Stefanie Hehn never pictured herself having a career in wine. Now the master sommelier at Hamburg’s Lakeside restaurant, Hehn initially studied at a hospitality training program, thinking she might work in reception or finance. After working in Laudensacks Parkhotel’s restaurant as part of the program, however, Hehn realized that being part of a guest’s culinary experience was especially rewarding.
“I never thought about going into the restaurant part of [the business], but it was the best part,” Hehn says, speaking to Observer in Lakeside’s private dining room on the top floor of The Fontenay hotel. “You could see the happy people eating their [food], and they were also drinking wine. You got the feedback right after you did your job—you didn’t have to wait. If you’re working in the financial part of a hotel, you don’t really have the feedback because it’s just paperwork. You don’t really see what you’re doing. My mother said I seemed so relaxed when I came home. You’re tired when you finish your job, but I wasn’t burned out. It was good energy. And, to me, the wine aspect was really interesting.”
Hehn, who is from Bad Kissingen, began learning more about wine, both in restaurants and in actual wineries. While working in Frankfurt, she spent her days off driving to the Pfalz region to experience the harvests and better understand the different styles of German wine. Still, she didn’t quite appreciate the taste. She’d grown up drinking cheap spirits mixed with soda as a teenager and didn’t like feeling drunk. Then, one night, she had a glass of a dry, aromatic Muskateller and immediately bought six bottles.
“I had sold a lot of expensive wines without drinking wine,” she says. “But now I really do like it. I think it was the best way for me to start this kind of work. I had really great people to show me how to drink. And maybe it was good that I didn’t like wine before, because I never had bad wine experiences that stopped me from being open to other wine experiences. Instead, I started with wine at an advanced level at 20 [years old] and studied how to combine it with food and how it was grown and how it is produced.”
Hehn grew to love wine so much that she took a course to become a certified sommelier. She passed her qualification in 2009 and then took an advanced level course followed by more courses and exams to become a master sommelier in 2020, a title less than 300 people worldwide have achieved.
In the midst of her training courses, Hehn joined the team at The Fontenay, a new-build property on Hamburg’s Lake Alster that opened in 2018. Although there are other female master sommeliers around the world, Hehn has come farther than many of her female classmates, partially because it’s often (unfairly) difficult for women to simultaneously juggle families and careers due to the workload and long hours. It’s an unfortunate fact that returning to work after maternity leave can also pose a challenge in the hospitality industry.
“What I mostly hear is that women are really happy that I came back after having a child and it’s inspiring for them that I’m not leaving the hotel business,” Hehn says. “I have been talking to a lot of female sommeliers in Austria and in Germany about how it was to start again [after having a child]. And for me it was, ‘Okay, you can do it.’ It helps to have a supportive restaurant and partner at home.”
When Hehn arrived at The Fontenay in 2017, she spent several months developing the hotel’s wine program, which encompasses the two-Michelin-starred Lakeside, German-inspired upscale restaurant Parkside and the property’s rooftop bar. Since then, the wine list has remained relatively consistent.
“The only thing [I’ve changed] is the entry-level wines,” Hehn says. “I had too many. When our customers are here, they want something really special. They want this champagne moment. They’re not coming to The Fontenay to drink an easy pinot grigio. We still have some entry-level wines—I think we started with about 30, and now it’s about 10—but we’ve developed the mid-level selection.”
The overall selection numbers in the hundreds, which Hehn knows can be overwhelming for guests. In Parkview and the bar, she offers an abridged menu that changes by the season (think Amarone in winter and glou glou wines in the summer). While the wine list is not exclusively comprised of German wines, Hehn does showcase them in an extensive way. She travels frequently to wine shows and wineries, searching for unique bottles. Currently, the hotel’s wine connections number around 20,000.
“I think we have to show the people who are not from Germany, as well as the Germans, the best of what we can do,” she says. “I don’t want wines just from the best [regions]. We need wines that are drinkable now. That’s what was really important to me from the beginning. The German winemakers opened their cellar doors and let us have a look at what kinds of older vintages they had, so we’re not always just buying what’s in the catalog. I always have to talk to them and ask, ‘Okay, maybe there’s something else in your cellar.’”
Hehn has also developed a non-alcoholic drinks pairing for Lakeside, which gets as much work and thought as the wine pairing (if not more). It currently includes kombucha from a local purveyor, which Hehn decants to make it less sparkling. She also pairs one dish with a high-end fruit vinegar created by German brand Weinessiggut Doktorenhof, which uses a 200-year-old recipe to create the product.
“We serve it in a really crazy glass because it doesn’t taste good out of regular glass,” Hehn says. “We had to buy a special glass because the aroma profile is coming out different. Guests are really excited about the vinegar, and it fits the course perfectly.”
This level of detail isn’t just because of what’s expected at a two-Michelin-starred restaurant. Hehn, who balances her career with raising a young child, simply wants people to have what she calls “special moments.” She hopes to share that passion with her staff, as well, especially during training. Everything about this career excites her, even on a long day, which is exactly why she got into hospitality in the first place.
“I like every part,” Hehn says when asked about her favorite aspect of the job. “I like the part when I do the education when we have new team members arriving, to show them how to sell the wine. Some people are tasting their first [ever] wine, and they’re surprised about the flavor. And in the restaurant, when you serve a wine and the food and people are sitting there and they just make an ‘Mmm’ sound. I don’t need more feedback than that.”
