Wine Judging Certification - Year 1 exam.

Last week we had our American Wine Society - Year 1 - Wine judge Certification class and exam.

The exam is only held at the National Conference and this year it was in Rochester New York. I flew back to attend the conference and to take the exam.

The exam is in 3 parts. One part is theory and we had a series of books and papersthat were required reading in preparation for the exam. Most of the topics were basic sensory analysis with some additional emphasis on Wine faults.

I wouldn't guarantee it, but I think one could be successful just reading Alan Young's book "Making Sense of Wine" and also Marian Baldy's "University Wine Course". these books also give you wine tasting exercises to perform such as judging between 3 wines of various sweetness. They give you the formulae and ingredients to create valid tasting samples.

The 2nd part is, for most students, the hardest, and that is: you are given 10 wines. In our case 6 had aroma faults and 4 flavor faults. There were about 25 possibilities of what could be the cause of the fault. We had to assign the correct fault to each of the glasses. I had tested and tasted and practiced this part of the exam several times over the summer and fall, and we also reviewed it again on test day, but when you have to pull out the correct aroma from a full red wine during test conditions, it gets a lot trickier.

This is something I will have to practice and practice again and again.

The final part of the exam is to judge 4 wines and write up your tasting notes and assign a score to the wine.

The wines were 1) A strawberry fruit wine, 2) A white hybrid 3) A chambourcin (native american red grape) 4) a red vinifera.

I had never had a Chambourcin before and I though it somewhat harsh and vegetal. I thought they must have adulterated it, and I described what I tasted and because I knew they wanted us to avoid scoring everything mid-range ( i.e. 14-16 points : a 'good' wine), I gave this a 12.5 out of 20. A commercially acceptable but nothing special wine. The judges who had tasted Chambourcin before, thought this a very good example of one and graded it 17 out of 20 points, though I did note that at least one also thought it vegetal.

The rest of the wines I came close on, and overall I was good enough to get a pass.
What a relief ! I wasn't sure of the results. I don't think any of us were and I wouldn't have been surprised if I hadn't passed and still had 2 more days of a conference to get through. I was beginning to think that maybe they should tell us the results at the end of the conference so at least we could all have a good time before we got the news.

After getting through the first year, I now have a much better idea of what to expect and I can plan and practice for it. Several of my class mates had fellow AWS members who had been through the class before and were able to give them some good advice. My recommendation is that if you do intend to attempt the program, that you search out anybody who has taken it before and talk to them about what to expect.

Having found out Friday morning that I had passed the exam, the next two days of the Conference were a real gas. I will write on it later.

john