Exclusive Tutored Tasting w/ Andrew Jefford...

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An exclusive tasting with Andrew Jefford: "French Wines Off The Beaten Track". 

Andrew wrote many books on France and selected for us an amazing line-up of 8 wines to taste.  Two of them are being posted to us as you read this and the others will come from various importers based in Hong Kong.

He will walk us through each wine's terroir, and let us know how each were made. We will then have a discussion about each to identify the clues in the glass which are linked to orgin & vinification.

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WSET Level 4 Practice Tastings - Fall 2014 Program

WSELevel Practice Tastings
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Our regular WSET L4 practice tasting sessions will return in the Fall 2014!

This time, we will limit attendance to 12 people for each session. The structure will be slightly different in that we will taste blind 6-8 wines at the beginning of the session. I will then guide the remainder of the session so that we can together identify each wines before releasing the labels.

Each session will focus will be on clues from tasting notes, style, quality, production methods, and ageing potential. We will practice tasting notes benchmarks (levels), identification of the essential clues blind, argue answers for each paper 1 to 4 (grape, region, quality, ageing potential, identification).

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Weekly Practice Tasting Red Burgundy - A Lesson In Quality Levels...

These days, I am a little obsessed with assessment of quality.  Not so much in terms of good/better/best per se but more in terms of regional/villages/1er cru/grand cru.  Some will say it is pretty much the same, but in an exam situation like the WSET or the MW, we are often asked to position the wine "within context of origin", in other words not only to justify how good is the wine among its peers, but also to position it within a certain quality segment of that region where it comes from.

In fact, the whole point of assessing wine for quality within the context of the WSET Systematic Approach should be to establish value but also to ascertain whether the wine is correctly positioned within the "quality segments" of its region of origin.  Sometimes, one can find some pretty good deals of wines classified "basic" but with a quality much higher than normally found within the category.

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