Grape & Grain | Master of Wine? I doubt it, when I can make a mistake like this in an exam

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.

Then, with the thudding inevitability of death and hangovers, came the blow. I was waiting for a taxi to whisk me away for an afternoon of blissful wine-free leisure, when one of my friends who took the exam broke our pre-agreed silence.

“I’m embarrassed to admit it,” said friend, “but I just didn’t spot those two Bordeaux.”

“Bordeaux plural?” I chuckled in slight disbelief, for I remembered the single (delicious) white Bordeaux from paper 1, but nowhere did I have two Bordeaux. And then suddenly it clicked; all was plunged into gloom.

For the record, missing a classic like Bordeaux in an MW exam is like missing Groucho’s lines in a Marx Brothers’ movie, or failing to find “x” in a quadratic equation. Such an extreme effort is made to flag the Bordeaux with very specific questions rarely asked of less familiar regions, like the vintage, individual villages, etc, that it takes a unique feat of imaginative scepticism – something at which I apparently excel – to miss them. Though even before tasting the wines I’d initially guessed Bordeaux based purely on the question structure, in the crunch of the last 15 minutes I’d convinced myself the wines came from two separate regions and so plummeted off in another direction.