Remembering Gérard Basset OBE

The hospitality business – working in restaurants, bars and hotels – is often an unforgiving one. Long and unsociable hours, enormous pressure, fierce competition… the timid need not apply. No wonder that it takes its toll, both on relationships and on individuals’ physical and mental health.

Those who rise to the top in such a world often have a reputation for being, to use an understating euphemism, ‘difficult’. The pantomime goings-on of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares may be exaggerated for the cameras, but they hint at an apparent underlying truth: here, nice guys (of either gender) don’t finish first.

Gérard Francis Claude Basset gave the lie to that theory. When he died last Wednesday at the criminally young age of 61 from cancer of the oesophagus, the tributes naturally mentioned his many career achievements as a sommelier and hotelier (of which more in a moment), but without exception they focused on one aspect above all: his kindness.

Perhaps it was something to do with the way that Gérard came into the business; visiting England in 1977 to watch his beloved St-Étienne play Liverpool in the European Cup (they lost), he stayed on, ended up working as a kitchen porter on the Isle of Man and, slowly but surely, made his way. It says much of the UK hospitality scene of the time that he was picked out for a front-of-house role pouring wine ‘because I was French’.

Star sommelier: Gérard Basset’s unassuming demeanour hid a wealth of achievements

So began a remarkable career, by the end of which the letters denoting Gérard’s qualifications came to outstrip the length of his name: MW (Master of Wine), MS (Master Sommelier), MSc (from wine organisation the OIV), MBA in wine business and – perhaps his proudest achievement – OBE.

He co-founded the Hotel du Vin chain in 1994, selling it to Malmaison for £66 million a decade later; then, with wife Nina, set up the boutique TerraVina Hotel in the New Forest. Not bad for a lad who left school in St-Étienne with no qualifications and no idea what to do.

A tireless entrant in sommelier competitions, Gérard’s most emotional triumph came in Chile in 2010, when he won the Meilleur Sommelier du Monde title at the sixth time of asking, after finishing second three times. Before the contest, he’d pledged that this would be his final attempt.

Through it all, he appeared unchanged by success and setbacks alike – unfailingly humble, with a wicked, dry sense of humour. For someone so ceaselessly busy and hard-working, he rarely seemed in a rush, always making time to talk to people.

These qualities were invaluable in shaping perhaps Gérard’s most lasting legacy to hospitality in this country: the generation of young sommeliers he mentored, and who are now some of the leading figures in the trade.

If they learned from the great man’s patience and humility, they were also inspired by something less obvious – his immense drive, ambition and appetite for hard work.

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the formidable Master of Wine and Master Sommelier qualifications will know just how hard it is to achieve either in a lifetime; Gérard passed both in less than a decade.

His many competition wins were grounded in a ceaseless quest for knowledge, coupled with a fearsome regime of tasting new wines and spirits each and every day; he would draw detailed wine maps from memory, starting from scratch if there was even one error, and once employed a memory coach. There was steel beneath that humble exterior.

Lasting legacy: A generation of sommeliers was inspired by Basset’s example

When diagnosed with cancer, Gérard used the time to write his memoirs; you can contribute to a crowdfunding campaign to enable their publication via the Unbound website; they ought to be quite a read.

Kindness often appears to be an increasingly rare and undervalued commodity, in an age when opinions are voiced and dismissed with parallel disdain on social media, and when so much cruelty has crept into political discourse – so it’s salutary to bear in mind that being nice is in no way incompatible with being ambitious, driven and competitive.

We would all do well to remember that in our discussions of whisky (and other topics). Fine to be passionate but, when so much is subjective, a little more respect for the other person’s opinion should not be too much to ask.

In one of his last interviews, Gérard was asked (for possibly the hundredth time) if the cliché of the ‘snooty sommelier’ still persisted. His answer applies just as much to those involved in whisky as in wine:

‘It has changed, but with any profession you get nice people and stupid people. When you meet a snooty sommelier – and they do exist – it’s a shame because most people who become sommeliers are passionate about wine.
‘Sometimes the problem is that they are too passionate about wine, and they think more about the product than the people.’

With Gérard, whether with friends, customers, colleagues or employees, it was always about the people.