Wine Appreciation – 9 glorious weeks of quaffing!

We have been pretty busy so far this Spring, and will be right up to May with our WSET Accredited Wine Courses, mostly for Yacht Crew in the run up to what will no doubt be an interesting Summer season…..but that’s for another Yachtie BLOG! Meanwhile we have been asked continually for a gentler approach to Wine Appreciation, skills and knowledge that might be acquired at a more leisurely pace.

Our WSET Courses tend to be “intensive” 1, 3 or 5 days to fit in with Yacht Crew timescales and their naturally nomadic lifestyles. But there is a wider Anglophone community here on the Riviera, more accustomed to a relaxed way of life, but who are still passionate and fascinated enough by wine to want to know a little bit more. We’ve looked as a starting point at the WSET Intermediate Level 2, which needs no prior Wine Training, just enthusiasm, greed for knowledge and a basic ability to tell the difference between a Red and a White wine. Rather than cram it into 3 days, we opted to run it over 9 consecutive weekly evenings, each around 2 ½ to 3 hours. We would also propose that taking the exam itself on the 9th session is entirely optional – some folk, would prefer not to have the pressure of lots of study and homework but just to enjoy exploring the wines of the world and getting to taste rather a lot of them! We did originally plan to run the course in this format from late Spring, but have found that the urge to learn gets clouded by visiting friends and rellys (it is amazing how popular one becomes in the Summer here on the Cote d’Azur!). We are also finding that the more people who attend our Events (see piccie) and start to understand what we are really about, then express interest in doing a Wine Appreciation course. So, in order to spread the net as wide as possible and give lots of gourmands and wine fans a chance, we have moved the dates to the Autumn and will kick off with the 1st session on Thursday 10th September. The details are all on our Training Page of this website and also show that we’ve managed to reduce the cost and instead of a full price of 750€ TTC, we’d split it into weekly sessions at just 70€ per session (this is if you are wishing to take the exam in Week 9), making a saving of 130€ all told!
There are also a few more tempting peeks into what we will cover in the 9 weeks, on my original BLOG on this course in January 2009. As I usually get a bit carried away with things, we are bound to taste a few more than the 50+ wines you are required to experience throughout the course. I can’t resist pulling another bottle from the rack if I think it will illustrate my point better – wine is such a real, tangible and practical subject, one can only talk about it for so long before the need to taste an example becomes apparent. If you, (or you know and love someone enough to give it them as a pressie), are interested in possibly getting together with like-minded individuals to taste wines and learn about their origins, then get in touch. Roll on Summer then we can start planning a decadent and vinous Autumn – something to really look
forward to!