"One sentence in Japanese, and I'll give you a million dollars." He said it loud enough for the whole table to hear, and he turned his phone around so she could see the number glowing on the screen, and he smiled the way men smile when they already know how the joke is going to end. The young sommelier in the white gloves didn't laugh. She didn't blush. She looked at the phone, and then at the three Japanese guests sitting at his table, and then back at him, and asked him one quiet question. He laughed in her face. And then she put both of her gloved hands flat on the table, leaned down until her eyes were level with his, and told him to listen carefully. Forty seconds later, the most important deal of his life was dead on the table in front of him, and the chairman of a Japanese corporation was standing up and bowing, very deeply, not to him, but to her. Nobody in that cellar knew who she was. Not yet.
Asha Reynolds had been awake since five o'clock that morning, and by the time she walked down the stone stairs into the cellar at four in the afternoon, she had already tasted forty-two wines.
She tasted them every morning, in the small kitchen of her apartment in Northside, standing at the counter in a T-shirt and sweatpants with a notebook open beside her and a spit cup by the sink. Six flights of seven glasses, poured blind by her roommate, a pastry cook named Lena who worked the early shift at a bakery on Hamilton Avenue and who thought the whole thing was hilarious. Lena would line up the glasses on the counter at five a.m., each one marked only with a number on a strip of masking tape, and then go to work, and Asha would spend the next three hours swirling and smelling and tasting and spitting and writing, and trying to name each wine: the grape, the region, the vintage, the producer if she could. She had been doing it every single day for two years and four months. She had missed exactly three days. Two for the flu, and one for her father's surgery.
She was preparing for the Master Sommelier examination. There were fewer than three hundred people in the entire world who had passed it. Fewer than forty of them were women. Fewer than five of them were Black. The final exam was in eleven weeks, in Dallas. If she passed it, she would be the youngest Black woman ever to earn the title, and the first sommelier from Cincinnati in more than twenty years.
She did not think about that very often. It was too large a thing to think about. She thought instead about the forty-two glasses on her kitchen counter, and the notebook, and the next morning, and the morning after that.
She was twenty-six years old. She was slim and straight-backed, of medium height, with smooth, dark brown skin and high cheekbones and a calm, watchful face that people sometimes mistook for cold, until she smiled. She wore her hair in neat, small box braids, cut into a sharp, chin-length bob that swung slightly when she moved her head. She kept it that way because it was practical: it stayed out of her face when she leaned over a glass, and it stayed neat through a twelve-hour shift, and she could redo it herself every five weeks in front of the bathroom mirror with a YouTube video playing on her phone. Her eyes were dark and quick and very observant. Her grandmother used to say that Asha had been born watching, and had never once stopped.
She worked as a sommelier at a restaurant called Vault 1887, in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, and it was, by almost any measure, the most unusual restaurant in the state of Ohio.
It was underground. In the nineteenth century, Over-the-Rhine had been the center of one of the largest brewing industries in America, built by German immigrants who had dug an enormous network of stone-lined lagering tunnels and cellars beneath the streets, forty feet down, where the beer could be kept cold year-round before refrigeration. Most of the tunnels had been sealed and forgotten after Prohibition. In 2014, a restaurateur named Shigeru Okada had bought a crumbling brick building on Moore Street that sat on top of one of the largest surviving cellars, and spent four years and nearly everything he owned restoring it. Now, at the bottom of a curving stone staircase, behind a heavy oak door with iron hinges, there was a long, vaulted chamber of exposed red brick, with a series of rounded stone arches running down its length, lit entirely by candles and a few dim brass sconces. Along every wall, from the floor to the curve of the ceiling, stood racks of dark oak holding more than eleven thousand bottles of wine. The tables were thick slabs of walnut. The air was cool and still and smelled of stone and old wood and candle wax and, faintly, of wine. It was quiet down there. Even on a busy night, the brick swallowed sound, and conversations stayed low.
It had nine tables. It served one seating per night, a twelve-course tasting menu that cost four hundred and twenty dollars per person before wine. Reservations opened ninety days in advance and were usually gone within an hour. Restaurant critics from New York and London had written about it. Two years ago, a guide that gave stars to restaurants had given it one. Last year, it had given it two.
Shigeru Okada was seventy-one years old. He had been born in Kanazawa, in Japan, had come to America at twenty-four to study hotel management at Cornell, and had spent forty years working in the wine cellars of hotels and restaurants in New York and San Francisco and Paris before coming to Cincinnati, of all places, because, as he liked to say, it was the only city in America where he could afford a hole in the ground this beautiful. He was a small, slender, precise man with close-cropped white hair and round wire glasses and a voice so soft that his staff had learned to lean in when he spoke. He was a Master Sommelier himself. He had passed the exam in 1991, on his fourth attempt.