Daughter Of The Loire

Acclaimed sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier grew up in France’s Loire Valley—its wines, its food, and, most of all, its people helped make her who she is. Here, she brings Executive Wine Editor Ray Isle along on a memory-filled homecoming.

- Ray Isle

I KNOW IT IS HERE SOMEWHERE,” Jacques Thorel says, clicking through photos on his computer ‘‘ I screen. We’re huddled around a desk on the third floor of the chef’s house, surrounded by his vast library of antiquarian cookbooks; anyone wanting a 17th-century edition of La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François or a 1935 menu from La Pyramide signed by Fernand Point will find it here. But that’s not what we’re looking for. “Ah!” he says, pointing. The photo is a 14-year-old snapshot, now digitized, of a young woman in a suit, dark hair pulled back, black glasses, somehow smiling and looking serious at the same time. Her name is Pascaline Lepeltier. “We’re very happy for her,” says madame Solange Thorel. “And very proud.”

Lepeltier, who’s standing next to me, also studying this photo of herself, responds with a sort of Gallic pff, waving the praise away. But she looks pleased.

There’s plenty to be proud of. In 2018, Lepeltier was the first woman ever to receive the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF) recognition as a sommelier, an extraordinary honor. That year she also won the title of best Sommelier de France at the Union de la Sommellerie despite living in New York City, where she runs a world-class wine program at Racine's restaurant. And she’s a Master Sommelier, a degree held by only 256 people in the world. But at the time of that photo on chef Thorel’s computer, she’d only just started working in restaurants. To him, she says, “That was on my first trip ever to Bordeaux. You took me—it was at Château d’Yquem. We had lobster with carrots.”