Emily Wines

Coming Up

The floor teaches a sommelier the basics that matter: timing, reading the room, and making the pairing feel deliberate rather than decorative. At Fifth Floor Restaurant in San Francisco, Emily Wines worked in a setting that required that kind of control, where each glass had to be placed with purpose and each match had to hold under pressure. Before that, fine dining service in Seattle and the Bay Area gave her the repetition that shapes service judgment. The Master Sommelier diploma, earned in 2008, marked the formal close of years spent studying, tasting, and working the room. "I love talking about how food and wine work together," she said, and that idea—plate, glass, guest, server—has stayed at the center of her practice.

Where They Are Now

Wine access is part hospitality and part education, and since 2017 Emily Wines has worked as Vice President of Wine and Beverage Experiences at Cooper's Hawk Winery and Restaurants in Chicago, Illinois. In that role, her focus sits on making wine feel approachable without flattening the category, shaping an experience that brings people toward the table instead of setting a barrier in front of it. "Cooper’s Hawk is democratizing wine: It’s wine for everyone and that’s something that really appealed to me," she says. The line captures the same throughline that runs through her work: wine as something to be learned, shared, and enjoyed without ceremony getting in the way of use.

Signature

Camille Brave and Camille Proud are listed as Emily Wines's signature dishes, and the names read like cues rather than explanation. In a restaurant context, that kind of naming carries its own work: it signals identity, shapes expectation, and gives service another tool for framing the experience. Placed within her career, the dishes sit alongside the same instinct that marks her wine work—making the guest encounter feel intentional from the first read to the last sip.

In Their Words “What I've always loved about being a sommelier was the opportunity to make people feel comfortable with wine.” “I have been working in restaurants for around 30 years and I have been a sommelier for 20 of those.” Those two lines define the trade plainly: duration and purpose. Thirty years in restaurants and two decades as a sommelier point to repetition, calibration, and accumulated floor sense. The first quote makes the aim explicit. For Emily Wines, the work is not only knowing what is in the bottle; it is lowering the threshold so guests can meet it without friction.

Honors

Master Sommelier, earned in 2008, is the distinction that sits behind Emily Wines's work and gives it technical weight. It records the scale of the study, tasting, and service that led to the diploma, and it places that training in the timeline of a career built in dining rooms rather than in abstraction.