After three months of waiting, this year’s Master of Wine results finally arrived in our inboxes last night.
There was heart pounding, a little bit of sweating and shaking as I opened the email. But when you see ‘I am very pleased to tell you that you have been awarded a PASS IN THE THEORY,’ the sense of relief is enormous. I couldn’t face going through that again!
I passed the white tasting paper with a B and narrowly missed out on tasting papers 2 & 3 with a C+ and C- but this year was all about theory and, I am expecting to drink a lot of bubbles this week.
It’s a far cry from my first ever MW essay when I got an E. I called my mum up to tell her I’d got an E because it was the first one in my life! Talk about a steep learning curve!
There are 11 new Masters of Wine today who have passed both exams and the dissertation so well done to them. We’d all like to be in that position.
Study partner, Richard Hemming who works for Jancis Robinson, has also passed his theory so well done to him. If you don’t know him, you’ve got to see this youtube video. It’s hilarious.
The 2011 MW exam, which took place last week, was as tough as always.
If you think you could do it, have a bash at the questions I tackled: you need 65% to pass - and remember to include examples from the old and new world!
Paper 1: The production of wine: part 1
What are the vineyard factors that influence the choice of rootstocks?
Compare and contrast the advantages of organic and non-organic viticulture
What are the options available for the control of acidity in must and wines from selecting the date of harvest to the end of the malolactic conversion?
Paper 2: The production of wine part 2
What factors should influence the choice of a wine’s closure?
What filtration techniques are available to the winemaker after malolactic conversion and before bottling? When and how might each of them be employed?
Critically assess the use of yeast lees in the maturation of both still and sparkling wines.
Paper 3: The Business of Wine
Examine the advantages and disadvantages of remaining a small wine estate
Volume or profit? Examine the options facing multinational wine companies
How can the internet influence the success (or failure) of a wine brand?
Paper 4: Contemporary Issues
How important is the influence of wine journalism in today’s media?
Some say the majority of wine consumers enjoy wine without understanding it. How will this shape the future of the international wine trade?
Auckland’s Royal Easter Show was the highlight of my Easter weekend mainly because it meant I was having a break from MW study, with the exams just six weeks away.
I now know more about alpacas than is healthy and have watched sheep racing competitively over hurdles a.k.a the sheeplechase!
And the size of the cows. I’ve never seen such big’uns except for on Victorian paintings of super-sized cattle. I’m not sure what they were feeding them (steroids?) but they would certainly provide plenty of rump and fillet.
The judging of the cattle was totally foreign to an urban girl like me. The formation of the horn on the Highland cattle, the ‘ease of movement’ and ‘kind eyes’ were all important to the judges. It was like getting a glimpse of another world and another language. Which got me thinking that maybe this is how the average consumer perceives the wine world. Come on, can we really smell cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush and, what does ripe acidity or fine grained tannins mean? I am as guilty as the next wine writer of this but it does make us sound pretty pretentious and excludes your average person in the street.
It’s important not to dumb down but making it seem less fluffy and more accessible would be a positive improvement. Perhaps we need to look at a different way of creating tasting notes that actually mean something to those who don’t spend all day everyday breathing wine (which, is certainly more appealing than breathing in that noxious cattle smell).
The MW seminar week is a Big Brother social experiment. Put 50 students from 13 different countries in a Bordeaux chateau for a week to eat, sleep and study together 14 hours a day (not counting the beer drinking and table football time) and it’s no wonder you leave feeling doo-lally.
My brain hurts and body pleads for no more wine and no more food. Luckily I have a week in the Alps snowboarding to recuperate!
Bordeaux is known for its foie gras, lamb, and duck as well as its world-class wines but instead we were served some typical British pub fare including gammon and pineapple on the first evening, which set the scene for the rest of the week. We were also treated to a pimped up version of a 1970’s classic party dish: remember cheese and pineapple on sticks in a tin foil covered orange? Think bigger. Much bigger. A foot high gold paper-wrapped cone with tropical fruit. What a treat! (If anyone has photographic evidence of this, let me know)
We were also lucky enough to taste a blend of red wine and sodium chloride. Mmmm, salty wine. And that was only one of the 24 wines the AWRI’s oenologist, Geoff Cowey, subjected us to. He managed to redeem himself on the bring-a-bottle evening, however.
So, it was an assault on the brain and the palate – and sometimes not for the right reasons.
However, I now have new friends in Washington DC, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Carcassone, Hungary…Whatever happens on this course, these social experiments are worth your participation.
Master of Wine students will be sitting their exams this week. Thank God I’ve decided not to sit this year as I’ve got a stinking cold – I can’t taste or smell a thing. For those who are taking the four-day nightmare that is the MW exam, good luck to you and, I hope you haven’t got the lurgy. Speaking to a few fellow students, I know they just want it all to be over so they can get their lives back.
On twitter there’s now a hashtag for all the MW students called #MWStudyFacts. If you have a geeky fact, it’s the place to post it.
Following the recent Veuve Clicquot tasting I attended, a Study Fact I learned many moons ago has been upended.
My trusty old Wine and Spirit Eductation Trust Advanced book tells me that non-vintage Champagne must spend 15 months maturing on lees (dead yeast cells) after the second fermentation, giving the distinct biscuitty/yeasty note to the wine. Wikipedia (not exactly the most reliable source) also says 15 months on lees is required.
But Veuve Clicquot’s winemaker, Francois Hautekeur, says this is incorrect. “The laws say it is 15 months between bottling and selling, including a minimum of 12 months on lees and three months for the sugar from the dosage to integrate.” So, for the past five years, have I been misled? Seems so.
Of course, most Champagne houses worth their weight would leave the wine on lees for longer eg 24 months for non-vintage at Veuve but there are surely others who are less scrupulous.