Véronique Rivest

Owner, SOIF Bar à Vin
Sommelier, Air Canada

Sommelier – Class of 1996

Sommelier Véronique Rivest got her start in the hospitality industry at 16 when she began working in a restaurant in the ByWard Market. It was, she says, love at first sight, and the beginning of a journey that has led her to become a successful restaurateur and one of the world’s most acclaimed sommeliers.

“I had no great interest in the service industry before this,” Rivest says. “I didn’t wake up one day as a teenager and say: ‘This is what I want to do.’ But once I was in the middle of it all, I just fell in love. I loved being around people and around food. I still didn’t know if I wanted to do this for a living. But because I enjoyed it so much, I kept working in restaurants as a student and tried to figure it out.”

But when it came time to choose a career path, she took another direction. She decided to study languages, first earning a BA in modern languages and later, because it also interested her, an MBA in International Trade.

She completed some of her schooling in France, where she spent seven years and worked part-time in a winery. It was during this time that her direction in life was becoming clear: food, wine, languages, travelling – “It all fell in place,” she says.

Rivest began thinking seriously of wine as a career. When she returned to Ottawa in 1994, she took up a job at Les Fougeres, the acclaimed restaurant in Chelsea, Quebec, and another at the LCBO. Then she planned her return to school. “I wanted to keep on studying and Algonquin College offered a sommelier program. I was looking for something academic that was linked to service – to the sommelier profession, not winemaking, and taking it in the School of Hospitality was ideal.”

Graduating as part of the Class of 1996 was only the beginning. “Reaching the peak of your profession is all about hard work,” she says. “Talent is a very small part of the equation. Anybody can do similar things if they are strongly motivated by a subject they love, are lucky to have great teachers and a quality education, and put in countless hours of work.”

After three decades in the hospitality industry, Rivest can look back on a record of unrivalled achievement in her field in Canada. She won Canada’s Best Sommelier competition in 2006, and repeated her win in 2012. She won the Wine Woman Award in Paris in 2007 and Best Sommelier of the Americas in 2012.

At the World’s Best Sommelier competition, she placed in the top 12 in 2007 and 2010, and captured second place at the same competition in Tokyo in 2013. She was the first woman to appear on the podium in the history of the competition.

“I was thrilled! People said to me, ‘Aren’t you disappointed you weren’t first?’ Are you kidding! It was awesome. I just wanted to have a woman on the podium before my days were over. I haven’t felt a lot of discrimination in my profession because, well, this is Canada, right? Competing at the international level, I learned that in a lot of other countries, it’s not like that. A lot of women have looked up to me because I demonstrated how far they can go in this field.”

But competing at the international level was taking its toll. It took time and money, and it kept her away from her friends and family, including her young children. Twelve years competing was enough, and in 2014 she opened SOIF Bar a Vin in Gatineau. Just one year later, it was named one of the 10 Best New Restaurants in Canada by enroute Magazine.

“Having my own place was always in the back of my mind, and I figured if I wanted to do it, now was the time. After coming home from Tokyo in 2013, I took a few months to savour the victory, then started working seriously on the business plan and the financing. A year later, we opened the doors.”

Having built a reputation for excellence, companies began calling Rivest. One was Air Canada. After a six-month selection process involving wine professionals across the country, in 2017 she was named the airline’s official sommelier, tasked with selecting wines for airline’s business class customers.

Even in the midst of the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Rivest is still going strong. She says her education continues to play a part in everything she does.

“My teachers sparked my passion for wine, and that has never diminished. I love to learn and to teach other people. I love to give our customers, including sommeliers from other restaurants, the chance to taste wines they don’t know or can’t get anywhere else.

“When you’re strongly motivated by something, no matter what the challenges, you can find ways to achieve great results.”