by Harald Franzen

Over 1,300 feet above downtown Manhattan, overlooking the World Financial Center's yacht harbor, Jersey City and a vast stretch of eastern New Jersey, about 60 people are sitting in rows of eight, quietly scribbling on test sheets like school children. An overhead projector and screen complete the classroom feel.

The industrious pupils are of all ages and background. A South Asian man with strands of gray in his dark hair, meticulously dressed in a brown suit is chewing on a pen. Next to him a pale young man with stylishly uncombed hair sports a black T-shirt under a gray trench-coat with a pulled up collar. A bleach-blonde, with rosy cheeks and blue eyes, squeezed into a gray business suit, blocks the evening sun falling through the high, narrow, steel-edged windows.

They all have one thing in common, a passion for wine, and they are here to learn from one of the best: Andrea Immer, master sommelier and beverage director at Windows on the World, one of New York's premiere restaurants, located on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. At 32, Immer is one of only six female master sommeliers in the world and was chosen Best Sommelier in America in 1997 by the Sommelier Society of America. As a sommelier, she creates the wine list, the selection of wines the restaurant sells, which in the case of Windows encompasses 800 different wines, and matches them with the meals served. She is also in charge of managing the 20,000-bottle wine cellar and training the staff of three restaurants and a bar. But Immer has different aspirations. She wants to educate a wider audience about wine and in order to do so she will be leaving her prestigious job at Windows on the World next month.

In front of each of the aspiring sommeliers sit eight tasting glasses, their contents ranging in color from a pale lemon to a warm-afternoon-sun yellow. One glass of deep red Merlot, an empty glass for water and a Styrofoam spittoon complete the ensemble. As a helper collects tests, Immer enters the room. She is dressed in a bright red blazer over a black T-shirt and pants. Her petite five foot two figure rests comfortably on a pair of low black leather shoes. Her straight brown hair is tucked behind her ears, revealing two golden clip-on earrings. She wears a small golden watch and two golden rings. Her nails are well-trimmed but natural.

The young master sommelier defies most stereotypes attributed to her profession. Sommeliers stand in an old European tradition and are often viewed as arrogant, conservative and, for the most part, male. Immer has often been portrayed as the Generation X sommelier, a new type of wine expert who uses terms like "bogus" or "awesome" to describe wine and wants to attract a younger generation more accustomed to drinking beer.

But Immer wants to make wine accessible not only to youths. "I get a similar reaction from people of any age just because of the approach, which is: Less is more," she says. "It's all about communicating in the most basic terms rather than self-important wine-speak. Everyone realizes that they too can get it and that there isn't some kind of club that they are excluded from. It doesn't have to be, and that's important to me." In order to take her message to a broader audience, Immer recently signed on with Starwood Hotels and Resorts, an international chain of over 700 hotels with more than 217,000 rooms in over 70 countries.

"How's everyone doing so far?" Immer breaks the silence with an almost military tone, resolute, yet friendly and down to earth. The day's topic are German, Swiss and Austrian wines. As the audience soon finds out, Immer has a weakness for Rieslings, which grow particularly well in the steep vineyards of Rheingau and Mosel. She explains the quality categories of German wines, tackling terms like "Qualitätswein bestimmter Anbaugebiete" (Quality wines from specified wine regions) with ease, going into detail about regions, soil composition and climate. "The Germans have a very cold climate," she says. "You wouldn't think they could grow wine there, but they had some of the most patient people: Monks!" The class laughs. "We need slopes. Do we have those in Germany? Heck yeah! Some really steep ones!" Immer keeps her audience interested with little anecdotes, but she knows what she is talking about. She spent half a year travelling around Europe, visiting vineyards and tasting wines before she committed to this career.

Immer's way into the beverage business was an unusual one. She does not come from a culinary background and her parents still drink jug wine. Her college education at Southern Methodist University initially led Immer to Morgan Stanley where she entered the financial analyst program, but her passion for wine, which she had also discovered in college, led her into the wine business only two years later. After taking a wine-tasting course in college, she began having dinner parties with friends where they would try different wines. "The fascinating thing about wine, to me, is that you can never master it, so there is never any boredom to be feared because it will never be old hat," she says. The fear that things could become boring was one of the reasons why Immer left investment banking. "The one thing that I know about my nature is that I like new and different things all the time," she says. "I don't want to miss something, and so I like to see a lot of things rather than having something that I always gravitate back to. The same is true for wine. I hate it when people ask me about my favorite wine."

Toward the end of the class the wines are tasted. Immer views her glass against a white sheet of paper. Then, after playfully swinging it a few times, she lowers her nose into it and slowly absorbed the scent of the 1993 Eugen Müller Riesling Auslese, a high quality German white wine. After tasting it she turns to the audience. "Honey, candy,...there is a lot of passion fruit there. Could be your desert island wine, right?"

After two hours, Immer has finished, and the class begins to relax. Some of the students start talking, many know each other professionally. Some head down the hall to the bar. Others line up with questions. She takes her time to speak to everyone, but there is a certain efficiency to her conversations. Friendly, informative, but brief. A few minutes later, she rushes out to her next appointment. Immer works a 12-hour-day and her time is precious. "If I can get half an hour with her I'm very happy," says Laura Daniels, the dining-room manager at Black Bird, a newly opened restaurant on 49th Street, a few steps away from the Waldorf Astoria. After tasting every meal on the menu, Immer created the wine list for this elegant, bar-style restaurant earlier this year. Black Bird belongs to the same chain of first class restaurant as Windows on the World.

