Long, winy road

Her course started in September 2009. Before starting the program, she wrote to several sommeliers in Paris to learn more about the profession. One finally agreed to meet her but warned her that the road to becoming a sommelier was a tough one.

Her journey to the top started in August of 2009 as she found her first internship in a winery, where she had to get up at 4 am to tend to the grapevines in the field, before starting work in the wine cellar during the day.

"I still remember the first glass of wine I tasted at that winery. It was Traminer that had notes of lychee and rose, which made me realize that I needed to learn everything I could about wine," says Li.

During the one-year course at the Cafa Sommelier Wine School in Bordeaux, she took up internships in wineries, cellars and restaurants.

Li interned at the Bistrot du Sommelier Paris, a restaurant owned by Philippe Faure-Brac-winner of the World's Best Sommelier award in 1992-where she learned about pairing food and wine together.

When she started the internship, Li recalls making a lot of mistakes. Each afternoon, she would read Faure-Brac's book and try to remember the step involved in serving wine and the location of each bottle of wine in the cellar.

By the end of the internship, she could serve a table of a dozen people and introduce all the wines by herself-sometimes earning her large tips from customers.

She won China's Best French Wine Sommelier Competition in 2010 and four years later, she was accredited as an Advanced Sommelier by the Court of Master Sommeliers, a title that put her just one step away from being a Master Sommelier.