Wine Scholar Guild Master-Level Bourgogne Certification: Study Tips

In August 2022, I enrolled in the Wine Scholar Guild’s Master-Level Bourgogne Certification course, a self-study online wine education program focused solely on the region of Burgundy, and I took my exam at the end of July 2023 and achieved a score of 94 out of 100, which conferred the designation of “Highest Honors.” See my blog post here for my thoughts on the program.

So how did I study for the exam?

For the first eight months, I was in “passive study mode.” Similar to my method of studying for 30 minutes a day each morning for my WSET Diploma courses before I started my day job as a real estate finance lawyer, during this period, I did a minimum of 30 minutes a day of passive studying - watching and re-watching the lectures and reading the textbook or secondary materials - but I didn’t do any serious memorization or outlining. When the deadline to take the exam started approaching around the ninth month, the fear started kicking in, and I started extending my minimum daily study time to 45 minutes and started outlining, practicing with the maps and doing hard memorization. During the month before my exam, I was up to a minimum of one hour each day of studying.

Admittedly, I over-studied for the exam. Looking back, I don’t think I necessarily needed to study so many hours and attempt to retain so much detail to be able to obtain the requisite 75% to score to pass the exam. However, as someone who does not work in wine full-time, I do feel like I am constantly trying to prove myself in the industry, and I reached for the highest score that I could get on the exam with at least a pass with “Honors.”

In addition, because there is no next step in this program to obtain a higher understanding of Burgundy in a wine certification program at the moment, I wanted to use this course and the exam to take in as much information as I could and confirm that I actually understood the concepts. As with much of the knowledge I had to memorize for my DipWSET studies, my memory bank of facts that I learned from the program will inevitably fade or become outdated, but I wanted to make sure that I had the foundational knowledge and understanding to recall the information easily later.

The Study Materials

From my personal experience, just reading the textbook without watching the lectures and following the review sessions is not sufficient to know everything that is tested on the exam. I felt like there were a few questions that tested information that came from only the online lectures, which were not in the textbook, so make sure you are paying attention to both!

In addition, the “self-study” part of this course cannot be over-stated. I think many people have some idea that these advanced wine courses (WSET Diploma, WSG Master-Level courses, CMS courses, etc.) will “teach you” about wine, but I’ve also realized that, aside from the fact that the Wine Scholar Guild provides students with a textbook, Powerpoint slides and some lectures, a lot of wine education is researching and digesting the material on your own.

The textbook is extremely brief on topics and the videos will not always be sufficient to help you understand the topics in the book. I am a big believer in using secondary resources to provide additional context to the topics covered in the course materials, and some of the secondary resources I used for this course included:

• Looking up all of the villages, premier crus and grand crus on www.wine-searcher.com. Wine-searcher.com was one of my go-to resources for my Diploma studies, and seeing the prices listed for the various producers and sub-regions really put into perspective for me the wines’ relative perceived value on the market

• Blogs about wine geology - Wine geology is a really tough topic, and unfortunately, there are not a lot of resources available to help the lay person understand it. Some of the excellent resources I used were:

  • Terroir by James E. Wilson

  • https://diaryofawinebuyer.wordpress.com/2014/12/20/understanding-the-terroir-of-burgundy/

• Producer websites

• The WSG Instructors’ Q&A online forum - In my opinion, the Q&A forum is very under-utilized by students! Because the video lectures are recorded and do not have an interactive component, other than the Zoom review sessions, the Q&A forum is really the only means for students to ask WSG clarifying questions.

Do you need a copy of Jasper Morris’s “Inside Burgundy” to excel at the exam? No, and I did not have a copy when I was studying for the exam, but Jasper also has an excellent website, insideburgundy.com, with some information available for free and other information available on a subscription-only basis.

Often, the information in these secondary recourses will conflict with the information in the text, but that should be expected with all wine courses. On the student Q&A forums, it seemed like students sometimes became frustrated when they saw discrepancies or conflicting information from textbooks and study materials, but we have to also recognize that there is actually a lot of conflicting information in Burgundy in general in terms of numbers and naming conventions. Sometimes you will see one number for the number of climats, and somewhere else you will see another number, and you just have to roll with it because it’s Burgundy.

It’s All About Memorization

The exam was all about memorization. For some courses, you can just understand the general concepts, but Bourgogne is all about specificity, and this is the Master-Level course, so students are expected to demonstrate a certain level of detail that they would not otherwise be expected to learn in other major high-level wine courses that have a Bourgogne component in them.

For those of you who are reading this, thinking, “My memory is terrible,” don’t worry, my memory is horrendous as well! However, I do believe that memorization is a learnable skill, and for this exam, it is crucial that you sit down with the material to memorize the information in whichever way works for you - writing out the words a few dozen times using pen and paper, making flashcards, making outlines, etc.

Also, it’s important to start the memorization process early. This is not an exam to cram right before the exam deadline!

Here are a few of my strategies for memorizing the information for the exam:

1. Drill, Baby Drill

For me, knowledge retention was the most challenging aspect of the study process. I would study a section and feel like I understood and mastered the information in that particular section, but then after I moved on to two or three other topics, I couldn’t recall the facts from that prior section anymore. I realized that I needed constant reinforcement and to keep revisiting prior sections and drilling facts until they became truly second-nature. Whenever I could not recall a fact - while waiting for the subway, doing dishes, getting dressed for work - I would open my book and look up the missing information.

2. Choose Your Battles Wisely

I would say that the biggest challenge with Burgundy is the formidable amount of information, and with so much information, sometimes, you have to just accept that you will probably not be able to memorize everything, and you have to pick and choose your battles.

