WSET Diploma


Well, ok. Maybe I exaggerate a bit. But next week (Monday!), I start the second year of my WSET Diploma. It does seem a scarier semester, at least for those of us who are stronger on theory than tasting. What do I have to look forward to? It’s the same format as last time – nine weeks of getting up too early to catch a train to London to make it to WSET before 9 am. (Yeah, I know. It’s almost like having a real job, with a commute and...

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It seems every time I tell myself I’ll be better at blogging, I get worse. It’s with more than a bit of embarrassment that I realise it’s been almost two months since I’ve posted here. Here’s a brief list of what we’ve been up to since my last post. Anthroenology has done two short, but very rewarding periods of fieldwork. In September, we were in Austria, and in October, we spent a few days down in Sussex & Kent. I’ll do...

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Last week however many (I didn’t count this time) of us gathered at the Royal National Hotel in London to take our WSET Diploma Unit 1 Case Study exam. This, basically, is an essay. Or, in our case, four shorter essays. About a month before the exam, we were given the general topic: social media and the wine industry. We were expected to revise and read up on whatever we could get our hands on. On the day of the exam, we went in and...

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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...

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Apologies for not posting last week. I got caught up in the end of term admin, final lectures, and making sure my students were sorted before the break. As a result, I’m going to condense the last two weeks of the WSET Diploma into one post.The last two weeks were mostly about starting Unit 3, and specifically, France. We’ve covered Alsace, Loire, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Southwest France. That included a lot of tasting – 22 wines in...

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This 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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