I just completed my WSET Level 1 Award in Sake course and exam. Thoughts??

WOW. Just, wow. I was approaching this course in much the same fashion (I imagine) as many of my wine students who know only the tiniest bit about the subject and are eager to learn more….

As the first ‘formal’ part of my sabbatical studies, I’m signing up for a WSET course.

Hello, sake!

I used to hate Sauvignon Blanc. I mentally filed it away with 80s neon and exaggerated shoulder pads - seriously too much to handle.

It really was only a matter of time… and frankly not a minute too soon as far as I’m concerned!

I’d like to introduce you to Mega Purple, which is essentially the grown-up, wine version of red dye #6.

Or a corked garrafón?

After that happened to me, I never, ever, ever bought another refillable bottle here in Mexico. I will only buy the 5 litre bottles to avoid my water tasting like TCA. I know, I’m such a wine geek.

This might seem silly, especially since one of my jobs as a WSET wine educator is to assess the tasting notes of students, but here goes: I really don’t like points scores or wine competitions at all.

Honestly, I should have known better. What is the point of having almost as many wine certifications as I have fingers if I don’t use the knowledge? 🙄

Oh, what a fool I’ve been! Don’t make the same mistake as me.

This week was the COP26 in Glasgow, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my own personal commitments to climate change.

I was reminded of a Case Study I wrote while studying for my WSET Diploma twelve years ago, and decided to dig it up to see how it stood the test of time.

I got invited to a small dinner party. Hooray! I asked what I could bring and the host suggested a bottle of wine. Yep, I can certainly do that. Hmmm, what to choose? Oh, look, there’s a bottle of Willamette Pinot Noir.

Ohhhhhhh..... now I get it.

Most serious wine geeks can remember exactly the time and the wine that converted them from happy, carefree wine drinkers to obsessive about why some wines are heads and shoulders above the rest. For me, that was a bottle of 1986 Chateau Sociando-Mallet. The year was 2002, and the location was an upscale fishing lodge on the west coast where I was doing a summer serving stint.

I’ve got a friend who is studying for his WSET Diploma exam and he’s enlisted my help a few times to taste through and talk about wines he might get on his exams. Currently mired in the Fortified and Sparkling sections of the six-part process, he asked me to join him last weekend to tackle no less than fifteen bottles of bubbly.

I needed a bottle of wine, and fast. I popped into the local Signature store near my daughter’s daycare to quickly grab something for dinner.

That woman was there. The same one every time.

I’d landed in San Francisco and it was my first evening away from my daughter in nearly three years. The first time I left her overnight, it was to fly to California for the world premiere of SOMM at the Napa Valley Opera House. I tend not to take my time away from my child lightly and only seem to leave her for very grand events.

My work often brings me into our winery’s storage room where I navigate dozens of pallets of wine to pack up custom orders for clients. Tucked away into the corner of this more-or-less tidy space is a haphazard mishmash of boxes: some cardboard, some wooden, but all filled with mystery. This is my employer’s personal wine collection, amassed mostly before the winery building was purchased in 2008 and stashed quickly as harvest approached.

Have you ever had a glass of wine that looked a little… strange? Unstable proteins or solids such as yeast particles could create a haze in the wine, white wine could be brown due to oxygenation and red wine could be way too bitter and astringent. Clarification is here to help winemakers create a stable appealing product through different procedures.

Fresh off my educator training with WSET, I thought it would be prudent to demonstrate the basic differences between writing a classic WSET tasting note at every level of the Systematic Approach to Tasting (also known as the SAT in WSET’s acronym-loving lingo).

Breaking news…. Mexico has a brand new option for taking the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines program, right here with me at Vino Vallarta Wine School! Just this morning, I learned that I passed both the Theory and the Tasting portions of the WSET Educator Training Programme, allowing me to start offering this course.

Amazing news! I’ve been accepted onto the WSET Educator Training Top-Up Program so that I can start offering Level 3 Wines at Vino Vallarta. When studying for any WSET Award, reviewing the Course Specification in depth is KEY. And the best way to understand the differences between levels is to make a chart of the information…. so here you go, enjoy!

It's always a great day when a new wine portfolio crosses my desk, so I was thrilled to peek at the offerings from Valgiani, a Bay of Banderas wine distributor with a retail shop in Punta de Mita.

Are you a lion? A wolf? A bear? Or a dolphin?

No, I’m not talking about your star sign or your spirit animal, but your sleep chronotype.