I found out yesterday that I passed my last exam of the two-year WSET Diploma program. I re-read the email so many times, I actually screengrabbed it and made it my phone lock screen at one point (though I didn’t trust the image because I couldn’t refresh it, as if the results could somehow be redacted if the announcement email wasn’t connected to internet.) Read the full article.
After a bit of a hiatus from writing, you can now find posts in which I dispense my very best and most serious wine career advice on the website of my WSET Level 3 alma mater, the wonderful Napa Valley Wine Academy. Read the full article.
First things first: In late August I made the decision to leave Chicago and move to Oregon to work a harvest. Like most of the major life decisions I’ve made, it all came together pretty rapidly––we’re talking about a three-day window between “I should just work a harvest in Oregon” and giving notice at work––but between feeling completely disconnected from the winemaking side of the industry and nature/mountains/green spaces in general, my recently developed conviction that Oregon is making some of the most exciting wine in the world at present, and a sweet harvest gig offer that I couldn’t turn down, plus being known to enjoy a Craft Beverage and looking pretty good in flannel, I knew as soon as I signed my offer letter and made the announcement to my loved ones that this was the right decision. Read the full article.
I took my WSET Unit 3 exam on June 14 in South San Francisco. It was a very long day: most of us arrived outside the examination room around 8 and chatted nervously until we were allowed to take our seats sometime after 9 (I stopped looking at the clock and was just furiously checking my notes), and the blind tasting portion began sometime after 10. The tasting portion took a couple of hours, after which we broke for lunch and then came back for three hours of essay questions. By the time I got out I was ready for a drink. Fortunately a close friend in Alameda suggested we meet at a winery. Somehow I was not sick of wine by that point. Maybe I’ll never get sick of wine. Read the full article.
With my WSET Diploma Unit 3 exam looming in the not-so-distant future, I’ve been practicing writing essays on a variety of wine industry topics, and friends suggested I post them here. This question asks for examples of how Italian winemaking south of Rome has become an increasingly high-quality source for value wines.
With northern Italy and Tuscany often stealing the spotlight, it can be easy to forget about southern Italian regions like Basilicata, Calabria, and Abruzzo,❉ but thanks to international interest in Italy’s local grapes plus a new generation of winemakers dedicated to better site and clonal selection, updating wine equipment, and focusing more on low-yield quality than high quantity of production, such regions are turning out some really nice everyday values that show local character.
Read the full article.