Two times a local

I was in San Francisco recently and noticed a remarkable number of Francophones around the city. It was hard to trace the direction of causality between their presence and the innumerable crêperies we encountered. But that relationship has been found to be specious, and has been superseded by a more robust theory... They were there for the wine.

You see, last week, the Court of Master Sommeliers was holding its diploma exam in the City by the Bay. Only eleven candidates rose to the rank of Master Sommelier, among them Serafín Alvarado, the head sommelier at Chicago's Charlie Trotter's. Why two times a local? Because Alvarado was raised in Villalba, Puerto Rico, which gives him both Chi-town and PR cred. I've also met him and can vouch for his kindness and generosity.

¶ Academic trivia: Trotter was a political science major at Wisconsin–Madison. No word on which was his preferred subfield, but one of the quotations that cycles on his website is by Burke—"our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire".

Alvarado's remarkable achievement has made headlines in the island's main newspaper. The article itself [in Spanish] draws rather oddly on baseball analogies to explain his journey, but the accompanying timeline [also in Spanish] tells an interesting story: how does a kid from an island with not a vine in sight end up as one of the top wine specialists in the world?

Congratulations to him. ¡Felicidades!