WSET Diploma

Last week we had two of the ‘small’ (as WSET calls them) exams. These were the sparkling wine and spirits units. It would be a miracle if I didn’t have to resit the sparkling wine one. Spirits? Who knows. What happened? Simple – I blanked. I think the sparkling tastings went ok. I was correct on 2 out of 3, but then again, that’s only 2 out of 25 points each. The rest is description and justification. As readers will know by now,...

Almost two weeks ago now, we had a reading week for WSET, so no trekking down to London for classes. This past week, I was sidelined with a stomach complaint, so also no trip to London. Both of these, however, left me time to sit back and reflect on larger issues. (Despite that, it took me ages to get this post to what I consider an acceptable condition – hence the silence on the blog. I’m still not as happy as I’d like to be with...

Poire Williams, a pear brandy, rather smells, as you might suspect, like pears. This is a problem. Pears smell like pears. There’s not a lot more to be said, as far as I can tell. One pear smells more or less like another. Why is this a problem? In the context of WSET, it’s a problem because the description of the nose contains five points for the description of aromas. Further, those points are awarded as one point per aroma. In...

Meh. That’s my one word review of the first week of spirits for our WSET Diploma. We covered a couple of areas, some interesting to me, some not so much. The morning was theory and tasting technique, as well as a practice test tasting on sparkling wines. (I was right on two of the three, but other people had the same incorrect answer for the second wine as I did.) The theory topic – basically, distillation – was interesting to me. I...