June 12, 2013

*insert obligatory “this week has gone by so fast” statement here*

2 more weeks until the exam.

2 more weeks.

Part of me is freaked out, but part of me feels confident that I can pass this thing if I took it right now – I think I’m currently in the solidifying phase, where I’m cementing my knowledge by going through everything and cross-referencing my knowledge using other books. It’s tedious, but it’s also the same phase of studying where you read it and mentally fill in the blanks, and you know it well enough that you can finally recite it. So that’s great.

Not much has happened during the week besides studying, some festivals, and the Game of Thrones finale.… read more

June 5, 2013

It was maybe around Thursday evening. My body gradually felt all grey and pained – an omen of an impending sickness. Immediate panic, because clogged sinuses and fried smell receptors is the equivalent of my athlete friends spraining their ankles, and who wants to read out tasting notes when you can’t even smell?! BODY, HEAL! Thursday would be the best time to get sick anyways, because it’s the farthest from the next Wednesday.

Despite my attempts to be healthy, along with battles of constant air conditioning at work and an all-too-optimistic container of Jugo Juice, I was able to breathe by today’s class but my smell receptors remained fried. We had Saint-Estèphe.

Saint-Estèphe.

I could catch hints of things time to time in the glass.… read more

May 29, 2013

I’m not going to say it was so much of a “busy week”, because I feel like that has the connotation that I am channeling the spirit of a hectic businesswoman from a stock photo.

But really. Week 8. Out of 12.We’re almost done this section and I feel like we’ve hardly started. Which, in retrospect, is a big lie, because some of those viticulture classes felt as long as a vintage. I gotta study hard, because those grapes aren’t going to ripen themselves.

Saturday was my fake birthday shindig – a smaller number of people were invited because I thought it would rain and I would have to shove everyone inside, but the gods were good and there were some clouds worthy of desktop wallpapers in the sky.… read more

May 22, 2013

The clouds have finally succumbed to rain. And it indeed is raining, and it sure was a bittersweet walk home from the Canada Line and WSET Diploma class with a hat and a thickish flannel. Unfortunately since a couple of days ago, weather forecasts have been hinting to an identical sort of weather for my fake birthday shindig this Saturday (since my real birthday was during exam time), which is okay, because we’ll be inside, we’ll be drinking Spatlese followed by less exciting things, and maybe we’ll do other fun things like I’m not sure yet. We’ll probably just end up playing Resistance.

Today’s WSET Diploma class was about everything from the alcoholic fermentation to the bottling – mostly things like must adjustments, barrel fermentation, stabilization, fining, filtering – all that fun stuff.… read more

This week went by just as fast as the last, but it already feels so far away. Was it already last last Monday when we had that summer-like heat? Jesus – some friends and I tried to go to the beach last Friday. Not that it was unsuccessful, or anything, because we went, but it was cloudier than we expected and slightly cooler. Which – whatever. I go to the beach as much as I don’t drink, so this was a big deal. I just find it such a hassle to get there and back, but going to the beach more often is definitely one of my sad little goals for the next couple of months. Because making it a summer goal to go the beach more is like making a goal to throw more snowballs in winter.… read more

Oh my Jancis. This pizza of a week has gone by so fast that I hardly remember what the toppings were.

My main free days include Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, meaning, realistically, that I should have at least half of those days dedicated to WSET studying and say maybe half of it for fun, while all other studying has to be squirrelled away before or after work. The material for this week was the largest section for the Viticulture unit and so I didn’t get the readings thoroughly done, so I’ll have to catch up somehow, even though this Friday is self-proclaimed beach day with the friends and I’m excited because I’m making experimental sandwiches. Experimental sandwiches. You can’t not enjoy the beach on a beautiful day in a month that high schoolers won’t have infested yet.… read more

First: happy birthday, blog! An excuse to open wine is all that’s good for. Moving on.

I think I’m beginning to get into a real groove of studying for this course. Weirdly, I’m using some studying techniques from high school which take a long time to actually do, but I think that the information sticks to my brain like Australian Shiraz sticks to the glass.

I’m just a touch behind on my study schedule, since I aimed to have studied and read all of the first element of the WSET study guide (viticulture) by today. But all is well, since I studied everything I needed to study for today’s lecture, which was essentially a consolidating class – i.e. one of those classes where I would silently complete the sentences of the instructor and subsequently feel both awesome and awkward, but mostly awkward for being that guy.… read more

Although my “background” is in “science”, I can’t help but be fascinated by the business side of wine. The hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of different wines can be nearly identical in chemical makeup (but differing in concentrations and subtle flavour compounds), meaning that such a global product is heavily dependent on marketing.

The label is the one thing you can fully control – the prices are taxed, and the buyers and agents (and the government, for that matter) pretty much make or break your availability in markets. It’s tough being a bottle of booze.

So, this week’s class was about marketing and consumer trends. Each of the wines that we tasted were chosen to display a scale of quality, the strategies their brands attempted to achieve, and the markets that these products were aimed towards.… read more

First: yesterday, the books I ordered came in the mail! Happy birthday, me!

Really exciting, though. The super thick Wine Grapes is an exhaustive list of the main commercial grapes in the wine world, compiled by Jancis Robinson MW, Julia Harding MW, and José Vouillamoz. So, pretty much a Pokedex for grapes. There are only a handful of individuals in the world who have been born in a precise generation to be able to understand analogies that bridge wine grapes and Pokemon. Magikarp and Nebbiolo? Eevee and Loire Chenin Blanc?! The possibilities.

The latter book, Grapes & Wines by Oz Clarke and Margaret Rand, is a little bit friendlier in a sense that it reminds me of those small quasi-encyclopedias with pictures that I always used to read as a child.… read more

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but finally. It’s been the same length of a human pregnancy since I’ve completed the WSET Advanced Certification, and I’m super stoked to be diving right into the WSET Diploma, even though some people pretty much consider it death. Pre-prepping for this through this past semester of university was tricky and hellish.

(First, the shitty details that don’t matter: the windows are behind us instead of beside us so I can’t gaze and doze off: both good and bad. For a lack of another good detail I’m just going to go ahead and say the lighting is good. Gotta assess that colour.)

What’s cool is that there are only about 10 of us in the room.… read more