EDIBLE: Monterey’s own master sommelier Alpana Singh builds a wine dynasty in Chicago.

Monterey Peninsula College student Alpana Singh, then 19, really wanted a job as a server at Montrio Bistro (648-8880), then the hot new restaurant in downtown Monterey. (It’s still hot, but now it wins the Weekly readers’ vote for Best Restaurant Over 10 Years Old.)

So she marched over and secured an interview. One of the questions she fielded: Did she knew anything about wines?

“They’re made from grapes, right?” she said, and the manager politely told Singh she’d add her to the waiting list for… hostess candidates.

Singh sniffed a hint, bought Wine for Dummies and made a weekend of swirling its contents.

That Monday, the restaurant chief’s eyebrows rose with her increase in insight, and she gave Singh a server gig.

Singh sipped her very first wine when her Montrio mentor-to-be asked her to try a Charles Melton Barossa red from Australia.

“I suddenly saw rainbows!” she writes in a 2006 book, Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine & Having Great Relationships. “The stuff absolutely blew me away.”

That night, that moment, she decided to become a wine professional. Her mentor told her to surround herself in wine. She secretly dropped out of MPC (to the eventual horror of her mother) to work in the wine section at Nielsen Bros. Market (626-6441) in Carmel. “I would hang around and try to learn the lingo of the business when wine purveyors came in,” she writes. “I would clean a certain area [arranged by region], then study it.”

Twenty years later, she qualifies as a Monterey County and worldwide wine industry outlier. Seems not many culture-curating sommeliers are under 40, female and Indian-American.

And she’s not just any sommelier. She was the youngest woman to qualify for the master sommelier’s certification, at 27. Test preparation typically takes up to 10 years of industry work and fervent study, and even then, just 3 percent of somms (then second-level) pass the gauntlet of service tests and blind-tasting stumpers administered by master somms themselves. Having talked with test-taking vets, that 3 percent sounds high.

She’s become a big-city star in Chicago, where she worked at destination restaurant Everest for five years, then another family of respected restaurants under Lettuce Entertain You. Along the way she became a fixture on PBS station WTTW’s Check, Please! and a Chicago Tonight segment called “Ask Alpana.”

She opened four-story, wine-centric The Boarding House to fanfare in 2012, assembling an all-female team to run the restaurant by the end of year one.

(That evokes a line from her book: “When the wine list was presented to my male companion,” she writes, “I tried to ignore this faux pas.”)

In the last few months she ran her first marathon and opened Seven Lions along Windy City’s iconic Miracle Mile, a throwback “clubhouse”-style restaurant I’m dying to try.

She’s not short on the power of women, romance, poetry or personality in her Alpana Pours book. She taps experience at special occasion restaurants, turning awkward wine ordering into something fun, easy and playfully romantic. It’s Wine for Dummies 2.0, by a master of much.

“Wine should never, ever be a point of frustration, shame, intimidation, confusion or conflict,” she writes. “It should be something that you have fun with and share with others; a joyful experience leading to a little bit of a need for creation and hopefully to high-quality canoodling and then some.”

I’ve been reading it on the train south to Los Angeles Food & Wine to see how the Monterey-based Coastal Luxury Management team has evolved the festival after a wildly eventful (even by their standards) 12 months. I was already on a unique food-and-wine mission that started at standout new Arroyo Grande seasonal/wood-fired restaurant Ember outside San Luis Obispo. There, it was smart yellowtail crudo and charred jalapeño, short rib-rapini pasta, crispy kale-fennel sausage pizza, Tuscan porchetta, and artichoke ricotta gnocchi to furnish excitement alongside lean and approachable Sinor La Vallee Pinot Gris and a Qupe Rhone blend.

Then came a wine pairing in the sky: a drive through Ancient Peaks’ sweeping ranch, a sequence of five zip line rides over chaparral, mountain forest and Pinot vines, followed by balanced cool-climate Ancient Peaks winners like the 2012 Zin, 2013 Cab and 2012 Renegade, for a $18-$24 sticker price Singh would dig. (The debut of Ancient Peaks’ new tasting room leads some California Wine Month events I’ll also have on the blog in September.)

Meanwhile I’ve been flagging the unsettling gap between men and women in the wine world and wider hospitality industry, as I did with a February column. I have also been looking for an excuse to track down Singh, who preceded me by a year at Monterey High and in applying to Downtown Dining restaurants. (I went for Montrio sister Rio Grill.) So when I saw her book on the shelf of my Los Osos Airbnb – the adorable Casita Estrella hosted by Central Coast Foodie blogger Rachel Duchak – I pounced. (Alpana Pours can be found on Amazon.)

Call it my own seeing-rainbows moment. I’ll get to the end of the rainbow and arrange an interview with my fellow Toreador soon.

Quickbites

• Coconut Thai (883-9399) has opened in the former D’Anna Thai in Marina in the same 210 Reindollar outpost. The menu has a dozen appetizers, a bunch of salads and soups, curries, 15 entrees, four barbecue plates, 12 seafood dishes, 10 noodle options and fried rice, too.

• If the Craft Distiller’s Act of 2015, AB 1295, passes, the public will be able to purchase spirits directly from small distilleries. Distilleries will also be able to act like brew pubs and have a tasting room, bar or restaurant on the premises. Huge news for local outfits like Lost Spirits and Fog’s End.

• Ten years ago, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger established California Wine Month in September to coincide with harvests. Look for special deals and events from Monterey County wine makers, and to the recent post “California Wine Month cometh; harvest already here, which is intense” for word on historically early local grape ripening.

• The Master Chef casting team holds open auditions for Season 7 on Saturday, Aug. 29: 10am-6pm at The Parc 55, 55 Cyril Magnin St., San Francisco.

• Noted local historian Tim Thomas and the Monterey Fisherman’s Wharf Association (521-3304) educate tour goers about the food history and fishing trends unique to Monterey Bay 10am-noon Saturday, Sept. 5 (free).

• C Restaurant and Bar (375-4800) does a coastal-inspired Veuve Cliquot four-course dinner with things like smoked applewood Sonoma duck and oyster and caviar Thursday through Saturday, Aug. 27-29 ($85). http://ictheclementmonterey.com.

• Monterey Bay Chefs do a Talbott Vineyards tour and tasting led by Dan Karlsen with a lunch catered by Tarpy’s Roadhouse 9am-3pm Monday, Aug. 31 ($45/MBC members; $55/general). www.montereybaychefs.org.

• Holman Ranch (659-2640) celebrates its 87th birthday with food, estate wines, lively entertainment and more 6-9pm Thursday, Sept. 10 (free/members; $35/guest; $50/adult). Five dollars from each ticket sold is donated to the Alzheimer’s Association. www.holmanranch.com.

• Zen Proverb: “The obstacle is the path.”