What Functional Ambivalent Will Be Doing the Next Couple of Days

Early this year, I decided to take a wine course. I shopped around and found a lot of "Wine for Beginners" courses that seemed more like excuses to go out drinking than they were actual academic programs. I also found a bunch of certificate-granting programs geared toward more serious interests. After considering various options, I settled on a home-study course developed by the Wine & Spirit Educational Trust (WSET) in London.

It took a certain amount of persuasion to get the school to accept me as a student. The course I wanted to take -- the Level 3 Advanced Certification -- is not one for which I'm technically eligible. It's designed for people in the wine and spirits industry, which I'm not, and it's designed for people who've taken the Level 2 course, which I haven't. But the Level 2 seemed too easy and hobbyist-oriented, and after a couple of long phone calls that included a lot of pop-quiz style questions, they let me in and sent me the literature.

I'm taking the course with Robert, a friend whose extensive wine cellar I've previously reported looting. Since early April, we've been getting together and tasting various wines on the class list. We generally tasted five to seven wines a week, and we rarely missed a week. We were able to do so without taking out second mortgages because a couple of wine hangouts here in town indulged us by selling us tasting pours of wines they don't normally sell by the glass.

Because it is a professional course, it is about the business of wine more than it is about the aesthetics of wine. Thus, the wines on the list are not all good. We've muscled our way through wines so bad they're nearly indescribable, the low point being Retsina, a traditional Greek wine that hearkens back to the days when wine was stored in tar-lined amphorae. Retsina is a novelty, of sorts, and the real heavy lifting was the week after week of wines from Bulgaria, Lebanon and other unlikely places.  In one stretch, we went three weeks without tasting a single wine we would've drunk if it weren't required, arriving finally at an inexpensive Alsatian Riesling that was like coming ashore after weeks lost at sea. I assure you: No wine ever tasted better than that wine tasted to us that night.

Our non-tasting homework has been memorizing wine laws and traditions of vinification for just about every place in the world where wine is produced. I can list, in tedious detail, the production requirements for deutscher tafelwein, identify the botrytised  sweet wines of the Anjou-Saumur, and explain the labeling requirements for any wine to be sold in the European Union. If you would like to know the capacity of the traditional pot still in Armagnac or the proper treatment of a nematode-infested vineyard, I'm your boy.

Memorization is not one of my best things, and I have to work really hard to retain the foreign-language names of grapes, towns and even hillsides that I'm expected to know. Sitting in the last row of an airplane coming in for a landing, after having spent the flight memorizing the major villages of Burgundy, I closed my eyes and mouthed over and over silently, "Gevrey-Chambertain, Vougeot, Vosne-Romanee, Nuits St. Georges, Aloxe-Corton..." After the flight touched down, the person next to me asked if I always prayed during landings.

People are fascinated that I'm learning all of this. Or, at  least, they're fascinated until I display my vast knowledge. Over Thanksgiving, my brother asked about a bottle of Spanish red I'd brought to share. I automatically went into a discussion of the wine that included information about the thickness the Monastrell grape's skin and the temperature at which it was likely fermented to get the fruity result we were all enjoying. I realized, looking  at his horrified face, that what he really wanted to know was how much it cost, and that I could have made him happy just saying, "$11."

Since I started taking this course, the people I've talked with about it have all asked me what I will get when I'm done with it. Most of them ask, "Will you be a sommelier?" I never had an answer for them, until I watched my brother's reaction to my discourse on that $11 Spanish wine. Now I have an answer: When I'm done with this course, I will be a freak and a bore. This achievement has cost me, to date, over $1,000.

Tomorrow Robert and I will travel to Cleveland, of all places, where our wine knowledge will be tested. Robert has the kind of intelligence that enables him to look things over a couple of times and remember them. I forget my children's names. I have been studying like a demon for six months; he picked up the book a couple of weeks ago and has been studying only off and on since then -- mostly, I gather, in the bathroom.

Anyone want to guess who's going to pass and who isn't?

Wish me luck.

Comments

[Lee]

Best of luck. I knew you loved wine...

[Frank]

Good luck becoming a pretentious ass. Or maybe at long last just certifying what you have always been.

Seriously, though, good luck.

[kamenin]

Retsina is hardly drinkable at all -- unless you drink it somewhere in the sunny Greek countryside in some traditional setting with Greek food, and then, magically, everything is well.

What's the meaning of knowledge, anyway, if you can't bore other people with it, so, good luck!

[Wally]

You have my cell phone # if you need a "lifeline." But remember, with my decades-long head start I'll always be more of a pretentious bore than you.

[Squidley]

I think the key to enjoying retsina is twofold: one, like kamenin says, is to drink it with Greek food, for which it is eminently suited. The other is to not think of it as wine!

[Squidley]

P.S.: Good luck!

[Pursuit]

Totally cool dude. I'm enormously jealous! Will begin looking into the course tomorrow.

Interestingly, I've developed the ability to be pretentious without actually knowing anything. So if the test doesn't go well send 5 hundy my way and we can get started.

Good Luck!