Becoming a Master of Wine - The beginning of a Journey

About 5 years ago I started on my wine adventure, and it has been great – I traveled to amazing places, tasted great wines and put my career in the direction of this fascinating industry.

Academically I followed the WSET program and I am really proud to have achieved the Diploma in Wine and Spirts this year. (yeah) – my celebration wine you ask? …

But what is next? Is that it?

I have been thinking long and hard about it, because of the overall time and financial commitment, but there is no reason not to try - I want to become a Master of Wine.

The Institute of Master of Wine is, like the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, London based, and next to the Court of Master Sommelier the highest academic wine program worldwide. Sounds great, but that also means the needed knowledge needs to be a quite a notch higher than with the diploma. There is a rigid application process to produce tasting notes and essay structured knowledge about wine. The rest is self-study and 2 years in a row there is a week of examination about all topics wine – tasting included, nothing is off limits. The last step is to write thesis in a wine related topic.

How to start?

I already feel overwhelmed. And I am just preparing for the application.

But here the plan:

I already pulled all available material from the master of wine website. Especially all the past exams.

I made an excel file of all the wines tested and clustered all the questions in groups of similar topics. The plan is to go through them and start writing essays but also study the topic as I go. That way I repeat and add to my learning in terms of pure knowledge but also learn how to structure an essay.

On the wine, it’s a bit more difficult but in the book Beyond Flavour from Nick Jackson – he wrote that he would take 12 wines for the week and taste them every day until he could tell them apart, understand their nature. While that seems like a lot, I understand that’s what it takes to get there – the holy grail.