As president of the International Sommelier Guild (ISG), Joseph Miller oversees the department heads in all curricular and other educational development projects from inception through implementation. He is also responsible for spearheading the ISG’s global expansion, boards of education licensure, and instructor development.
Born in South America, Mr. Miller spent part of his early youth in Europe and the Middle East and has lived his entire adult life in Canada and the United States. His interest in the hospitality and wine industries was sparked while he was still in school at Ryerson University, studying aerospace engineering. “I come from a family mostly educated in the science and medical fields,” he explains. “I was in school and started working in a restaurant and realized I was having a lot of fun. Eventually, wine pairings and service became a focus, and before you knew it, I was certified as a sommelier. I never looked back.”
Leaving his aerospace engineering career for the hospitality industry, Miller continued working at numerous restaurants and hotels as a restaurant manager and food and beverage director as he expanded his wine knowledge. He became president of the ISG in January 1997, continuing to build on its mission to provide students with an in-depth, hands-on wine education by making it the only sommelier organization in the world to be governed and licensed by various state boards of education.
His vision was to create a benchmark for the sommelier profession, and has standardized the ISG curriculum throughout all of its school locations. These steps have ensured students become successful in the hospitality industry and attain concrete vocational competencies. Since becoming president, Miller has expanded the organization from an initial four cities in two countries to over 60 satellite school locations throughout North America and over forty countries across five continents, teaching in 13 different languages. “We provide direct instruction through the ISG, with an excess of 350 ‘contact’ hours to lead students to be certified,” he says, highlighting the rigors of the organization’s curriculum. “We provide vocational competencies so that our graduates can work well in the industry, and we’ve maintained a very high success rate despite the immense academic challenges to the programs.”
Mr. Miller’s passion for wine continues to drive his work, and it’s a quality he helps foster in the ISG’s current students and graduates. “If you’re a true masochist, wine is one of the best subjects you can study,” he says with a laugh. “You can never know the entire subject just because of the sheer volume, and yet it’s amazing how much you can learn—about winemakers, grapes, soil, history, and more. It is a complex and fascinating subject, offering much to talk about and enjoy. We do our best to have the industry’s best teaching our programs.”
Mr. Miller is the author of The Beginning Sommelier: Major Grape Varieties and Themes of the Wine Industry, That Place, This Wine: The Regional Approach to Wine, and The Modern Sommelier Compendium. Mr. Miller is finishing the Enology and Nutrition book sections of Beyond the Sommelier: Fundamentals of Enology, Nutrition and Business Management in the 21st Century.
Mr. Miller is fluent in four languages, is married to his wife Enna, and has three wonderful sons, Jacob, Joshua, and Jesse, with their lovable English Mastiff. In his quiet time, he enjoys watching and playing hockey and sipping a nice Amarone in the afternoons while thinking of new adventures.
