Many sommeliers, one community. Inside the United Sommeliers Foundation, with Erik Segelbaum

By Rachel Fellows

Published 01-April-2025

Interview / USA

The Covid pandemic brought many industries to their knees – hospitality in particular. In 2020, Cristie Norman and Chris Blanchard MS created the United Sommeliers Foundation with the help of industry friends including Star Wine List’s Erik Segelbaum. The charity offers financial aid to sommeliers in dire need, and has become a lifeline for wine professionals across the US, recently winning Wine Enthusiast's award for ‘Social Visionary of the Year.’

Star Wine List’s Denver Ambassador was boarding a flight to Frankfurt when a stranger made his way up to him.

“Are you Erik Segelbaum,” the guy asked.

“Yeah,” said Erik.

“Like, the United Sommeliers Foundation Erik?” this man continued.

“That’s me.”

“You don’t know me but my brother recognised you, and thank you for helping keep a roof over our heads during the pandemic.”

“I was absolutely blown away!” Erik says of the interaction. “That was insane.”

The United Sommeliers Foundation

Much as we like Erik (he’s not just our Denver Ambassador but a sommelier, a prolific consultant, writer and more), this story isn’t just some sommelier love-in where a keen fan spotted their idol in, let’s face it, rather a niche industry. No, Erik Segelbaum is the Vice President of the United Sommeliers Foundation (USF), a charity founded “in the wake of and in response to Covid” to offer financial assistance to sommeliers in critical need through no fault of their own.

Last month, the USF took home the “Social Visionary of the Year” gong from Wine Enthusiast at its annual awards acknowledging exceptional contributions to the industry. It comes after the charity was named one of Bon Appétit magazine’s “Heads of the Table” for ‘saving’ sommeliers, in 2021. And whilst it was Covid that prompted the initiative, time has shown that something like this will always be needed by wine professionals working in hospitality, whose entire livelihoods can be whipped from underneath them by, of course, global pandemics, but also natural disasters, turbulent economic landscapes, and more.

To date, the USF has raised nearly $2 million and given out around $1.5 million in emergency financial support to over 5,000 wine professionals across the USA. The organisation operates at under one percent, with just one paid member of administrative staff and yet a tireless board, whose members work voluntarily to raise money for their sommelier colleagues across the country. After Covid came, amongst other things, the 2023 fires in Hawaii, Hurricane Helene in 2024, and the LA wildfires at the beginning of 2025, each major crisis generating countless individual crises for those who lost their homes, places of work, or both; and then there are those with medical or simply personal challenges to contend with. It all means that the USF’s work is very far from done.

As a member of the Star Wine List team and a founding board member of the USF, we asked Erik about the charity’s ongoing work, including how people can help provide, or apply for, funding.

The sommelier community rallies

The idea for the USF came to sommeliers Cristie Norman and Chris Blanchard MS in early March 2020, just as hospitality staff across America were facing furlough, with no foreseeable end to the various lockdown and quarantine measures being enforced worldwide. As is common globally but acutely so in the States, sommelier incomes are heavily reliant on tips, meaning that the salaries on which furlough was calculated were particularly low to begin with. So even if businesses survived, making ends meet as a hospitality professional during the pandemic was not just tough but, for some, impossible.

“We were seeing all of our friends and colleagues and former colleagues and their friends having to make decisions like ‘Well, neither myself nor my partner has a job … so tonight I can feed my kids or give my spouse their medicine. I don’t have enough money for both,’” says Erik. “The analogy I make is that Ferrari sales people don’t drive Ferraris; while sommeliers deal in luxury, most of them, at least in America, are pay cheque to pay cheque, don’t have benefits, don’t have pensions or employment insurance, or things like that, so we started to see that our entire industry was collapsing, with no end in sight.”

At this point, Cristie (a sommelier at Spago at the time, who runs her own wine academy) and Chris (a Master Sommelier now working with Opus One) recognised the need to help their colleagues, along with the fact that their broader professional network stretched far and wide – a potential source of financial relief. After texting one another about setting up a GoFundMe page, they reached out to more colleagues who would, themselves, have a wide reach. Erik, at this point, had “just finished being a buyer, buying $100 million of wine per year for one of the country’s largest programmes with footprints in nine different states, so I had a lot of big contacts.”

