Windy Zhang: “Wine Has Always Given Me Positive Feedback”

Windy Zhang is not one of those smooth-talking industry “big shots” who can hold forth on anything. Ask her about her own career and the answers come back plain and direct, stripped of embellishment. But mention wine – mention the work of being a sommelier – and something shifts. She lights up, occasionally talking so fast she trips over her own words.

That unpolished way of speaking is exactly where her sincerity shows. The love is in the rush.

Across a long conversation, one thing becomes unmistakable: Zhang has chosen to give her career to hotels and restaurants. In a sense, she seems built for them.

Working in a hotel was the cool thing to do

Years before she became a sommelier, long before the trophies, Zhang had already settled on her direction.

“I studied hotel management in school,” she says. Why that major? Her answer is almost too simple. “Because it was cool.”

Her father is a Chinese-cuisine chef, which nudged her toward hospitality as well.

Her first job after graduating was at a high-end resort in Sichuan, Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain. The work had little to do with wine at first, but as part of standard staff training she was put through the WSET Level 2 course.

“Then I paid out of my own pocket for Level 3. That’s where I met a sommelier,” she recalls. “He later invited me to The Temple House, another star-rated hotel in Chengdu, and that’s where I started working with wine more seriously.”

Why did wine gradually take over? Again, the simplest possible answer: “Because I liked it.”

So when The Ritz-Carlton Chengdu offered her a sommelier role, she barely hesitated.

An ocean of wine

At The Ritz-Carlton, from 2019 to 2020, Zhang went all the way under.

Wine dinners were having a moment in China then. Wineries entering the market wanted a stage, and star-rated hotel restaurants were the stage of choice.

“In two years I worked on ten to twenty wine dinners. I did a lot of it alone, designing the pairings, coordinating with the kitchen. I even ran a blind tasting of sparkling wines on my own,” she says. “That stretch shaped everything that came after.”

She read voraciously alongside the work, stacking up technical knowledge.

One of the fastest ways to learn was competition. She started entering competitions – and winning. Her record includes champion of the Bordeaux Academy Cup, champion of the China Best French Wine Sommelier Competition, a top-ten finish at the China Best German Wine Sommelier Competition, runner-up at the Italian Wine Sommelier Competition, and runner-up at the China Wine Sommelier Competition.

Her first motive was disarmingly concrete. “The champion got to go to France, and I really wanted to see the wine regions.”

That first trip to France has stayed with her. “I was thrilled, and I held onto every minute of it. A vineyard is nothing like the page. So much of what I’d only read about suddenly made sense once I was standing in it – everything started to connect. And after walking the cellar, going back to the books, the words came alive,” she says. 

The competitions soon became something else: a discipline.

“Without them, my reading wouldn’t be as focused, and I wouldn’t push deep into a single region. Left to myself, I probably wouldn’t study so systematically,” she says. “They matter to me because they keep me learning, constantly.”

And they test more than knowledge. They expose the small habits of the job. “Checking the bottle mouth, turning the label toward the guest when you present a wine – simple things. But if they aren’t automatic, the moment you get nervous on the competition floor, they vanish.”

About her own string of first- and second-place finishes, she is strikingly modest.

“In competition you see plenty of people far better than you who still don’t win. So a title doesn’t prove much.” The point, for her, was never the ranking.

“Only by competing do you find out what you’re still missing. That part is everything.”

Walking away from the safe job

A sommelier post at a city’s top hotel is the kind of job people envy: stable, respectable, secure.

It wasn’t enough for Zhang.

In 2021 she made a risky call – leaving The Ritz-Carlton for a wine bistro. That year, Wine Universe by Little Somms, one of China’s earliest wine-bistro brands, opened in Chengdu, and Zhang signed on as its store manager and sommelier.

The logic mirrored her earlier jump out of Six Senses: she did it to learn.

“The Ritz-Carlton is a huge group with a roster of contracted suppliers, so the freedom to choose wines was actually limited,” she says. “Burgundy was the obsession at the time, but the trendy, interesting bottles were hard to get inside a hotel.”

More than that, she could feel the edges of her own knowledge moving.

“My mentor had also left The Temple House for Wine Universe. I went in for a drink once and didn’t recognize half the list. I thought, I need to push myself further.”

Reality turned out harder than the dream. After a bright opening, the Chengdu bistro ran headlong into pandemic lockdowns and mounting financial pressure. Business thinned, then stopped.

It was a low point. “Toward the end of the lockdowns, the customers kept dwindling,” she told us. “People were cutting anything non-essential – and wine is one of the first things to go.”

The late nights, the intensity, the strain of keeping a struggling business alive – it wore her down. She decided to step away and rest, leaving before the bistro formally shut its doors. The Chengdu location closed soon after; Wine Universe’s flagship Shanghai store followed, announcing its own closure in late 2025.

Even so, the memory carries warmth. “Near the very end, we all went back – we even put our uniforms back on. Standing there, I realized almost everything I remembered about that room was good.”

Optimism, by choice

After some time off, Zhang returned to the floor.

In 2024 she joined Co-Restaurant, a one-Michelin-star establishment in Chengdu, as beverage manager. With a per-head spend north of 1,000 yuan (about US$150), it sits firmly in the city’s high-end tier. 

The market she came back to was unforgiving. Wine consumption has been under steady pressure since 2023, and fine dining has felt the squeeze too. Holding the line as a sommelier, with consumers tightening up, is no small thing.

Yet she describes the past two years with persistent optimism. “Co-Restaurant is built around the chef’s IP. Because it’s a set menu, we send a pairing proposal when guests book, then walk them through it in detail when they arrive. Wine becomes part of the whole meal, not an add-on.”

This clientele, she says, is the best she has worked with. Some guests already know wine intimately; even those who don’t are curious and open. Between 40 and 50 percent of diners order wine.

Just as important to her: management lets the sommelier choose the list. That autonomy is something she prizes.

She doesn’t pretend the headwinds aren’t real. “Chengdu’s wine scene is still niche. The local market alone is small, and out-of-town traffic isn’t yet enough to carry it.”

How to widen wine’s appeal is a question the whole profession keeps circling, she admits. For now, her answer is trust—building durable relationships through skill and credibility, so that guests are willing to experiment and willing to believe a recommendation.

Why she keeps going

Being a sommelier in Chengdu, Zhang concedes, is a narrow road – thin on career ladders, on entrepreneurial openings, on examples worth copying.

None of it has cooled her.

“It’s a niche job here, sure. But I love it, and it makes me happy. So I’ll keep pouring most of my time and energy into it.” She pauses. “And even if I have to leave the industry one day, I want to leave at the moment I’m doing it really well.”

The pull, for her, is the steady stream of positive feedback. “I started competing because I wanted to go abroad. I’d dreamed of Paris since I was a child – and it turned out wine was how I got there.”

The daily work feeds her too. “A guest’s recognition is a real high. My colleagues tease me about how I always seem to know the wealthy regulars who love to drink,” she says, laughing. “Wine is a kind of medium. It connects people on the same wavelength.”

And it never stops teaching. “Do most things long enough and they wear thin, turn sour. Wine doesn’t. At 30, at 40, it still makes you want to learn.”

She stops, then lands on her own conclusion.

“Because it keeps giving you something back, you keep walking forward.”