A wine writer needs a wine education

My good friend and well-respected drinks writer, Henry Jeffreys recently wrote an engaging post titled, “Do wine writers need qualifications?”

It rightly gained a great deal of attention given that both the “writing” and “education” aspects of wine are hotly-discussed amongst winedrinkers.

I’m always quick to read anything Henry writes, but right from the start, this piece caught my eye with the tagline:

After 15 years as a wine autodidact, I am wondering whether it would help to study for some professional qualifications.

What’s interesting is that he and I share a great deal in common as we’re the exact same age (“youthful” GenXers), hold degrees in English Literature, and have been writing professionally about drinks for nearly the same amount of time. Despite this, we each came at the profession in rather different manners.

Henry, being English (thus, European), arrived to writing about drinks and specifically wine via a more self-taught manner. Myself as an American, I actually followed some prescriptive courses and sat exams (some passed, some not) to arrive at my current state of wine knowledge.

This is important to note as the most well-known wine certifications—Wine & Spirits Education Trust, the Court of Master Sommeliers, and the Institute of Masters of Wine—are British institutions. It’s unsurprising given that Europe-wide there is a strong emphasis on earning an excessive amount of degrees and certifications in order to appear qualified to do things. In Spain, where I’m based, this even has a name, “diplomitis”.

In what is a sharp contrast to Europe and, despite having a wealth of universities, Americans usually learn through trial and error paired with the accumulation of collateral damage. There is no better example of this recently than, “Tariffs!” “Um, that’s a horrible idea.” “No way, let’s do it!” “Fine, what’s the worst that could happen.” […] “Oh.”

But to answer Henry’s initial question via my decade and a half in this zany landscape, while the “writing” part is the absolute most crucial element to wine writing, the qualifications aren’t the means to an end, usually.

Separated by a common language

Again, much like Henry, I started with a personal blog but also a bit of writing for a Central & Eastern European wine importer. I could already see back then that I was having to come up for air quite often in terms of wine knowledge and thought about better informing myself.

The reason being that there were a lot of us at that moment, writing about wine in this casual manner, which has to some extent been replicated on Substack as of late. But I could see that there were limits to what was possible in this approach which is why, back in 2011, I pitched a story to the editor of a now-defunct San Francisco publication on becoming a sommelier.

While Bianca Bosker would ultimately write a book on this exact subject in 2017, I never managed to get my article off the ground as I discovered several issues: it would require far more time than what I had to write an article (I was preparing to move from California to Spain), it was going to cost a tremendous amount more than what the article would pay, and lastly, I didn’t understand the difference between the CMS & WSET. The Court of Master Sommeliers was something I didn’t know about (this was a pre-“Somm” world) and as I was looking into WSET courses, this would not have afforded me the frothy title of “sommelier” in the end.

The whole idea was shelved and I reverted to the “learning through the accumulation of collateral damage” method that we Americans do with such great abundance.

Once I was firmly installed in Europe, I was seeing this lack of foundational knowledge in my own writing and especially in that of others who had self-taught their way through wine knowledge. Those who have a family background in wine drinking and/or are inherently good writers can scoot around this lack of knowledge, but it’s still there and it’s going to create gaps and holes where there shouldn’t be in your writing.

It’s for these reasons and more that I decided to revisit the topic and, for reasons that did actually make sense at the time, I chose the Court of Master Sommeliers.

The melding

Now, why would someone who’s a writer go down the service path of sommelier when in fact WSET would make more sense?

My initial investigation into WSET courses in San Francisco had left a bad taste in my mouth. After I’d contacted the schools, they kept “following up” to get me into the classes. It felt a lot like a beach restaurant with a guy who keeps pushing you into the restaurant if you stop to glance at the menu. If the place is good, I don’t need to be cajoled. If you cajole me, I have doubts as to the quality level and I run away.

So, as this was about a decade ago, the CMS reasons were: much cheaper, independent study, and most importantly, “sommelier”.

Spain runs about 5-10 years behind the US in terms of what’s trendy (natural wine has just reached its all-time high) and thus, being able to call yourself a sommelier meant something in a way that WSET simply did not at the time. Most Spaniards can’t even say that acronym correctly, pronouncing it, “vizzet”.

But is this to say that credentials do in fact matter for wine writing? If you need to be called “sommelier” wouldn’t that infer there’s a need to earn this title? For a brief moment in Spain, yes. But everyone, from salespeople at wineries to PR people to social media influencers to enologists to yes, wine writers were dropping “sommelier” into their bios until it had no more meaning. It didn’t actually matter where the qualification was from as long as it was “sommelier”, but this has receded again.

I did both Level 1 & Level 2 of the CMS exams and then attempted Level 3, the Advanced. The problem with the CMS Advanced is that it goes into Bonkers Land. For example, amongst many questions I failed, there was one specifically about Limoux in Languedoc, France as it asked, “What is the main red grape variety for Limoux was and what percentage?” I wrote, Merlot and 50%, which was wrong, it’s Merlot and 45-70%.

Nobody needs to really know these kinds of things as they’re insanely easy to look up in seconds.

But something interesting happened when studying for the Advanced exam as there was one day when suddenly, everything just clicked. I call this, “The Melding” as via dogpiling and processing information in my melon for years, it all finally came together and I understood how to connect all the related points of the wine world together with little effort. It seems simplistic to explain it this way, but once you arrive to it, everything is much easier.

