My Fair Lady, The Master of Wine Exam

As some of you already know, I am a candidate for the Master of Wine– a hellacious exercise in British writing and manners that supposedly leads to glory and lots of great free wine. The idea is that you go into the program like Pygmalion’s Eliza Doolittle and you come out a civilized young lady who can work in a flower shop and eat lots of chocolates.  In other words, the IMW is Rex “quit snivelling you squashed cabbage leaf” Harrison and the student is Audrey “Im a good girl i am” Hepburn.

One must take a minimum of two years to prepare for the reaming of the first exam– which one indubitably fails. One can then take the exam for several subsequent years before the Institute of Masters of Wine essentially says “You really have no way in hell of ever passing this exam, now please sod off!” Americans apparently take failure particularly badly because there are only like 26 in the U.S. (I think the lack of basic grammar provided in the schools here has an effect, think Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady singing “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak!, in some parts of the world they haven’t spoken it in years, in america english completely dissappears!).

The exam is broken into roughly two parts– the practical and theory. This year, the former section put the “practical” into “practically no-one passes.” I believe nine people passed world wide out of over a hundred people who sat the exam. For each of the first three days of the exam, one is poured 12 glasses of wine. The first day is whites, the second day red, and the third is “mixed bag,” aka. everything from madeira and ports, to champagne, to Mateus. Then one is asked SAT like questions about the wines. I.E. “Wines 1-4 are from the same country, and year, for each wine provide the country, year, varietal, region, and method of production.”

The Theory section of the exam takes place over four days and is an essay exam. The first two days deal with winemaking and viticulture, the third about the business of wine, and the fourth deals with broader, more philosophical questions. A question for one of the first two days might be “Evaluate the role of sulfur in the winery.” Something seemingly benign yet layered with great difficulty when you take into account the range of wines and regions in the world. A third day exam question might be “Are supply and demand inbalances inevitable in the wine industry?”

Through some stroke of luck, or by sheer mass of writing, I managed to pass the Theory side of the exam on the first time around. That said, I completely bombed the Practical, the section for which I thought I was most prepared. This essentially means that I have another year of tasting a huge number of wines from all over the world in both blind and non-blind settings.

It would be really helpful to retype out my notes and I thought the winery blog would be a good forum to post notes on the wines I taste. When I am tasting in group format I will do my best to gauge the groups reaction to the wines as well. So, for the rest of the year, until the exam takes place again in June, I will be posting my notes under the MW tasting prep page under the pages column. Since I taste so many wines and many notes read similarly I also assign a score for myself to the wine. I will include those here as well, but please take into account that is my way of evaluating a wines quality to myself, and other people will probably see things differently. Unlike other rating systems I take price and origin into account. For instance, if I think a Second Growth Bordeaux does not live up to its reputation or price it may get a low score even if by a strict qualitative measure it might be quite good. Conversely, if I find a delicious $10 Beaujolais do not be surprised to see a high score. Wine, for me and for the exam, is about typicity and quality. Thus, this may be the only place you will see Jean Foillard Morgon Cote du Py Cru Beaujolais get 100 points! In any case, I hope it is something that interests you. If you have had the same wines, or have questions or comments please feel free to make your thoughts known!

Just remember, as any MW should know, the claim that “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” is just not true. Otherwise we would we not have all those tasty, low-priced Monestrells available to us these days….