Nurse the Hate: Master of Wine Chase

 

A couple months ago I took the entrance exam for the Master of Wine program.  I had expected to take the exam last year after spending a long weekend in Dublin at an introductory seminar.  I sat next to a guy who was Scottish that lived in Germany which resulted in him having an accent that was impenetrable.  I laughed at almost all of his jokes though I can admit now that I only understood about every eighth word.  He would lean in now and again and say something like "Dah... Ehh ohh duh jah rah doh" and smile.  Frankly his enthusiasm carried it for me.  He called a Pommard something crazy like a Napa Cabernet in a blind, but he seemed pretty with it for the most part and helped close down a pub with me at the end of the weekend.  Good bloke (as they say).

In theory I would have gone to Austria to take this exam in 2020, which is a test to see if they will let you take a bunch of more tests and write a very involved paper across the next 3-5 years.  At the end of all of these impossible tests, if you somehow prove your mettle, you could become the 420th Master of Wine in the world across 31 countries.  Obviously, this is no fucking cake walk.  The problem with this subject, like most any other subjects in which one immerses themselves, is that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.  I have passed that blissful stage when I felt like I was an expert, and despite knowing ten times as much as I did then, I have even less confidence that I know anything at all.  It makes me wonder if Picasso was at his easel after decades of transformation and thought "Fuck... I'm a fraud." or if Bob Dylan picked up a guitar in the late 1990s filled with the fear of knowing too much.  Maybe that's why rock musicians so often write their best material when they're young and don't have any idea of what they are doing.  

Covid harpooned my trip to Austria to take the exam last year.  This is a shame for two reasons.  1.  I really like Austria, and it would have been a great excuse to waltz around with purpose.  When's the last time you had an excuse to go to Austria?  2.  There can't be that many more high stakes reasons for me to fly across the earth for a winner take all sit down at a table.  Doors and options continue to shut close in the world of the aging man.  If nothing else, I have nerves of steel, and I would have liked to walk into that room for this test in a completely foreign atmosphere.  No one is more American than me in jeans and boots in an Austrian wine test.  Alas, I wound up doing that exam this year like everything is done in 2021, via an online app.     

I took the test in July.  I haven't received the result.  I open my email each morning awaiting word from the London based organization.  "Sorry chap, you're out!" or "Good day.  We are pleased to welcome you to a chance to fail sometime in the future.".  I assume, like all of Europe, they are somehow off all August, living comfortable lives in Southern France or Ibeza while I am bobbing in an anxiety pool of grim despair in the American digital work force.  Eventually someone across the pond will have a spot of tea and politely yet sternly tell me my fate.  It has to be next week sometime.  They have to eventually go back to their officially sanctioned work stations.

There are only two potential results.  If I failed, I will re-double my efforts and take it again.  If I passed, I am now on a one year beatdown where I need to immerse myself in wine facts and tedium unlike ever before.  For fuck's sake, I took a winemaking and fermentation chemistry class last winter just so I could get a better grasp of the process.  I made five gallons of Semillon in my garage.   Normally if you make booze in your garage, you're a fucking hillbilly, BUT because it is Semillon, it's possible to pass it off as an academic pursuit.  Sure, that's a goddamn lie, but it's POSSIBLE to MAKE THE ARGUMENT.  Either way, I am trying to give myself a fighting chance to pass these exams.

I am proceeding as if I have already been accepted into this program.  Every night, when you are watching Netflix or putting firecrackers in toads or whatever it is that you do, I am sitting in my windowless basement office grinding away.  I am reading about viticulture.  I don't even like to garden, and I now have opinions about rootstocks and soil compositions.  I am doing a deep dive on Spanish wine.  I'm not talking Rioja here.  I am looking at Vino de Pagos like Dehesa del Carrizal.  I am remembering names the Spanish give the winds like the Levante.  Side note, next time a massive storm blows down a tree on my asshole neighbor I will refer to it as "The Will Of The Levante".  Chew on that Jerry.  This wine shit never ends.  The more you learn, the more it becomes obvious that "mastery" of the subject is as elusive as a ghost farting in the wind.  So, what am I doing?

Ultimately, the real reward is the chase.  If I never pass these exams, I still will not have completely failed.  The exercise of gaining the knowledge is the gift.  The shiny pin at the end is only a symbol of the struggle to get to the level of knowledge necessary to pass the test that was asked of you that day.  The next day, maybe you wouldn't have known the answers or been tasting the wines well.  Still, failure is not an option.  So I grind away.  Tonight was Catalan.  Tomorrow is blind tasting.  The day after is plant disease.  And I'll keep checking my inbox for that result.  And I will keep grinding.