Hi Everyone,
I’ve been collecting a lot of resumes lately. After 5 years with us, our brilliant Director of Operations, Susan Wong, is leaving to be closer to her family in Los Angeles.
So up went a posting on Winejobs.com for a new Business and Operations Manager, and I began to read resumes. There is so much you can’t tell about a person from their resume. Maybe the most important things…(sigh).
I noticed that just about every resume listed WSET as evidence of the employee’s wine knowledge. Which tells me that the person has a view of wine through the binoculars of WSET. But WSET is not the only set of binoculars.
I am not opposed to WSET, of course. I think they’ve raised the general level of wine knowledge around the world. And as a business, they’ve been wildly successful. In 2022, one out of every 14,500 people in the U.S. took a WSET exam. In Singapore, it was one out of 1,500 people, and in Hong Kong it was one out of EVERY 1,000 PEOPLE!
But while WSET teaches you facts and a standardized way of analyzing wine, I’m not sure it teaches you how to think about wine.
In fact, while there are scores of wine writers, wine critics, sommeliers, and wine educators, there are very few wine thinkers—people with original and creative viewpoints; people who see wine in a whole new light (vs. parroting what has already been known and said for decades).
Andrew Jefford is a good wine thinker. So are Matt Kramer, Jon Bonné, Terry Theise, and Tom Wark. Interestingly, none of them have a credential from WSET or from any other organization
I don’t know how you become a good thinker about wine. Maybe you start from a widely-believed assumption and then tear it apart into a thousand pieces, discard 999 of those, and then illuminate and expand on the one gem left. Or maybe you lie on a wine psychiatrist’s couch (metaphorically) and see what sort of creative thoughts and feelings pour out. (I’m pretty sure Terry Theise does it this way).
In any case, I am striving to be a good wine thinker. All the rest is just memorizable knowledge.
On other topics, our Wine to Know in WineSpeed this week was the delicious VILLA MATILDE Falerno del Massico—a savory red from the south of Italy (Campania) which sent me right to the store and then to the kitchen to make some osso bucco.
Those of you who are also WineSpeed readers know I love quizzes and True/False questions. My favorite this week was this True/False: In the United States, a wine label cannot legally depict nudity.
You may be surprised by the answer.
The harvest continues in Napa Valley where I live. Everyone is looking a little exhausted but happy.
—Karen
As a coffee professional this is what I’ve always wandered about any sort certification, thanks for sharing your insightful observations.
From Hong Kong and so much WEST educator and courses here. It seems like the only route to "learn" wine structurally. I took the WSG courses too which I think is much better. My blog. https://winesnobbery.net/