How do you become the world's best authority on wine

It is only when you meet the World’s Best Sommelier, which is an honour bestowed every three years upon a person I can only describe as the human encyclopedia of wine, that you realise how demanding and lonely the road to becoming one can be.

I can declare with pride that I was at a wine masterclass conducted by Paolo Basso, the most recent of the recipients of this coveted life title since 1969, but I must admit with utter dejection to my abject failure in the blind tasting conducted by him. I felt almost like the winemaker I knew who couldn’t identify one of his own wines at a fun blind tasting that an importer had conducted before dinner at his home!

I could identify three of the four wines, but I fell flat on my nose when asked to zero in on the vintage and the production region, so much so that I was sure that a Rhone Valley Syrah of the year 2009 was an Australian Shiraz (true, the two share a common genetic pool, but their expressions are very different), circa 2012!

Basso was addressing Kempinski’s top global food and beverage honchos at the luxury hotel chain's first World Gourmet Summit in Delhi — at the Kempinski Ambience Hotel in Suraj Mal Vihar — and had us riveted to his account of how he became the World’s Best Sommelier.

The impeccably mannered Swiss-Italian’s exacting quest began two decades ago, when he started preparing for the Best Sommelier of Switzerland title, which he won in 1997. Since then, he has spent thousands of waking hours and euros travelling across the wine regions of the world, visiting vineyards, sampling wines and mentally cataloguing them according to vintage and region, and evolving into a walking-talking encyclopedia of wine.

"It took me 18 hours a day of hard work and a lot of money to become the World's Best Sommelier," the ever-smiling Basso said. "Each time I drank a wine to prepare tasting notes, I had to spend money." That must be quite a lot of money, for Basso must have tasted thousands of wines to become the World’s Best Sommelier. Conducted by the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale (ASI), or the International Association of Sommeliers, the road to the title, which is awarded once every three years, is the toughest test in human history — the only test that measures the capabilities of all five senses of a candidate.

And worse, the last two rounds, after all but nine of the 55 candidates (each the champion sommelier of his or her country) are eliminated from the competition, are conducted in front of a live audience and televised live, so you have to look good, dress smart, talk well and, above all, keep a cool head.

Basso had to perform in front of a crowd of 4,000 people in Tokyo and the runner-up, Canada’s Veronique Rivest (the first woman to make it to the final round of this gut-wrencher), suffered the ignominy of having her violently shaking hands being zoomed in on national television.

It’s like being on a reality TV show. The big difference is that you’ve got to know answers to such questions as how many times does the Bible make a reference to wines and vines (241 times, in case you are curious), or what is glera (the grape that goes into making the sparkling wine Prosecco — the grape variety was also known as prosecco till 2009).

That is the easier part. The competition also requires all those vying for the title to write tasting notes for wines served to them out of decanters, to recognise wines (including their vintages and regions of origin) in a blind tasting, and to serve wines while answering random questions from experts who pose as customers. It takes a razor-sharp brain and nerves of steel just to survive the challenge. Well, Paolo did, and now he's on top of the world.