"I feel like I'm always working, because even if I'm not in my workplace, I'm always thinking about work and new ideas," Immer admits. She commutes to Manhattan from suburban New Jersey every day where she lives with her husband and 5-year-old son Lucas. Her husband had stopped working for a few years to take care of their child but recently started working again. Their son is now in day school. "I guess we have a pretty different idea of what constitutes quality time and we just snag it when we can," Immer says. She tries to have a "fairly civilized life" especially because she wants to be part of her son's life. "He's a great guy," she says. "He makes me look good," When she speaks of Lucas, all her professional assertiveness leaves her and her eyes glaze over with amazing warmth.

Immer sits in her tiny office, one flight below the restaurant and the size of an average New York cubicle - with an exceptional view. It is painted in a functional beige and stuffed with two metal filing cabinets and a metal desk more suited for public administration than an exclusive restaurant. Photos of Immer harvesting and tasting wine are pinned to the top edges of a slightly crumbled sheet of white paper, painted with a melange of seemingly erratic blue and yellow lines in watercolor - an early work of Immer's son, one of several on the otherwise bare walls. Copies of Wine Spectator, Food&Wine and the Quarterly Review of Wines stack on top of the two filing cabinets alongside gifts from students and framed copies of newspaper articles about Immer. Next to the window, several bottles of what she calls "crappy wines" sit on a metal air conditioner grill in front of a wood-framed photo of Immer's son. "People send me all these wines saying, 'Try this, try that'," she explains. "And I feel like 'You don't wanna know my opinion about your wine.'" The desk is covered with layers of paper, official letters and food magazines. A computer keyboard peaks out from under a postcard and several faxes. In the center of the room is an office chair. Immer has placed her phone on it and is standing in front of the desk, sorting documents while she checks her phone messages and makes arrangements for the evening. "She says that the chef is doing something special for them for aps [apéritif], and she doesn't know what, so she wants us to speak to the chef and select accordingly. It could be red or it could be white or champagne or whatever for the ap and then they're gonna do the Pinot for entrees."

Immer seems more relaxed in this more personal setting. She still has an incredible energy and her statements are well formulated and to the point, but she seems more personable. When asked about her success, she does not boast. "In the field of wine, nobody cares who is number one," she says. "For me it's always been something I did for myself. I like to know the details and the facts. I don't use them in my work much because my customers don't want to know this, but it's just for me."

A lot of Immer's responsibilities nowadays are managerial, and she admits to missing the customer contact that working in the dining room offers. "It's instant gratification when you've chosen wisely and you either surprised the customer or made them happy," she explains. "You've changed their lives for a brief moment and that's a great thing."

The other aspect of the work that Immer enjoys is teaching, and she hopes to reach out to more people in the future. "I know that there are a lot of people out there who will be pleased to get the message that they can relax about wine," she says. "And if I can spend as much time as I have available reaching people with that word, that would be cool because they all deserve to be able to enjoy wine without having an inferiority complex associated with it. I think we are the only culture that has this kind of silliness going on."

In order to achieve that goal, Immer has hosted a cable TV show on the Food Network and is in the process of publishing a book which she would like to call Wine Simple. "But I don't think the publisher wants that," she admits with a grin.

Immer has also decided to leave Windows on the World, the place where she started her career and has spent most of the past 8 years. She will be working for Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, a large hotel chain which owns and operates Sheraton, Westin, W-Hotels, Caesar gaming facilities and a collection of luxury hotels like the St. Regis and the Phoenician Resort. "I'm less interested in going up, if there is an up, as much as out. I just want to broaden my approach in terms of who I touch." In her new job, Immer hopes to be able to reach out to a larger audience than the somewhat selective crowd at Windows on the World. "There, the least common denominator is probably a screw-top bottle in the mini-bar, so obviously there is some potential!" She laughs.

Glenn Tuckmann, Senior Vice President of Staff Operations for Starwood Hotels and Resorts sees it similarly: "I think what interested her was the size. You know, she is an educator, which is different than a lot of sommeliers. A lot of sommeliers try to impress you, she tries to teach you and I think she saw this as an opportunity to influence a beverage program of substancial proportion." The beverage revenues alone are almost 1 ½ billion dollars a year at Starwood. Immer has not told her staff about her decision to leave yet but plans to tell them that night. She seems uneasy about facing them.

Immer has been sorting documents while talking on the phone and making arrangements and by the time she leaves her office half an hour later, her desk is well organized. She has to hurry again, this time to the evening briefing in the restaurant. She pushes out the door and down the hallway past the administrative offices through the huge kitchen that feeds Windows on the World. Men and women in white uniforms hastily push industrial metal carts with groceries and packaged goods around the tiled aisles. One of the hostesses from the bar scrambles to punch in on time. Immer greets them in passing. She turns another corner, a heavy metal door flies open, and she stands in the middle of the main dining room. About sixty men and women in neatly buttoned art deco style brown and blue uniform jackets and gray pants, reminiscent, of bus boys from the 1920s, sit scattered across the large room. One of the managers in a dark blue suit, white shirt and tie explains the schedule for the evening. Immer walks to the center of the room and jumps a few steps up to an elevated platform with several tables.

Suddenly she seems like a lost girl, her delicate silhouette uncertainly turning from side to side as she waits to speak. "I want to inform you that I will be leaving Windows on the World," she announces in a calm professional tone. "I will be working for the Starwood group which owns Sheraton, Westin and all sorts of other things that I can't remember right now." She pauses, seems annoyed by the superficiality of her statement. After a pause, she begins again. "This isn't easy for me. I have worked with some of you for quite a long time..." She stops and lifts her hand to cover her face and turns away. Andrea is crying. Someone begins to clap and soon everyone is cheering. One of the older men in uniform walks up the steps and takes her in his arms. He is almost twice her size. Most of the staff stream up to the podium, surrounding her, wishing her all the best. Immer almost disappears in the crowd of tall men. "She is a fine woman," one of the waiters says calmly. He smiles and turns to the kitchen.