Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Spanish Wine Course: Update

As I mentioned previously, I registered for the Spanish Wine Educator's course. Today, I received what appears to be the course book for the class, a series of .pdf files totaling roughly 200 pages or so. The pages have a lot of colorful pictures of Spain. They almost look like slides.

The materials also provide a slightly different schedule than that provided on their website. The most significant change is the addition of a session on "Climate Change & Wine." The materials also indicate that we will get to taste over 40 different Spanish wines during the class.

There is also a little more information on the two tests, Theory and Practical, which we will take. The Theory exam will consist of 50 multiple-choice questions and we will have an hour to complete it. The Practical exam will be the blind tasting of six wines. We will have to identify the grape, discuss the wine making techniques and quality of the wine. We receive 45 minutes to complete that exam. The Practical exam will likely be the harder of the two, at least for me as I have little experience with blind tasting.

I will definitely start reading and studying the materials now to get a head start. There is plenty of information on those 200+ pages so waiting to begin would not be wise.

Have any other wine bloggers decided to sign up for the class?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I attended the course last year, and found it worth while. There is a lot covered in a few days so go through the material before hand.

Richard Auffrey said...

Thanks for the info. How difficult were the two exams?

Unknown said...

There is a lot of information given out in the two days. I would spend time going over the material. The questions are similar to and about the same level as WSET advanced. The exams where not easy, and some of the people in my class had a hard time with the exam.