the first certified Sommelier from here,” he says. “Even now, I don't think there's anyone working in Sheffield with the same qualification. It was kind of a nice buzz and a good feel. It means a lot.”

Rafters’ wine list has since won awards and is on AA’s notable wine lists for 2024, as well as being on included in The World of Fine Wine’s World Best Wine Lists back in 2021.

While there are next steps that Myers could take in terms of his qualification to become an advanced, and then a master, Sommelier, for now he’s content.

“I really enjoy teaching people about this,” he says. “We’ve been putting several of our staff through the training so they can get qualified. People ask if I'm going to do my advanced, and I will, one day, but right now I'm going to pass on the knowledge. I enjoy spreading the love of it and just enjoying wine. I'm happy where I am.”

He is also hoping that he can use his unique backstory and trajectory to try and make wine a little bit more accessible.

“I hate the barriers and snobbery around wine,” he says. “I absolutely hate it. They are there to be enjoyed. It's about breaking all that down. When I started, I had no idea what Sauvignon Blanc was, let alone how to tell it apart from other wines. People feel intimidated by wine but honestly, don't be. You're talking to the guy that was the dumbest person in the room for a long time. I’m just a lad from Sheffield who got into wine by accident.”