A young woman who started out washing dishes in a Takapuna restaurant has been named the best wine waiter in Britain. Emma Denney, 33, who grew up on Auckland’s North Shore, was judged the UK Sommelier of the Year at a multi-day live final in London, an award widely regarded as the top prize in British wine service.
Denney is now Head of Wine at Claridge’s, the grand Mayfair hotel that has served royalty, prime ministers and film stars for more than a century. Getting there has taken her from a dishpit in Auckland to the most senior wine job in one of the world’s most famous dining rooms, and the win caps a climb that has been years in the making.
The UK Sommelier of the Year title is run by the International Wine and Spirit Competition, one of the oldest wine and spirits contests in the world. Finalists are put through an exhausting run of blind tastings, wine and food matching, spirits and service tests, and then have to perform in front of a room of fellow professionals, wine buyers and leading figures from across British hospitality. The judges weigh not just how much a competitor knows about wine, but how well they read a table and look after the people sitting at it.
Denney had come close before. In 2025 she reached the semi-finals and placed fifth, and picked up the award for the best performer in food and wine matching. This year she went one better and took the top title outright, becoming the latest New Zealander to make a mark in the upper reaches of the international wine trade.
Her start was about as ordinary as it gets. As 1News reported, she was 13 when she got her first job washing dishes in a Takapuna eatery. She did not discover that being a sommelier was even a career until she was 19 and working at a wine bar in Auckland, where the idea of a job built around wine, food and hospitality slowly took hold. From there she worked at well known Auckland restaurants including SPQR and Ebisu before deciding to try her luck overseas.
About nine years ago she moved to London, where the sheer number of high-end restaurants offered a path that barely existed at home. She worked her way through some of the city’s serious wine rooms, including Roka and LPM in Mayfair, before joining Claridge’s and rising to lead its wine programme.
In an earlier interview with the Sommelier Wine Awards, Denney said the best part of the job was the human side of it. “Getting to share the stories of places where the wines come from, and the people and families behind them,” she said was what she loved most. She was also blunt about the grind behind the polished service, warning that “being a good sommelier is definitely not a job for the lazy.”
She has spoken too about how the trade has changed for women during her time in it. Since arriving in London she said there were “undeniably more women in the trade”, and pointed out that at Claridge’s both head sommeliers are women and about three quarters of her team are women. It is a long way from the days when the image of a sommelier was a stern older man in a waistcoat hovering over a wine list.
Denney has said it was the documentary Somm, which follows a group of candidates cramming for one of the wine world’s hardest exams, that first showed her the profession could be a serious calling. Sommelier jobs were rare in New Zealand when she was starting out, and the film helped convince her the career was worth chasing overseas.
The wine list she now runs has been drawing attention in its own right. Judges for the Star Wine List of the Year awards earlier in 2026 praised the Claridge’s Restaurant selection, saying it “confidently covers all the key regions and styles while also venturing beyond the classics into exciting, out-of-the-box territories” and that a good run of older vintages added real depth. The restaurant carries more than 200 sparkling wines alone, from the big Champagne houses to small independent growers.
A sommelier, for anyone who has only ever met one across a white tablecloth, is a trained wine specialist who looks after everything from how a cellar is bought and stored to which glass ends up in front of a diner and why. At the level Denney works at, the job is part detective, part storyteller and part host, matching a bottle to a meal, a mood and sometimes a very particular guest.
New Zealand has become a genuine wine country over the last few decades, with Marlborough sauvignon blanc and Central Otago pinot noir now poured in restaurants around the world. Denney is a reminder that the country exports the people as well as the bottles, and that a kid rinsing plates in a suburban kitchen can end up choosing the wine for one of the most storied hotels on earth.
What do you make of Emma Denney’s rise from a Takapuna dishpit to the top of the London wine world? Have a favourite New Zealander making it big overseas? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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