Wine & Spirit Education Trust or WSET has been providing certified wine education and training since 1969. Founded in London, the program is now offered in 66 countries including the London Wine & Spirits School in the U.K.
Through 5 levels (including a 2 year diploma) students learn all about wine regions, grape varieties and food pairings; all of which come along with a whole lot of wine tasting. While you may not be a Master Sommelier in the end, WSET certification is a significant qualification in wine for a curious enthusiast or industry professional.
All WineCollective staff have completed WSET courses and received some level of qualification in wine training, enabling us to choose great wines to deliver to your front door! Over the past few weeks, Larissa completed her Level 2 certification – though we’re still waiting to hear if she passed or not 😉
The Level 2 course goes into further detail of everything learned in Level 1. If you already have a great understanding of wine, you are able to skip Level 1 and move directly into Level 2.
“Looking Behind the Label” – Level 2 WSET
The course focuses on production, quality, grape varieties, styles of wine (including sparkling and sweet) and even spirits. Even more, how a bottle’s label can help you determine quality, variety, production, etc.
At times, reading a label (especially from the Old World) requires some previous wine knowledge, all taught during the course. For example, to determine the label and wine above, the consumer would need to know that Chablis is a sub-region of Burgundy and that the key white grape variety in Burgundy is Chardonnay. Chablis wines particularly must be 100% Chardonnay, normally unoaked.
WSET’s Level 2 goes very into detail about grape varieties, bulk production, which regions they thrive in and the variety of styles and characteristics they can take on. During the 3 days of Larissa’s course, she tasted over 50 wines from around the world using WSET’s Systematic Approach to Tasting Wine, which should already be quite familiar to WineCollective members.
To Larissa’s surprise, the recent course had only several industry professionals taking part. The majority of students were wine lovers looking to expand their wine knowledge, including a WineCollective member!
We encourage all of our members to check out WSET courses available in their city through Approved Programme Providers. Larissa took her course through Fine Vintage LTD which offers regular courses and levels through out the year in most Canadian cities.
For more information, visit WSET, or contact us for classes in your city.
Happy Tasting!