A review of the WSET Advanced exam.
After 16 weeks of classes and a recommended 100 hours of self-study, my knowledge of wine so far was put to the test recently in a 2 1/2 hour exam.
The exam was held in a lecture room at Napier University, Craiglockhart campus - a good half hour bus ride to the edge of the city. I arrived early to find most of my fellow students sitting on the grass outside - some cramming in a little last-minute revision, others had decided like myself that if they didn't know it by now, the next 10 minutes wouldn't help much.
Exam time came and in we all went. One of our course tutors was adjudicating and she carefully explained how to fill in all the bumf and checked all our I.D's (photo ID is required - apparently in case anyone sends their Master of Wine friends along to sit the exam for them). We were ready to start.
First up was the Tasting paper - 25 marks available for each of two wines, based on writing a blind tasting note using the Systematic Approach. I found out later that our wines were an Alsace Gewurztraminer and a Californian Zinfandel. The first was obviously much easier to identify and quite delicious I might add. A real confidence boost. I thought the Zinf was fairly poor in quality - making it much trickier. No big deal though, since identifying the wine is only 2 of the available 25 marks. 55% needed to pass this part.
A quick break then straight into the theory paper. 50 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions, again 55% was the pass mark. The first question was about a sparkling wine AC in France. I had NO IDEA. Not such a confident start for me. Things picked up though and I was soon drawing neat little lines in the neat little boxes with all the confidence of an MW. The written paper was much bigger than I had expected - 5 long answer questions worth a lot of marks. A surprise for me was a big chunk of points to score for knowing the the legal stuff about selling alcohol in the UK, with a lot of governmenty responsible-drinking jargon. Also, a huge question on Fortified wine felt a little out of proportion to the amount of study in that area.
And that was basically that. I left before a few people but a few had already finished. Now a rather agonising 8 - 12 weeks until the results plop through my letterbox in a big brown envelope.
Fingers crossed.
