D3: Wines of the World is what we nickname “The Beast”. Nearly 600 pages, covering 16 countries and their respective uncountable regions. On the exam, it boils down to 7 questions, out of which you choose 5 you feel most confident about to answer. Plus 12 wines divided into 4 flights to taste. Brutal.
My D3 exam took place in late October 2024. In less than 10 days, I would be flying to Taiwan to give tastings and product training to customers and distributors over there. For months, I had been working on getting wines from 5 wineries to leave Italy and to arrive in Taiwan. Translation: I’d had zero time studying.
The thing is, when you have zero preparation, you have zero anticipation. And with zero anticipation comes zero stress. How zen and wonderful!
For this reason, on my D3 exam, I didn’t turn into an adrenaline overdose with my brain switched off. Instead, with the adrenaline level record low, my brain was as lit and on as an award-winning novelist’s. I was creative-writing.
Despite being The Beast, D3’s allowing students to choose 5 questions out of 7 renders it more gentle and humane than D4 and D5. At D4/D5, you must answer all. At D3, you have the power to discard the 2 questions you dislike the most. Getting to choose feels great. Also, with D3, every past exam question is explicitly published in Examiner’s Reports. By eliminating them, you can focus your time and energy on the countries and regions that have not emerged in the most recent exams. With D4 or D5, past exam questions are only vaguely mentioned. And because D4 and D5 hold a considerably smaller amount of content compared to D3, skipping any section or chapter can be highly risky.
Furthermore, the unbeastly side of D3 also shines through its splitting the theory and the tasting exams into two days. With D4/D5, you must complete both within 90 minutes and you cannot re-sit just the theory or just the tasting if you pass one of the two but your overall result is a fail. While with D3, not only do you need to just tackle one part on one day, you also get to re-sit just the part you fail without re-doing both.
Tasting exam took place the next day. As I was fully aware my creative writing on the theory would not lead to a pass, I wanted to be well-prepared for the tasting so that my re-sit would involve only the theory.
The evening before the tasting exam, I reviewed over and over my notes taken on the tasting tutorial in Dublin back in September.
Turned out I did pass the tasting and failed the theory, as expected.
Before my D3 re-sit in May 2025, I had submitted my D6 paper on Virginian wine in January and scored a pass. So far, to complete the Diploma, I was left with only D3 theory and D4.
In May 2025 on my D3 theory re-sit, a well-prepared me answered my 5 cherry-picked questions with absolute assurance.
In August, I received good new in my inbox. I passed. 2 out of the 5 questions were even marked as pass with merit.
In October, I re-sat D4. It was unclear what got to me that day. I was so much of a nervous wreck I wrote my candidate ID wrong. I found out immediately after the exam and reported it to the crew. They assured me they would correct it for me.
Correct candidate ID or not, I failed, again.
At that point, I found myself almost holding a grudge toward sparkling wines. It even got to a point where I felt like giving up on the whole Diploma thing.
But, family and friends just wouldn’t allow that. I guess I put their needs before mine. For them, I started over.
At noon on the 10th of June, once again, I showed up at York Hall in Bethnal Green, wishing it to be the very last time.
I remained very calm during the exam. Miraculously, I managed to engage both adrenaline and my brain and have them collaborate. And it worked. On September 2nd, while at work, I was informed I’d passed the theory and the tasting with merit respectively. The same email also stated my Diploma result as Pass.
Now with the grudge lifted, let’s crack open a Bellavista!
