Looking Back on the Wine Scholar Guild Master-Level Bourgogne Certification
In the summer of 2022, after I found out that I passed my last exam for the Wine & Spirits Education Trust (WSET) Diploma, I spent the next two months just drinking wine for fun, reading and listening to books and podcasts not related to wine and just generally not thinking too much about what I was drinking. After two years of having wine exams hanging over my head while working a full-time job as a real estate finance attorney, this time period was a welcome break from the grind of waking up early every day before work to study and constantly writing quality assessments.
However, after a couple of months, I started to feel restless and wondered what else I should be doing to fill up my newfound free time. We often joke around that the people who don’t work in the wine industry but take on these wine programs “for fun” are gluttons for punishment, and I think there might be a ring of truth to that! After a while, wine study seems to feel like a natural part of our lives, and after a blissful exam-free summer, I started to feel like I needed something else to challenge me.
In addition, although I did learn a lot from the WSET Diploma courses, I started getting the feeling that my knowledge was, at best, general and somewhat surface-level. As someone who does not work in wine full-time, I felt like I knew a little about a lot of different wine styles and regions, but when I was discussing the specifics of any regions, producers or styles of wine, I really felt the limitations of my wine knowledge.
Level 4 is the highest level one can achieve with the WSET, so, like many other people who had completed the WSET Diploma, I considered the various other wine certifications out there. The Court of Master Sommeliers was never seriously on the table for me, as I had no interest in the service component, and I had serious reservations about the issues with sexism and sexual harassment that came out about the Court. The Institute of the Masters of Wine was also not a serious consideration for me, since applicants are required to demonstrate three years of continuous and current work experience in wine. Wine blogging/influencing likely does not count.
At the end, the Wine Scholar Guild was the wine certification program that I considered the most seriously. I liked the fact that the focus of the program was on theory and education, and the self-paced, online nature of the programs was very convenient for me as a full-time deal lawyer. Among the various courses offered by WSG, for me, it came down to the Italian Wine Scholar courses and the Master-Level Bourgogne course.
I ended up choosing the Bourgogne course because:
(1) Mastering Italian wines seemed really hard. As much as I consider myself to be a huge fan of Italian wines, there are over a thousand Italian native grapes and over 325 DOCs and 75 DOCGs! Kudos to those who undertook the Italian Wine Scholar courses because the courses definitely seemed challenging! I decided just to enjoy Italian wines and learn from drinking them.
(2) I didn’t grow up drinking Burgundy wines. In fact, the first time I ever heard of Burgundy was probably in my WSET Level 1 course. My price point for wines is usually around $20 to $30 a bottle, and the prices of Burgundy wines and all of the talk about the different climats, the terroir, “bad” vintages and the confusingly similar producer names was so intimidating that I often shied away from buying wines from the region, and I dreaded whenever people wanted me to pick a Burgundy wine for the table.
I had visited Burgundy in 2021 while I was in the middle of my Diploma studies, but I still found Burgundy to be quite bewildering , and I felt determined to redeem myself and come back with a much more thorough understanding of Burgundy during my next visit.
(3) Going back to the issue of generality, after completing my Diploma studies, I felt that my tasting skills were good, but still quite general without getting very specific. I had not spent enough time tasting between different vintages and different sub-regions of one region to be able to innately understand the specific nuances, and I wanted to turn my attention to focusing on just two major grapes of the world - Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, grapes with plenty of character and ranges of expression - and learning to appreciate the distinctive qualities of the various villages and sites that Burgundy is known to reveal in its terroir-specific wines.
What does the Master-Level Bourgogne Certification Entail?
The program is a six-month online course covering the Bourgogne wine region. It mentions Beaujolais as part of the “Bourgogne wine district,” but it does not provide any substantive information about Beaujolais.
WSG will provide you with a hard-copy textbook and online access to recorded video lectures, a few practice exam questions and a few review sessions held on Zoom.
The course covers the following topics:
The growing environment, viticulture and vinification methods in Bourgogne
Clones, rootstocks and major varieties of Bourgogne wines
History of Bourgogne
Geological timeline of Bourgogne
Recent vintages (when I took the exam, from 2005 to 2018)
The Bourgogne quality pyramid and appellation systems
The village/communal appellations of Bourgogne, notable premier crus and all of the grand crus, including the general characteristics of the wines from these sites
The business and economics of Bourgogne
Major events/holidays in Bourgogne
Major producers in the region
Not all of these topics are covered equally, and everything is fair game for the exam. The exam has no tasting component. For those wishing that there were a tasting component to the exam, people quickly learn that they have plenty to deal with just to prepare for the theory exam!
What is the Exam Format?
The exam is taken over a two-hour period on a computer using an online exam proctor program. You schedule the exam with WSG two weeks in advance, and WSG provides you with a link to download the proctor software to your computer before your exam start date. On the screen, you show the proctor your ID card and the layout of your room, and you are not allowed to speak (even silently talk to yourself) during the exam. For those who are concerned about typing in accent marks in your exam answers, the WSG confirmed that it does not penalize examinees for failing to use accent marks in their responses, and I admittedly did not use accent marks in my responses.
The exam is split into three sections:
Ten map identification questions requiring the exam taker to identify the location of major geographical features, villages, notable premier crus or grand crus on a map. All maps on the exam are supposedly substantially similar (if not identical) to the maps provided to the students during the course.
