The water sommelier helping firms in China sell fine water to wary middle class

Many people going to a party bear gifts of wine for their hosts, but Michael Mascha always takes along a bottle of water sourced from drifting icebergs.

“There might be a Bordeaux or some other wine that costs more than a thousand dollars, but at the party, no one talks about the wine. Everybody just wants to try the iceberg water,” he says.

It’s not surprising that the nondescript beverage garners so much attention when you hear Mascha explain how water has given him as much enjoyment as wine once did, if not more, since he gave up drinking.

His words also carry weight because Mascha is a rare breed in the food and beverage industry – he works as a water sommelier.

“Food and wine were always very important to me, but in 2002 my doctor told me that I could continue drinking alcohol or I could live. So I decided to stop,” he says.

With a PhD in food anthropology from the University of Vienna, Mascha moved to the US in 1992 to become an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California. After his fateful consultation with the doctor, he decided to apply his knowledge of wine to water. He set about developing a training and accreditation system for the job of water sommelier, which has since become a specialist profession sought after by hotels, restaurants and drinking water bottlers around the world.