When memorizing the facts, the key question that I tried to keep in mind was “how would this show up on the exam?” and divide the material between (1) facts that would be likely to come up in a map ID question or a multiple choice question and (2) information that could bolster the appearance of my mastery of Burgundy concepts in an essay exam. My priority was always to make sure I had the facts under category #1 above down first and then to make sure that I had sufficient supplementary information under #2 to make my essay responses complete.

Often, the determination came down to whether the information was an objective fact or a subjective view. Objective fact is a category of indisputable information that the WSG actually can and is willing to test you on in the multiple choice exams, which would fall under category #1 above. Subjective views are personal opinions, especially opinions regarding the character of vintages, wines and producers, that WSG probably would not be willing to test on a multiple choice exams in order to avoid receiving e-mails from angry examinees who read or held contrary views, and therefore would likely fall under category #2 above.

For example, that Marsannay is the only communal appellation permitted to make rosé wines is an objective fact that could come up on a multiple-choice question and therefore is a must-know fact for the exam.

In contrast, detailed information about the character of the vintages of Burgundy likely falls under category (2) above, although there is a whole section of the textbook dedicated to describing the recent vintages, along with a couple of video lectures on the subject.

Other than the notable trend of the progressively hot weather in the recent years and a few very terrible vintages sprinkled here and there, due to the specificity of the different conditions in the various areas of Burgundy, it seemed to me that it would be very unlikely that a factual question about Burgundy vintages would show up on the multiple-choice exam (or at least not more than one or two questions).

I figured that the value I would derive from learning the vintages would lie in being able to use the vintages knowledge to provide supporting information and examples on my essay responses, and therefore, I made sure just to remember a few vintages where hail, frost or heavy rain during flowering caused issues in Burgundy. For example, if I were to have an essay prompt about the challenges of climate change in Burgundy, where relevant, I could add in a sentence about how hail had become a more common and worrisome phenomenon, decimating crops in 2012 and 2014, or how spring frost had reduced yields in 2012 and 2016. If I were to have an essay prompt on vinification processes in Burgundy, I could also use a couple of examples of vintage years where mildew or summer hail was an vinegrowing issue to state that, during those such years, sorting in the vineyard or in the winery would be particularly important. Basically, I didn’t memorize everything about the vintages, just a few key facts about certain vintages that tied to other facts.

In addition, when there were many premier crus or many producers to memorize for a certain village, grand cru or premier cru, I intentionally chose just one or two of them to retain and decided to free up my brain space for the others. For example, the textbook has a section on the top Premier Crus of Burgundy, and this section lists the names of the top five to six owners of these premier crus. Instead of trying to memorize all of them, I memorized just two of each with the intent that, if I had a question about these top Premier Crus, I could at least answer with some sort of response like, “Volnay Les Caillerets is also considered a top-tier premier cru due to the high quality and reputation of some of its notable owners, such as d’Angerville and Pousse d’Or.”

3. Routinely Look Up the Origins of the Names of Notable Places and Geographical Points

It adds context, which helps with memorization, and when there is so much information to memorize, you have to make the process as fun as possible.

Some of my favorite Burgundy name meanings:

- Les Pézerolles 1er Cru in Pommard - "Pézerolles" refers to "chickpeas", likely because chickpeas used to be cultivated by the vines!

- Meursault - Named by the Romans "mouse leap" after a small stream, the Cloux, which runs through the commune.

- Clos Des Mouches 1er Cru in Beaune - "Mouches" is the local word for honeybees and one of the symbols on the Joseph Drouhin Clos des Mouches 1er Cru labels.

The weirdest to me was Échezeaux and Grands Échezeaux Grand Crus in Vosne-Romanée/Flagey-Échezeaux. According to my WSG book, "Échezeaux" refers to "a secondary dwelling added on to the main building or group of buildings." Not quite as sexy as the wine.

4. Mnemonics:

These were lifesavers for me. Make a few up and make sure that they actually mean something to you so that you can easily recall them.

A few of my favorites:

The Villages of the Cote de Nuits:

My Marsannay

Friends Fixin

Good Gevrey-Chambertin

Morning Morey-St.-Denis

Come Chambolle-Musigny

Visit Vougeot

Vivian Vosne-Romanée

Now Nuits-St.-Georges

The Five Villages of the Côte Chalonnaise (from the Wine for Normal People Podcast):

Boozers Bouzeron

Really Rully

Make Mercurey

Good Givry

Martinis Montagny

The Seven Official Grand Cru Climats of Chablis:

Best Bougros

Place Preuses

Vivian Vaudésir

Gets Grénouilles

Value Valmur

Chardonnay (in) Le Clos

Burgundy Blanchot

The Eight Villages of Saint-Véran AOC (the Mâconnais):

Please Prissé

Don’t Davayé

Spit (on) Solutré-Pouilly

Chardonnay Chasselas

Like Leynes

Chablis Chânes

Some Very Saint-Vérand

Stylish Burgundy Saint-Amour-Bellevue

5. Drink the wines!

Even though there is no tasting component of the exam, this is the best part of the course - a bona fide excuse to buy and drink Burgundy in the name of studying! When I had trouble with memorizing or understanding a certain village or sub-region, I tried to buy and drink those wines, and somehow, the sensory experience helped cement those wines in my memory, and sometimes those became my favorite wines.

If you followed me on Instagram during this one-year study period, you heard me whining and wringing my hands about how much material there was to memorize for the course. Everything is fair game for the exam, and for a year, I was constantly stressed about studying. As with all wine exams, stress is an inevitable component of the process, but you can manage or reduce it by studying strategically for the exam.

However, having completed the course, I do see the WSG course was one of the most challenging but rewarding experiences of my wine career, and all the time and effort spent was worth it at the end, including the fact that I drank some delicious Burgundy during the past year!