50 multiple choice questions testing the exam taker’s factual knowledge
Four short-answer questions requiring the examinee to demonstrate depth of knowledge and the ability to how to link together various topics from the course
The minimum score to pass the exam is 75 out of 100 points. A score between 85 and 90 points confers a designation of passing with “Honors,” and a score between 91 and 100 points confers the designation of passing with “Highest Honors.” I ended up with a score of 94/100 and therefore passed with “Highest Honors”!
What did I get out of it?
Tools to Progress Independently
Having completed the course, I am not necessarily an expert of Burgundy vintages or producers. Nor do I know all of the 640 premier crus of Burgundy.
I would say that the biggest return I got from the course was learning the core concepts of Burgundy that enable me to continue my own exploration of Burgundy going forward. When people ask me what is the biggest difference is between the WSET Level 3 Advanced Course and the Level 4 Diploma courses, I usually say that, other than the significant jump in the amount of information required to be learned at the L4 level from the L3 course, in my opinion, L3 provides students with wine facts, while L4 provides students with facts, plus the factors that contribute to the wines. When I finished L3, I felt like I still relied heavily on others to “teach me” about wine to be able to keep progressing in my studies, but the Diploma gave me the tools to be able to continue learning about wine on my own.
To me, the WSG Burgundy course was like making the jump from L3 to L4. I will likely not remember all of the facts I learned from my Burgundy studies, and Burgundy is a continuously evolving region, but after doing a deep dive into the topics listed out above over a one-year period for one region, I feel comfortable enough now to be able to ask questions on my own, make more informed decisions when buying Burgundy wines and speak more confidently about Burgundy wines.
Appreciation for Soils and Geology
When I visited Burgundy the first time back in 2021, I was so enamored by the gorgeous landscape - all those rolling hills and vineyards everywhere! Although I paid some attention to the training and trellising systems, admittedly, I did not spend a lot of time looking down at the ground.
Geology is a major part of the concept of terroir (although assuredly not the only part), and the WSG course does a good job going into the geological history of Burgundy, and it makes comments consistently throughout the course materials on the soil types that can be found among the various villages and major sites.
The WSG never explicitly states, “X type of soil leads to Y kind of wine,” and admittedly, the lack of cause and effect statements by the instructional materials can feel frustrating for Bourgogne students. However, the course does point out the connections between certain villages and sites with certain soil types, and after a while, certain patterns start appearing, which helps organize the various sub-regions and sites in one’s mind, and the geology starts becoming a regular consideration when considering wine. Even when I visited the wineries in the Tuscan coast this past summer, I became a lot more focused on the variations in soil color and texture in the vineyards than I had been in my prior wine visits.
Personal Perspectives
In contrast to the WSET Diploma program, the WSG courses provide much more information about major producers in the regions. While there is no tasting component in the exam, the course provides a list of recommended tasting samples, and WSG provides recorded lectures by Tim Magnus MW on major producers, rising star producers to watch out for and the major négociants.
The personal perspectives on the producers and sites by wine professionals who have deep experience tasting the wines of Burgundy was one of my favorite parts of the course. It was refreshing to hear the instructors’ perspectives and tasting notes, and in particular, my favorite lecturer, Robin Kick MW, who led the video lectures on the regions and villages of Burgundy, was not shy about providing her personal opinions about her favorite wines, regions and producers and sharing her insights from her visits with the producers.
While everyone should taste wines on their own, the astronomical prices of some Burgundy wines can often prevent wine lovers from making the monetary investment to “try them out.” At some of these price points, you want to know what you’re getting yourself into and whether the wine will be worth the price, and the WSG course provides plenty of commentary on the producers and some of their highly regarded wines and sites to help one navigate a Burgundy wine list with more confidence.
What’s next for me now that I’m done with the Certification?
One thing I will not be doing in the immediate future is signing up for another certification. Studying for any wine certification is extremely taxing, and despite the “self-study” component, I felt like, given the amount of information expected to be learned, the exam was constantly weighing on me for most of the past year.
That said, continuing my Burgundy studies on my own is my immediate goal, and I am going to keep doing comparative tastings and learn about sites and producers I didn’t get a chance to learn about. The course taught me how much there is to learn about Burgundy, and I absolutely barely scratched the surface with the course.
In addition, I signed up for the Wine Scholar Guild Bourgogne tour in April 2024! It will be my first time ever taking a WSG wine region tour, and I am so excited about applying the information I learned to my visit, and I will have so many more questions about Burgundy that I won’t be as shy about asking this next time.
Finally, during the past year, my goal with respect to my website and my Instagram page was to share with wine lovers of all knowledge levels the cool and fun things about Burgundy that I learned from the course. Burgundy often gets a bad rap for being too esoteric, confusing or financially inaccessible, but I firmly believe now that, despite some of the eye-watering prices, Burgundy is for everyone, and there is great Burgundy to be found and enjoyed for all types of occasions and price points. Burgundy is a region that is constantly changing and looking forward to the future, and my goal is continue to share my knowledge of Burgundy through writing and posting on social media, as my own understanding of it continues to evolve.
Follow along as I continue my journey on my Instagram, and best of luck to those who decide to embark on this challenging but rewarding adventure with the WSG!
