WSET: Officially Advanced!!!

23 01 2012

Ten weeks and a day (but who’s counting) after I tasted and wrote my way through the Wine & Spirits Education Trust’s Advanced Exam, I officially got my results from WSET headquarters in London.  Thankfully, they were worth waiting for, on both the theory side and the tasting side:

Woooooooooo!!!!

I now have a fancy certificate (which I’m not allowed to reproduce in any form, hence the substitute pic of the boring accompanying letter above) to hang in my not-yet-built wine cellar, a somewhat-less-fancy green pin and a heck of a load off my mind…I think I was more nervous about this exam than I was when I wrote the LSAT.

An anticlimactic but hard-fought pin.

According to the WSET website, I can now work “in the drinks and hospitality industries in a supervisory capacity” (who’s hiring?  🙂 ) and, more importantly, apply to the WSET to use the “WSET Certified Advanced” logo on my letterhead and business cards!  I am totally doing this.  This has completely made my week.  I will crack and write about a suitable celebration bottle shortly, but for now I’m just going to sit back, savour the moment and thank my lucky stars that my tuition money didn’t go to waste.  Cheers!!

 

 





WSET

25 05 2011

With any luck, in a couple of weeks I’ll be removing all of your lingering doubts about reading a wine blog written by an uninitiated hack; if everything goes according to plan, by then I’ll be at least a semi-initiated hack.  Starting this weekend I’m taking my first ever formal wine education course:  I’m signed up for the Wine & Spirit Education Trust’s Intermediate Certificate in Wines and Spirits course here in Calgary.  I’m extremely excited, not only to lend some much-needed legitimacy to this poor site, but to learn a more systemic approach to tasting and evaluating wine that should improve both my analytical skills and my appreciation for what I’m drinking.  Even better:  we get to practice this tasting method in class by trying over 50 wines in a 3 day period!  Now THAT’s what I call a weekend. Read the rest of this entry »