My Homework !

As mentioned in my last post. You can take WSET courses as self-study. One one hand you save several hundred $$ by not going to the class sessions. On the other hand, you are responsible for getting and tasting your own samples of the various wines you can expect to see. This will cost you a couple hundred $$ as well.

It is NOT a wash, self study is definitely cheaper and having the wines yourself means that you get several tastes, you can compare it against different other wines, and you can take your time trying to understand this wine - whereas in class you will probably be moving along to another tasting. You do lose by not having other's opinions and tastes experiences to add to your own, but one can often find these in reviews, or books on wine. For example you can find a lot of references for a generic Nebbiolo. It is light in color, it is high acid, it is high tannin, it may have dark fruit flavors and aromas, you may find more tertiary aromas than fruit ones. A specific Nebbiolo may very well have oak, spice, tar, bramble, etc. You will generally find these on your own.

Generally in WSET tastings, you need to recognize 2 aromas, and then 3 flavors after tasting it, and the aromas and the flavors can be the same. The trick is that they need to be the ones that the official taster also gets and records. If your official taster gets 6-7 aromas / flavors, then you have a fair chance to match and get full points on that part of your tasting.

So, I have spent the last month tasting Manzanilla, Fino, Pale Dry, Oloroso, Cream, and Amontillado Sherries. I have also been tasting Ruby, Late Bottled vintage, Colheita, and Tawny Ports with an indication of age ( 5, 10, and 20 years old ). Also a 5 year old Verdelho Madeira, and a 10 year old "Malmsey" - Malvasia Madeira.

I have been trying to understand the differences in Color, in Alcohol, in Acidity, plus the unique characteristics that each brings to the table.

For my tasting test, I will be given 3 wines in a blind tasting and have to describe them according to the WSET Systematic Approach to Tasting. This approach is also very similar to the one used by the Society of Wine Educators, so I am happy to find that out and work with it.

One describes the wine according to 4 standard categories, and several ad-hoc ones, that can change according to the tasting: see the image below



Note that it isn't specifically required to guess what the wine is, although often that is done as part of the quality assessment, the country of origin or the grape variety involved. For a Sherry it might not be to hard. It is a Palomino Fino grape from Spain. However when you consider a Port, it is a lot harder ... over 80 grape varieties are allowed and often Ports are actually a field blend and in an old vineyard, the grower himself may not know the full mix of the varieties. It is enough to know the type of Port and perhaps the growing region.

So finally, here is the results of my homework over the last month. 14 empty bottles and a bunch of (very) happy memories