Kevin Vogt

The Climb

University of Nevada, Las Vegas provided the formal start, after which Kevin Vogt spent 1996–2016 as Wine Director at Emeril Lagasse's restaurants in Las Vegas, Nevada. That kind of room-level work demands speed without sloppiness: lists have to hold up under service pressure, and the wine program has to function night after night. In 2000, he also began judging Anthony Dias Blue’s San Francisco International Wine Competition and the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, work that kept him in regular contact with evaluation standards across categories. By 2016, he had also moved into his role as Vice President and partner at Wine Country Connection.

Today

Since 2016, Kevin Vogt has served as Vice President and partner at Wine Country Connection in Yountville, California. The setting shifts the work away from the nightly pace of restaurant service and toward a more measured kind of wine business. Vogt has described his own aims plainly: “I had three goals when I entered the wine business. One was to pass the Master Sommelier exam. Second, to build a Grand Award–winning wine list. And the third was to produce my own wine.” That list of goals maps the trade in concrete terms: certification, program building, and production.

In Their Words “I had three goals when I entered the wine business. One was to pass the Master Sommelier exam. Second, to build a Grand Award–winning wine list. And the third was to produce my own wine.”

Recognition

Kevin Vogt’s recognition is the Master Sommelier credential in 1999 and Wine Spectator’s Grand Award in 2004. Those markers matter because they point to two different parts of the trade: passing the exam and building a list that meets award-level scrutiny.