For some people this might happen a lot earlier and for others, a lot later, but the fact is, unless you force yourself to study and gain an actual education of wine, you simply can’t reach this level. Will it make you a great wine writer? That’s definitely not guaranteed in the slightest as there are people with the absolute top qualifications in the industry who can’t write at all. But, this melding allows a plugging of the holes and an ability to be more fluid in what is an exceedingly vast topic.

Ditch the creds

There were other reasons I didn’t pursue any higher credentials. I attempted the Advanced in February of 2020. With the arrival of the pandemic, I lost a great deal of motivation to try it again, especially once I had stumbled into The Melding without realizing that that was what I was after the whole time.

Then of course there were The Somm Seven that were part of the CMS-Americas sex scandal which put myself (and I assume a great many others) off the organization. “Sommelier” doesn’t have the sheen that it once did given the succession of ethical failures the CMS-Americas has accomplished in such a short time.

I’m not alone in throwing in the towel on higher credentials as I know a lot of people have done various phases of wine education and stopped for various reasons. My good friend Kelli White is one of the best examples as she did all the parts of the WSET Diploma, but didn’t finish it and then went on to start the Master of Wine program, but didn’t finish it either due to the pandemic disrupting all the exams. This hasn’t hurt her in the least as she’s been very successful and I don’t think there’s a soul alive that would say, “Oh yeah, what does she know?” as she’s the Director of Education at the Meadowood Center in Napa Valley. Also, check out her latest book.

Henry mentioned only doing the WSET I which he put wonderfully as, “being shown a map of France and pointing out where Burgundy was”. British wine writer, Will Lyons also didn’t finish his WSET. And, if memory serves, Simon Woolf was much like Kelli in doing all the parts of the WSET Diploma but not finishing it. I’m sure there are countless others I don’t know about as for a long time it was the consensus that if you didn’t accomplish these levels of study you were somehow lesser for it, which isn’t the case at all. There’s a personal level that’s different for everyone, but needs to be reached in order to have fluency in the language of wine and ultimately, your words as a wine writer become your credentials.

There’s there other issue at stake in that, a wine writer may also need to check out at some point as you run the risk of being yet another person writing: “this is a white wine with a clear rim, no evidence of gas, silver sheen, aromatic notes of lemon, green apple…”

Via a recent chat with Kelli, she brought up a salient point which is, “The concept of so many wine education systems is that there’s a singular manner in which to understand wines which simply isn’t true.”

And this would be one of the big failings in the current education systems is their rigidity. After all, why in the hell are still taking visual aspect into consideration? That’s at least two if not three decades out of date. It’s for this and many other reasons that, once reaching a certain level of education, checking out of some credential trajectory might be the best thing any wine writer ever does.

Breaking out of the box

One of the more interesting aspects that people brought up in the comments of Henry’s article was that you learn to taste and think about wine in a manner needed to pass an exam that the studies are designed to pass. Creativity is not rewarded.

It was Cape of Good Wine that mentioned,

“You do become regimented because you need to pass a tasting exam. Some people retain that way of tasting and talking about wine. Many find their own voice. More disturbing, for me, is the flood of WSET-trained conclusions that align with institutional expectations and assumptions about traditionally lauded regions/producers.”

And Miles Morland said,

“Does getting a wine qualification actually alter how you evaluate wine?”

I would counter that the dogma of wine education is like studying acting, dancing, or really, any art. There’s a base manner and form you need to master, but you’ll eventually need to break free from this and create your own approach. But again, this isn’t an excuse to skip some kind of wine education altogether as, like with foreign languages, I’ve met plenty of people who have gone the American, “accumulation of collateral damage” method and simply can’t function as the core of the language just isn’t there.

A couple of books, a couple of bucks

So if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s quite clear from countless examples that a wine writer definitely doesn’t need a jumble of letters after their social media bio in order to write. It might get stupid people to stop questioning one’s ability every do often. But, once I was having a glass of wine in London with a female MW once and the sommelier still handed me, the man, the menu despite her company distributing wines to the restaurant.

Ultimately, it was a great point by Kate Reuschel,

“No one cares but those that have them. People outside of wine have zero idea what WSET is, they don’t even understand someone works in wine but isn’t a sommelier.”

There isn’t any alternative to the time needed to invest in some form of wine education but you don’t need to spend thousands and thousands to arrive to a stable bed of knowledge.

If you’re someone who’s a self-starter and doesn’t need the loaded barrel of an exam pointed at your head to study, here’s what you do: buy a copy of World Atlas of Wine and read it from cover to cover, studying the maps. Then, if you want to know how to taste wine, pick up The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting and read it cover to cover, buying some of the wines to taste and understand. If you want extra points, get the Oxford Companion to Wine as well as Beyond Flavour, but both of these are quite advanced and not really all that necessary to build your wine education foundation.

And that’s it. If you can cover these texts in depth on your own, go to tasting events in your area, and ideally visit some of the famous wine regions at some point, you too can achieve this “melding” effect.

If however you need the classes and more defined study parameters, you can read more about the WSET, CMS, etc. to see which is right for you.

Now you must excuse me while I go and change all my social media bios to, “With Merit”. Make of that what you will.