The founding board consisted of nine members, including Master of Wine Geoff Labitzke, Master Sommeliers Lindsey Geddes and Jackson Rohrbaugh, plus Yannick Benjamin, Eric Crane and Jon McDaniel. As Erik explains, “a group of fairly prominent sommeliers across the country got together and said, ‘Ok, we’ve got a lot of contacts, we’ve been high-level buyers for a long, long time. We know people at wineries, importers, distributors – now’s the time to ask them to give to their community.’ And especially since they were not using their budgets for travel, or events, or for going into restaurants and supporting them. So we started reaching out to our contacts and said, ‘Hey, now’s the time to start supporting the community that supported you and kept your brands in business.’”

A name was invented and charitable status applied for (in the States, that’s a 501(c)(3) tax exemption), which came through in spring 2021. Donations were secured through “tens of thousands of emails and email follow-ups, and follow-up follow-ups and tertiary follow-ups and quaternary follow-ups” in addition to social media campaigns and an annual auction, hosted online, to which wineries and private collectors donate rare and fine bottles. This year’s edition is pegged for November, in case you’re interested.

How it works

“Basically the way we operate is, anyone who passes the qualifying screening is eligible for a $500 emergency grant, and then for more extreme or severe situations, we have a higher-level grant called the Open Grant (formerly Grand Cru), and that is for really significant situations – people with really critical problems, so someone who had a heart attack during service and missed four months of work, or someone who was in an accident and broke their back. Everything's voted on by our committee of board members, but done anonymously.”

Names, locations, places of work and all other identifying details are redacted from any documentation that the board sees, so that there can be no risk or question of bias during deliberation.

“We also want to respect the anonymity of these people who are coming to us in absolute desperation,” says Erik. “So we never know who the grants are going to. We just see the circumstances. We spent weeks coming up with a survey and then a voting rubric that was as absolutely objective as possible. It doesn't matter if you're a Master Sommelier, a Master of Wine, or don't have a pin at all; whether it's your first day working in wine or your 50th year working in wine – it doesn't matter. It's really just about, do you have this need? What is the level of this need? What other supporting resources do you have that aren't us?

“And then from there we make the decision to give them as much as we reasonably can within the guidelines of what we set forward to be able to give out as the maximums. And for the Open Grants, we don't give the money to them directly – we pay appropriate bills on their behalf (rent, mortgages, utilities, car payment, phone payments, hospital bills, things like that). Not only does this alleviate any tax burden on the awardee, it ensures that the donated funds are appropriately allocated to what they were donated for.”

What’s next?

Today, the charity is searching for an Executive Director to lead it into its next phase. Under the continued guidance of President Cristie Norman, the board remains as intent as ever on helping sommeliers across the USA because, although the world has made it through the eye of the Covid pandemic’s storm, its effects are still being felt by the sommelier community, which is easily forgotten.

“There's absolutely a lack of understanding,” says Erik, “a lack of awareness. And it was hard but easy [to get donations] during Covid because, at least in the States, you’d see #wereallinthistogether but now we're back to the everyone-for-themselves mentality, so there's a general lack of awareness of hospitality professionals in this country and what that really means in terms of their revenue streams, their quality of life, their mental and fiduciary health. But also, when everybody was stuck around at home and had nothing to do and wanted to do something meaningful and help, it was really easy to get [donations]. Now people are traveling again, they're doing all sorts of other things, and it's a little bit harder.”

If people would like to help, they will find a donation link at the top of the USF website. Prospective patrons interested in making a high-level donation or setting up an ongoing endowment (such as a designated scholarship opportunity) can get in touch with the team by email.

“I would please encourage any American wine professional in critical financial need to go to that same site where there's also a link to the application for financial support,” Erik points out.

So while that airport encounter might seem unlikely, it is by no means rare. “I've many times had somebody come up and introduce themselves to me and say, 'You don't know who I am, but your charity saved me through a particularly rough patch; kept me from being evicted; kept me from losing my house; kept me from losing visitation rights with my child because I couldn't afford the child support or whatever it is. I've had, personally, dozens, maybe better than 100 people over the course of the last five years because I really don't know who's getting awards – they introduce themselves. And not only that, I have found out, years later, that some of my personal friends and colleagues have received financial support from the institution and I had no idea – people that are close friends, people that, if I'm in their city we always hang out, and I had no idea that they’d received financial assistance.”

The charity’s tagline is ‘many sommeliers, one community’ and, says Erik, “we really mean that.”

For more information, visit the United Sommeliers Foundation website.