Why you can be Master of Wine yet pour it like a left-handed gorilla
Qualifying exams test your wine tasting, ability to research, and knowledge of the wine industry from vineyard to supermarket shelf - but not wine regions, wine brands nor even how to open a bottle of wine
“Wine theory” exams are something that people outside the wine industry would be forgiven for regarding sceptically. After all, even the most bearded of long macchiato hipsters doesn’t go around referring to “coffee theory” expecting to be taken seriously.
However, in the context of the Master of Wine, the validity of theory exams often goes unquestioned, perhaps because of the sheer volume of output required. In total: five exams taken over four days, most lasting three hours, with two to three essays each. However, because the MW has long remained something of a black box, much confusion remains as to what those 14 hours are spent writing about.
The temptation is naturally to allow this ambiguity to linger, affording anyone who has passed the exams a flattering aura of vinous omniscience. Doing so, however, can elicit some awkward overestimations. For instance, I’ve now been asked a handful of times to help authenticate wines with vaguely suspicious labels (sadly, I really couldn’t, but I’ll pass you on to non-MW but very serious counterfeit expert Maureen Downey who almost certainly can).
Having recently burrowed my way through the theory portion of the MW (the other portions of which are the practical, i.e. tasting, and a research paper) I feel somewhat reasonably placed to try to delimit what MW theory is and isn’t. It is: a theoretical study of growing vines and making wine, packaging and transporting it, marketing and selling it and how all of the above are or might be about to change.
The questions range from the rather expansive, such as this beauty plucked straight from this June’s exam – “How might the costs of growing grapes and managing a vineyard affect the price of a bottle of wine?” – to the rather specific – “What are the causes of grapevine trunk diseases, such as Esca, and what are the best strategies to combat them?” also from the 2015 vintage. These questions must be answered in essays of approximately 700-1,000 words each.
Both of these questions stem from our first paper (viticulture), but reasonably represent the range of knowledge expected. Between the five papers, in which we dig into everything from soil pH to supermarkets, it might come as a surprise to non-MWs that there remains much in the world of wine that sits outside the MW purview.