WSET Unit 1 - Update

I have not been writing, at least not in this blog, for the last month. I have, however, spent several hours a day on my WSET Unit 1 Course work Assignment.

The CWA is a 3000 word research paper on some aspect of winemaking. The topics change each year, there is 1 topic in the spring and 1 in the fall. You submit either the November paper or the April paper. You only need to submit 1 but you must submit the appropriate one for its due date.

This year's topics were "How advances in science and Technology have affected Winemaking" ( due November ) or "The Presentation and Packaging of Wine" ( due April ). WSET posts the topics for the year in late May so if one were to choose the April paper, they would have almost a year to prepare for it.

In my case, I knew i wanted to write the November paper. I also knew that with my French Wine Scholar studies and test in mid August, that I wouldn't start this paper until then. I also knew that I needed to retake my Unit 6 Fortified Wines exam in November, as well as my studies and exam for Wine Judge Certification - also in November.

So I gave myself just the month of September to write my Unit 1 paper. I took a week longer than planned, but I finished it and packaged it for submission just this morning after my wife read it and corrected my punctuation. (I think I had the correct number of commas in the paper, but according to her, they were all in the wrong places. I needed to add some here and remove some elsewhere.)

The paper is in 4 parts. An introduction that included general advances in technology and winemaking and how they affected the final bottle of wine. Two specific advances with documented and referenced research on each, and then finally, a conclusion that also suggests what advances might occur in the next 20 years.

Picking the topics was easy. I knew what I wanted to talk about, but getting relevant, up-to-date research on the topics was a lot harder. Originally I was going to write about advances in refrigeration and temperature control. We all agree it has been one of the key advances of the last 50 years and improved wines greatly, but try to find and research on the topic !! I headed down that dead end for about two weeks before I gave up and picked a new topic instead.

The other and probably most difficult part of this project was that when I had finished writing my preliminary draft, it was 5600 words long. About 2x longer than WSET would allow. I had to go back in an rip my baby apart. And, when it was done, all my carefully balanced paragraphs, all my nuanced continuity, all of my enlightening examples still needed to hang together and make sense. It was a painful operation and took me a week alone just to perform that operation. Getting rid of the last 500 words was hell. the last 100 even harder.

I finally submitted with 3029 words. I am hoping they only mark me down a point or two for the extra words, but I couldn't cut any more and keep the narrative together. I am hoping that the quality of those extra words will make up for being over on the quantity.

Note: This paper is only 1/2 of the Unit 1 grade. Some time next spring I will take the 2nd part which entails another research paper, but one that we write in a test environment and in 1 hour rather than getting a month to write and edit it. We get the generic brief on the topic for the test paper about 1 month in advance. We get to study all aspects the topic, since we don't know what the actual question will be. Then we walk into the exam with nothing but our pencils and erasers, see what the actual questions is, and then write everything that we can about it.

Each paper counts 50% toward passing Unit 1. Figuring that the exam will be a bear, I spent a lot of time on this paper. I hope I did well.

john