Raimonds Tomsons, the World’s Best Sommelier 2023, smiles ruefully. ‘My wife tells me I’m not normal,’ he says. He’s speaking from the offices of Barents Wine Collectors in Riga, Latvia, where he’s wine director. He seems perfectly relaxed and, well, normal. But then again, in the rarefied world of the high-end sommelier, perhaps different rules apply.
Apart from triumphing in the famously gruelling World’s Best Sommelier competition, run every four years by the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale (ASI),Tomsons has a portfolio of jobs, any one of which might be enough for an ordinary person. His day job is wine director at Barents Wine Collectors, the fine-wine arm of Barents restaurant in his native Riga; he’s a board member of the Latvian Sommelier Association, ambassador for The Craft Irish Whiskey Company, co-founder of the Guild of Whiskey Sommeliers, and owner of Raimonds Tomsons Wine Consulting. He judges at the UK Sommelier Competition and numerous international wine competitions, and he holds the world record for Champagne sabrage: 71 bottles in 60 seconds.
Competition, he says, ‘was always part of my DNA,’ but he got into wine by chance. Like so many successful people, school did little for him. Missing out on university, he fell into restaurant work, portering, waitering – ‘I started at the bottom.’ His big break was to be taken under the wing of one of Latvia’s most celebrated chefs, the late Mārtiņš Rītiņš, of the iconic (now closed) Vincents restaurant.
One of the most common mistakes young sommeliers make is to be overconfident
Rītiņš introduced him to people like Ferran Adrià at El Bulli and Rene Redzepi at Copenhagen’s Noma, where the young Tomsons did a two-week internship. It was while he was waitering that he opened a bottle of Lindemans Bin 65 Chardonnay. ‘I thought, “Okay, this is wine but it smells of pineapple and mango and vanilla and butter. How can it be?” So I was like, “I should learn a little bit more”.’
Rītiņš and the sommeliers at Vincents encouraged him. ‘So I started falling in love with wine competitions.’ He was Best Latvian and Baltic sommelier in 2006; he entered Best Sommelier of the World in 2010 and in 2016 he came seventh; in 2017 he won Best Sommelier in Europe & Africa; he won the ultimate title in Paris in 2023.
To be Best Sommelier in any country requires not only encyclopaedic knowledge of wine, beer and spirits but the ability to perform in front of an audience (of around 4,000 at the international level) on a stage set with multiple tables around which might a formidable figure like Jancis Robinson or a Michelin-starred chef like Anne-Sophie Pic, reading from a script.
How do you begin to prepare for such an ordeal? Tomsons chuckles (as might a footballer when asked, ‘How do you prepare to face Brazil in the World Cup final?’), ‘You need to spend quite a lot of time on planning. Take Austria, for example. I would dedicate a week to it: geography, geology, climate, typical regions, sub regions, wine making, regulations, most famous producers, name of rivers.’
Like the detective in a one of those Scandi-noir thrillers, he distils those facts down to their essence, prints them out and sticks them on the wall. He multiplies that knowledge across all the wine regions of the world, from Sonoma to Southern Rhone, Barossa to Bordeaux, the Loire and Lebanon and the LaLa’s, does the same for beer and spirits and all points in between, and then presents that knowledge to a packed auditorium.
In the 2019 competition, Tomsons froze. His ‘guests’ on the stage were demanding draught beer, Sauternes with ice and cocktails. He was shaking, he couldn’t work the beer pump, couldn’t pour the wine. ‘It was a very painful lesson for me but it revealed a weakness I wasn’t aware of in myself – how I reacted to pressure. So for the next world competition in Paris I paid attention, not only in preparation for theory, blind tasting and the service elements, but also to mental and physical health.’
It might be an Olympic sprinter talking or any elite sportsman working in a discipline that requires an almost superhuman level of concentration and focus: no mistakes, no mental lapses, no distractions. Preparation is all. There’s a telling malapropism in Tomsons’ near-perfect English when he says, ‘Then there is hardship. Hardship leads to success.’ It takes me a moment to twig that he means ‘hard work’.
He stresses that ‘there are plenty of great sommeliers who don’t enter competitions’ but for those who have the urge to compete you might distil his advice down to a handful of key points. First, you need passion and second, ‘perseverance and stubbornness to realise your goal’. Linked to that is patience, ‘because there are no shortcuts.’ Last: ‘you need to listen, listen, listen. You need to learn from the great personalities.’
When I have free time, I like to open a bottle of wine and read something about the wine or spirits world
In practical terms it means hard hours learning. ‘Start with theory. There will be questions on China, on India, on Asia, on the New World, Old World, France. You need general knowledge – specialising comes later. Parallel to that, you need to taste as many benchmark wines as you can. And then, take part in competitions, because you will gain experience and confidence, and the right tactics.’
Above all, Raimonds counsels, one of the most common mistakes young sommeliers make is to be overconfident. ‘You need to listen to every word in order to understand, what are they asking of you, and what is the time limit? These are the important practical elements.’
Tomsons has found new challenges now that he has no more peaks to conquer in the sommelier world. One of the most important is to be ‘a great example, to motivate and inspire new sommeliers.’ Another is to branch into whisky, another of his passions. When he met with The Craft Irish Whiskey Company, which makes ultra-rare whiskeys like The Emerald Isle – seven bottles, one of which sold last year for $2.8m – he was in his element.
‘They’re really obsessed with quality. There are no shortcuts about their whiskeys, and I see so many connections to the wine world, which you don’t often find in spirits. They are obsessive about how whiskey should be served, the right glasses, the temperature…’
We’ve been talking for an hour and there’s more to cover – great whiskey food pairings (‘imagine smoked salmon’), and how his involvement with The Craft Irish Whiskey Company let him to be part of the founding of the Guild of Whisky Sommeliers (which covers all whiskies) – ‘we’ll be able to bring the best sommeliers on board and make them more passionate about whiskey, and educate them as well and make them great ambassadors.’
But all I have time for is to ask him what he does in his spare time? He laughs, possibly at the concept of his having any spare time at all. Then he has to think. He and his family (he and his wife have four children) love to travel, he says. And personally, does he read, listen to music, to podcasts?
‘It might sound like total obsession but when I have free time, I like to open a bottle of wine and read something about the wine or spirits world.’ It all sounds pretty normal, I assure him. As he said earlier, ‘In the wine world the most important thing is to be honest and ask yourself, “is this what I want to do?” Because if you want to be successful without obsession and without passion, it’s just not possible.’
The final of the IWSC 2025 UK Sommelier Competition will take place on Tuesday, 8 July 2025. You can watch the live stream on the IWSC YouTube channel from 2pm, with the results announcement scheduled for 6pm.
