But few know that Fazil once made the faux pas of asking for ice to go with his glass of red wine. “It was during my first job (16 years ago) as a foot runner in a restaurant under the Michelangelo group. My manager asked if we wanted a drink, and I can still recall his face when I asked for ice,” laughs the 36-year-old. “It was a pinot, one of my favourite varietals now.”
Trained for precision
To be sure, Fazil admits that his early days as a sommelier was challenging: “I could smell things familiar to me as a kid – freshly-cut grass from when I played on the field, (popular rose syrup beverage) bandung and baked breads."
To counter this, Fazil made good friends with chefs he worked with to gain access to their larder. “I would smell all the fresh vegetables and herbs such as tarragon and rosemary.
I became more precise that way,” he says. Take the scent of apples. Instead of merely identifying the fruit, Fazil trained his nose to pick out if what he was smelling was of the green or red variety.
“I expanded my vocabulary by learning from the tasting notes of other sommeliers too,” he shares.
Preparing for challenges
What sparked his interest in participating in the Ruinart Sommelier Challenge 2017 was its focus on blind tastings.
“The Ruinart Sommelier Challenge is about bringing education to the sommelier community and sharing our technical knowledge in a way that they can’t find in books,” says Frédéric Panaïotis, Ruinart Chef de Caves.
To prepare for Singapore's second edition of the Ruinart challenge, Fazil took two weeks to study his old tasting notes. "Tasting is one of my biggest challenges in wine exams. It is a test for me to see where I am at and how disciplined I am at making notes,” he says. After speaking to previous participants who shared they were presented with four chardonnays for the blind tasting last year, he made an educated guess that this year’s selection would be sparkling wines. “So I focused on just white wines and bubbles when looking through my notes, and tried to get as many flavour profiles as possible. I looked at chenin blancs, pinot gris, chardonnay from Burgundy and Rieslings from Germany,” he shares.
Power of deduction
Ultimately, Fazil’s strong sense of deductive logic put him in good stead for this competition.
“Accuracy and logic in getting to the answers is very important,” says panel judge Ying Hsien Tan, a qualified Master of Wine.
“It’s about the systematic approach to the answer. We want to see how you deduced that it is a chardonnay, for instance, and not just tell us what wine it is,” he continues.
Take the third wine in the blind tasting. Though the Jansz Vintage Cuvee 2010 from Tasmania, Australia, is the house pour at Salt Grill & Sky Bar, Fazil laughingly confesses that he couldn’t recognise it.
“I thought it was a good quality champagne," he says. But this is where the deductive tasting grid he uses - a tool guided by 32 classic wines – came into play. “The tasting grid helps you to eliminate stuff so you can only pick from what’s left,” he shares.
"I am very happy I was disciplined enough to follow my tasting grid because that’s probably what helped me here even though I guessed wrong.”
As the winner of this year’s Ruinart Sommelier Challenge, Fazil will get to go on a sponsored trip to the Champagne region in France. The three-day journey includes an opportunity to learn from the House’s Chef de Cave, a winery visit, an exclusive champagne tasting that covers older vintages of Dom Ruinart, and a gastronomic tour of the region. Founded in 1729, Ruinart is the first established House of champagne, and was also the first Maison to export bottles of champagne in wooden cases.
“It’s my second time in Champagne, but this time I want to do barrel-tastings and visit a bigger winery to see how larger production scale is done. I also want to taste some back vintages,” enthuses Fazil. “When you get the opportunity to taste new wines, it gives you a new profile you would never think a wine has.”
