I wondered, back in December, if certain kinds of tasting notes were soulless. I want to return to this point, and take it in a slightly different direction. I want to think about the ways in which tasting notes can be unduly restrictive.One of the starting points for this is further reflection on the WSET fortified wines exam I sat about a month ago, and in particular, one of the wines, an Oloroso sherry. The other starting point is...
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Earlier this week, I sat in a hall in the rather decrepit-feeling Royal National Hotel in London to take the WSET Diploma Unit 6 (Fortified Wines) exam. There were somewhere between 130-140 of us, all Diploma students. Did I pass? I don’t know. It will take 3-4 months to find out. I correctly identified two out of the three wines (an Oloroso and a Rutherglen Muscat) but in the tasting section, correct identification is only about 10...
Read MoreThis was a fairly big week. We had our first exam, I got the results of my feedback tasting exam from some weeks before, marketing turned out to be fairly interesting, and some of us socialised.The main point of the day – I don’t want to call it a ‘highlight’ – was the Unit 2 (Wine Production) exam. It was 100 multiple choice questions to be done in 90 minutes. I feel confident that I passed, although perhaps I should take heed of...
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