If I claimed the days leading up to doomsday (aka MW exam results day) weren’t filled with blistering anxiety about this column, it would be one of the larger untruths I’ve ever attempted. As the day approached, my ego amused itself with fantasies of writing about another subject entirely (rootstocks or something), slipping “oh, and I didn’t pass” in the last sentence and hoping nobody noticed.
Anybody who’s studied something for long enough can likely empathize with my conundrum. No matter how much love you bear a subject to start with, by the time you are several years in, the topic – however sexy – has lost its luster.
The origin story of this week’s column is especially dear to me because it is an ode to the bliss of a Master of Wine student’s post-exam life. You see, in order to preserve the sensitivity of my olfactory instrument (nose), I swore off perfume for about two and a half years (with, I confess, the occasional guilty lapse on very special occasions, like non-wine dinners).
I should have sensed that something was amiss. The sun was shining, Master of Wine exams over, and I was feeling, if not quite like I was walking on air (something I suspect is impossible after three days of punishing exams), like all was reasonably well in a decent version of all possible worlds.
With only about a month remaining before my MW tasting exams as I wrap up this article, the pressure is now somewhere on the dial between 10 and 11. I remember from about this time last year that this is when most of us begin to show subtle (and some less subtle) signs of wear – under-eye bags more than usually baggy, spines like typhoon-battered tree trunks from shuttling about weighty tomes and cases of wine, teeth perpetually black from daily tasting.
One question that never seems to get old when you reveal to people that your version of studying involves tasting lots of different types of wine is “you must drink loads of good wine then?” Regrettably, this truly isn’t the case (at least, not while I’m studying). Loathe as I am to play the consummate wine snob, even my well-exercised liver simply lacks the capacity to process whole bottles of the myriad (many, sadly, rather average) wines that I’m required to know intimately in order to pass the Master of Wine tasting exams.
After weeks of trying to channel How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Master of Wine Exam, I’ll capitulate and revisit one of my many exam lowlights. Most people’s exams don’t involve alcoholic beverages (at least not concurrently), but I imagine everyone can recall an exam question that made them want one.
Blind tasting has always been, I must confess, one of the banes of my vinous existence. While some Master of Wine students and particularly Master Sommeliers (a totally separate undertaking with its own London-based HQ, the Court of Master Sommeliers) take to blind tasting like chardonnay to oak barrels, I view it as a necessary evil.
“Wine theory” exams are something that people outside the wine industry would be forgiven for regarding skeptically. After all, even the most bearded of long macchiato hipsters doesn’t go around referring to “coffee theory” expecting to be taken seriously.
For everyone even remotely related to the wine trade, the final quarter of the year is not primarily about the approach of Christmas (though our already heavily-bedecked shopping malls clearly feel differently), nor Thanksgiving, Diwali, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Singles Day or any other cultural (!) celebration.