I continue to slog ahead in the WSET Diploma still wines
unit. The amount of information is
completely overwhelming. I am hopelessly
behind after my two week stretch zonked out on Nyquil, Robitussin, Espresso and
Whiskey. I knew I was in a real tight
spot conceptually a week ago. It is one
thing to feel like things have gotten away from you as an overall idea. "Yeah, I got to pick it up over here." It reminds me of being that guy in a college
history course that hasn’t opened the book yet with the exam creeping ever
closer. Whereas the rest of the class is
drilling down on the designs of the Bayeux Tapestry, I’m the guy that is
listening to Circle Jerks records, drinking beer, and not totally sure of where
France is even located on a map. Well, that’s not
completely accurate. I spend almost
every free moment reading wine texts and doing tastings on obscure wines. I just can’t do it fast enough to keep up. I'm not retaining enough information because I might be slightly brain damaged.
It all became evident that things had gotten out of hand
when I received a practice test for the week from my online classroom. Let me give you a feel for it. One of the questions is this:
With reference to the wines of Europe, write
about FIVE of the following:
- Assyrtiko
- Dolcetto
- Grüner
Veltliner
- Hárslevelü
- Mencia
- Scheurebe
Uh-oh. If I was in the exam, I would stand up and walk out of the room directly to the airport. It would be somehow more noble than the answers I would provide. Off the top of my head, my answer would be something along
these lines.
Assyrtiko I assume is
something Greek. I’ve never had it. That’s because I don’t eat Greek food and no
store near me carries Greek wine because there are about a million other wines
in the same price point that are better.
I’d drink it if they offered cups of it at gyro carts near crummy bars I
guess. Dolcetto is the Italian red wine that people drink in Piedmont when
they are sitting around a café eating sausage and hard cheese and that’s what
the café offers by the glass. You’d
rather have a Barbera, or a Barberesco/Barolo but you don’t want to spend $65+
on a bottle that your dipshit friend that is with you won’t even
appreciate. They call it “the little
sweet one”, which was sort of a way to con the peasants into thinking this
clearly inferior wine to the others in the region was just fine for them. Gruner
Veltliner was every East Coast somm’s favorite white wine for about a
minute because no one had heard of it and it made them seem cool to recommend
it. It’s acidic and citrusy. It’s pretty good but why not just get a Riesling
instead? It’s usually much better. Let that douchebag somm with the waxed beard
sell Gruner to tourists in Brooklyn. Harslevelu is a grape used in a wine
that you get poured at your ethnic early 20’s girlfriend’s house by her
grandfather who made it in the garage.
His could rip the paint off a car.
It burns your throat so badly that from that point on you sing like Tom
Waits. From that one experience, you
never touch the stuff again. When
blended with furmint it makes a beautiful dessert wine the Russian Royals
enjoyed after a nice day of genocide on their people. Communism was no good for Harslevelu. Tough to sell sweet wine in Hungary to people
that couldn’t afford potatoes. Harslevelu
is now noteworthy in America for being in the one very dusty bottle of Tokaji on
the bottom shelf in the same general area as where they keep Marsala in most
decent wine shops. Mencia is the new cool grape from Spain that is like a low rent
Zin. No one has heard of it as the Bierzo
region where it comes from is like the West Virginia of Spain. This is what those D-bag Gruner Veltliner
somms moved onto after they realized other guys with waxed beards were also
trying to sell Gruner to everyone. A
good thing to say if you want to sound cool in DC is “I had this amazing
organic Bierzo last night. 100%
Mencia. Hand harvested. Fucking killer.”. Scheurebe
is a super obscure German/Austrian grape that was some unholy science
experiment by the Dr. Mengele of grape doctors in Germany. It’s this very aromatic grape that they make sweet
wines that no one is interested in because no one is interested in the even
better sweet wines they make from Riesling or Muscat or gewürztraminer either. If you
find this in a wine shop it got there by mistake, or some wine sales rep was
trying to win a sales contest and shoved it down the poor wine buyer’s throat.
My gut feeling is that the answers I just provided will not
fly amongst the WSET grading staff.
While my answers are not technically wrong, and I have, in fact, “written”
about these wines, I don’t think the tone and/or tenor of my answers are what
they are looking for in an exam format. If you want to get down to it, they are asking
you to “write about” these topics. So if
I answer with something like “It was the 8th of July and I was on a
chopper outside of Fresno drunk to the gills on Scheurebe I had clipped from a
BevMo when the cops started chasing me.” I think it is technically “writing
about” scheurebe. I don't know though. Once again, I might
need to focus on retaining more info on the actual grape and resulting
wines. I think my writing style and current focus might be an issue at WSET.
It’s a hell of a thing I’ve gotten myself into…
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