I never thought that my first visit to Dublin would be for a wine tasting tutorial.
As my WSET Level 4 Diploma D3 (Wine of the World) Exam was coming up, the school had arranged an in-person tasting tutorial for the online course students. My tutorial was supposed to be in London, but a few months ago the school had written to me about a Dublin alternative. “The London one’s usually packed.” So I accepted this suggestion.
On the morning of September 9th, I got to the Hilton in central Dublin. No sign in the lobby, so I asked one of the hotel staff members, who was absolutely clueless. I thought the school might have stood me up, also because there had neither been a reminder email a couple of days before. My diploma class was already online, and now finally we had some tasting in person, I was met with cluelessness 1855km away from home.
Luckily, someone else working at the hotel knew about the tutorial and walked me to the room, a tiny one with four tables and 12 chairs. I texted one of my WSET mates who was in London for her tutorial to ask her what it was like there. “Only three of us here.” I just couldn’t believe it.
I was the first to arrive. Before long, a guy arrived too. I asked him why there were no tasting glasses on the table, he told me that the school usually prepared glasses for tutorials in London only, and that outside of London, students would have to bring their own.
“But the school didn’t give any heads up,” I said.
“I’ve got six. You could use mine,” he replied.
Just then, the tutor came in. She was at my D4 (Sparkling Wine) and D5 (Fortified Wine) tutorial in London in April. I did not expect to meet her in Dublin.
“I thought you’d be at the London one today,” I said.
“I sometimes do come here,” she replied.
I remembered back in April she’d mentioned her Master of Wine study (a top wine certificate that fewer than 500 people in the world have obtained in the last 70 years), so I asked her how it went. She told me she probably would not finish it, because the work load was just too much, and she had other priorities in her life too.
“Not just Master of Wine, WSET Level 4 as well, a lot of people just do not finish it, which is not uncommon at all,’ she continued.
It made me think of my unsuccessful D4 Sparkling Wine exam result and my upcoming D3 exam, plus my ever busier wine-related work. But I wasn’t going to give up just yet. I had to try my best first.
The tutor handed me three glasses when I asked.
First up, we tasted an Alsatian Pinot Gris and a Barolo. The prominent melon and slightly oily texture were pretty typical of Pinot Gris. But then I guessed the Barolo wrong. The oregano note had me lean towards a Chianti Classico, but obviously the 2019 Pio Cesare Barolo showed some herbaceousness as well.
In the WSET Level 4 Diploma wine tasting exams, you are expected to be asked about a wine’s grape variety and place of origin, but not many marks are allocated to these questions. The majority of marks are for aroma, flavour and quality judgement. That is to say even if you get the grape and place of the exam wines right, you are not necessarily to pass the exam. And I totally agree with the logic behind this, because unless it is a wine with a very unique aroma and flavour profile, most reds and whites in the world are pretty similar in terms of the nose and the palate, so getting the grape and the place right may be out of competence but may also be out of luck, while getting them wrong in no way indicates that you can’t judge properly a wine’s quality. At the end of the day, quality judgement is the most important thing in wine tasting.
Of One Variety
Next, we tasted three whites of the same variety. Lime, honeysuckle and sky-high acidity, and the first and the third wines were even sweet. An easy guess: Riesling. The first one, from New Zealand (by Donaldson Family), was sweet and with a 14% abv. I wondered how sweet the grapes would have been at harvest!
Of One Country
The first white had an obvious smoky flavour that I had tasted in a Vouvray and a Ribolla Gialla in the past. So I decided it was a Vouvray.
The second white tasted like a Sémillon. And the third wine, a red, was almost identical to the Beaujolais (not Beaujolais Nouveau) I had tasted in France in late August, so I decided that all three wines were French.
There were instead Australian.
The first one turned out to be a Chardonnay (from Adelaide Hills). I’d been wrong to think of smoky as a typical flavour of the Chenin Blanc and the Ribolla Gialla grapes, because according to the D3 textbook, this smokiness could come from post-fermentation lees ageing but withoug stirring (leading to this smoky, reductive character). The problem with this smokiness is that it’d mask the varietal aroma and flavour of the variety, making it all the more difficult to tell what it is.
The second wine was indeed a Sémillon, but not from South West France as I had thought. It was instead a Hunter Valley Sémillon from Australia.
With the country being Australia, there was no way the third wine was going to be a Gamay-based red wine. It was a Yellow Tail Shiraz, delicious in its own right at £7.
Of One Region
Then three more from the same region. The first one tasted like Viognier, so I decided it to be a Condrieu from Rhône Valley, France. Following the Rhône logic, the second wine, a red, totally has got me baffled. It tasted off-dry. Never had I ever read anything in our textbook about a Rhône red being off-dry. The third wine, also a red, displayed a distinctive peppery aroma, so I guessed it was a Syrah from Hermitage. The region was indeed Rhône Valley, France. The second wine was a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Later when I googled Châteauneuf-du-Pape, I found out some of its wines to be off-dry indeed. I learnt something new.
Unrelated Wines
The last three red wines had nothing to do with one another. By then I was already too worn out to be able to judge the variety and the region. All I could do was to write down the aromas and flavours as I detected them. Then we learnt that the first one was a Californian old vine Zinfandel, the second one was an Austrian Blaufränkisch, and the third one was an Italian Taurasi.
At the end of the tasting, the tutor confessed that she had deliberately chosen wines that we’d rarely taste.
“So don’t worry if you get them wrong.”
She also stressed again that guessing the variety, country and region right was never the point, and that we should continue to focus on accurately judging the aroma, flavour and quality of the wines as we were to practice in our own home.
As soon as the tasting was over, I headed out for Dublin Airport. Hopefully next time I visit Dublin, I will have obtained my WSET Level 4 Diploma and I will be just a tourist taking photos and buying souvenirs.
