This is something I get asked a fair bit about, and although I’m currently studying my Diploma with the WSET I’d like this to be about wine education in general, as I intend to cover those topics in more depth another time. The real questions are, I suppose, what is wine education all about? Is it as much fun as it sounds? How do I go about it?

There’s a couple of ways to look at this, and I’ll get the first one out of the way quickly: If you want to be professionally involved with wine, you should, of course, invest in wine based education. Gone are the days of casually working your days in a wine shop and winding up as a senior buyer for a major wine company; the industry is now both more visible, more competitive and the world of wine has grown enormously. This subject came up a few months ago, when Matt Kramer, part of the Wine Spectator team, wrote a scathing article about this ‘new wave’ of wine professionals who were placing too much faith in qualifications and not enough on experience. Easy to say if you were fortunate enough to get a job with no experience/education and even easier to say if you were wealthy enough to have access to the worlds best wine from a young age (This was more a product of the times – wine simply used to be a lot more affordable!). For the rest of us though, we’ll simply have to spend our time and money investing in education.

With that aside, this post is really for people who have little to no professional interest in wine but want to know more about it, which I believe accounts for the vast, vast majority of wine consumers. Is wine education a worthwhile expenditure for you? I believe so, and here’s a few reasons why:

1. Base knowledge – This is the big one for me. The world of wine is a vast, complicated subject that is absolutely rife with subjective opinion, interpretation and personal preference. All well and good but in order to get to grips with the enormity of the subject, it pays to have a framework to work from, a foundation if you like. Once you understand the basics of Viticulture (growing the grapes), Vinification (Making the wine), market influences, wine service and consumer habits, there isn’t too much you can’t quickly grasp from that point onwards. This is where good wine education comes into play, as it covers these bases in adequate detail and builds everything upwards from that point.

2. Tasting skills – Whether or not you like a wine is a matter of personal preference. As I mentioned in this previous post, the concept of having ‘good taste’ is nonsense and should be taken with a very large pinch of salt. However, in terms of improving your ability to taste wine, break in down and understand the different components, a systematic approach to tasting is invaluable. The lexicon of wine language is just that, a language and in order to use it, you have to learn it. This is where tasting practices come in, and having a benchmark to work from is the real advantage here. When I first took my level 3 course with the WSET, I saw red wines under 14% alcohol as being quite light, because my only experience up until this point had been with big, beefy Spanish reds. I quickly discovered that 14% is considered pretty powerful for a lot of the world! Conversely, we had a German student who was so used to drinking Mosel Riesling that the concept of ‘High acidity’ was lost on her for all but the most gripping of wines.

3. Experience – As Mr Kramer points out, nothing is a substitute for experience. When I first starting studying wine, Spain was my only real experience. In a week in London I got to try 112 wines from all over the world; Californian Chardonnay, Burgundian Pinot Noir, Canadian Riesling, Italian Nebbiolo, Australian Cabernet Sauvignon…. it was a truly eye-opening experience for me. Whilst it takes a while for such an intense amount of information to settle in, it completely changed my approach to wine and I saw a thousand doors open in front of me. I’ve been excited and curious ever since, constantly searching for new wines, new grapes, new regions and a better understanding.

   

4. Context – Like all good education, the learning process should be less about what to know, and more about how to think. With the foundation above, I have discovered that learning how to think and analyse wine and the world around is has greatly improved my analytical skill-set in general. To paraphrase Ian Cauble MS from the documentary SOMM; how often do we really take the time to sit, analyse and think about something? We mostly live our lives at a very fast pace and that is something that is simply not possible with wine, it has to be broken down and dissected in order to really answer that golden question; ‘Why does this wine taste the way that it does?’. In particular I have found that my appreciation of food, coffee, cocktails and basically anything that can be appreciated on the nose and/or palate has greatly improved since I started to focus on wine.

5. Fun – I suppose it goes without saying that wine education tends to be a lot of fun! I have yet to meet anyone who spent time and money with an institution like the WSET and regretted it, as pass or fail you always gain something from it. With that comes new friends, new contacts and definitely new holiday destinations! It’s hard to learn about the natural beauty of Piedmont in Northern Italy without wanting to travel there immediately; wine, after all, is very rarely made outside of beautiful areas.

So, there you have it, I am greatly, greatly in favour of wine education, although I suppose that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. In the future I intend to look at some institutions in a little more depth in terms of what they can offer.