I mean I could see this for honest to god supertasters in the current system but the whole sommeliér thing is pretty much a large ass scam.

It's like fortune tellers asking to be prioritized because covid fucks their chakras

the short answer is yes. if you can get your hands on a copy of De Long's Wine Grape Varietal Table (a sweet poster/infographic) and figure out where your preferences are on the major axes (acidity, color, weight) you will know more than 99% of the population, including the off-beat wines that most people have never heard of. i like dry, heavy reds, but cheap is the real name of the game.

in the US, the wine culture is wildly classicist and snobby making wine wildly overpriced here unless you don't give a shit and go for the screw top stuff. which i absolutely do, and it drives my colleagues nuts. i think mostly because i know more about wine than they do and eye roll at anything more than $8/bottle. my philosophy is, it's fuckin' booze. stop trying to church it up.

there used to be this funny interview online from like 20 years ago with Fred Franzia, who i'm sure is an asshole because he's a very rich CEO, but when it comes to wine making he's my kind of asshole. he works out of a shit trailer, complains about ants, and wipes his ass on everything. all the super low budget wines ($2 chuck, the screw top gallo gallons) are under his banner. the repeatedly shreds the US wine industry for being full of shit. some big fancy wine contest had a blind entry one year and his like cheapest offering cleaned up major prestigious awards, so the contest body stopped allowing blind entries lmao. one of his major quotes are "our wines are for drinking, not storing in a closet."

all that terroir, "i taste the sophisticated impertinence of juniper trellising and geranium" bullshit is patter for the rich rubes. never forget that in the 1980s the austrian wine industry collapsed because an insider dropped a dime to regulators on the wineries for putting antifreeze in their wine... because nobody could tell that's where the sweet flavor was coming from. here's a link to the Down The Rabbit Hole about it ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhN-o2ame-4