Diploma Exams

I'm just two months into the Diploma and I've done three exams already. There's been some intense studying going on and it's a relief I can finally sit down with a glass of wine (Pieropan Ruberpan Valpolicella, since you're asking) and relax. Our next exam isn't till June, so I'm not sure why the WSET have found it necessary to cram these three very different exams into such a short period of time. Anyway, here's how they went...

Wine Production

The Diploma starts, obviously, with Unit 2 (out of 6), which focuses on all the technical stuff - what happens in the vineyard and the winery - the building blocks to everything we go on to study about wine. We took this exam in February and I wrote about it then. I passed with distinction, which I won't be doing for these next two exams.

Sparkling Wine

The next exam was Unit 5, on sparkling wine, which we had to study in conjunction with Unit 4, spirits. It was hard studying these two completely different and equally vast topics together. The amount of information we had to process, let alone the amount of drinks we needed to try, in just the space of a month, was at times overwhelming - not forgetting that we have other things to do in our lives as well. I was helped by going to a series of trade tastings where I sampled all the sparkling wine I could and by a blind tasting of nine spirits very kindly arranged by Sam of Manchester House. All that work doesn't quite prepare you for the pressure of the exam itself, though.

Both the sparkling and spirits exams are in the same format: three drinks to taste blind and three subjects you to have write a paragraph on. The exam's 65 minutes, so you have roughly just ten minutes for each drink and question. I decided beforehand to tackle the written answers first to get the factual information out of the way and, for the sparkling wines, to allow the wines to warm up and the aromas to become more apparent.

That cunning plan fell to pieces with the first question, which caused a wave of panic to rush through me as I read it. "CM (Coopérative-Manipulant)" was all it said. First question I asked myself as I fought off the panic: what's a Coopérative-Manipulant? Second question: even if I remember what one is, how do I dredge up enough information to write an answer? (Each question is worth twenty-five points, so you pretty much need to say twenty-five things.) Third, and final question, How and why would the examiners ask this question? A bad day at the office that they decided to take out on the whole world of Diploma students?

After the exam, we all clustered together to work out how we should, or could, have answered that question. First off, we reached for our study guides to see what it said about Coopérative-Manipulant. Here's what we found:

That's it, and half of that definition was the question. However, the WSET advise that we read other material to deepen our knowledge so when I got home I looked at the recommended further reading, Christie's World Encyclopedia of Sparkling Wine. This book is exhaustive and here's what it says:

Slightly more helpful, but that's not the only book I've got for further reading. We got sent a copy of the Oxford Companion to Wine with our study materials, and this is our go-to book. It did expand on the above entries a little.

Even with these books to hand, I'd be hard pressed to write a detailed answer and in exam conditions it was an arduous task requiring some imagination. What was particularly frustrating was its close emphasis on a term from a traditional wine-making area, rather than stretching out to newer areas. I was all prepared to write about Argentina (Moët & Chandon are just about to release their first Argentinian wine in the UK - one of a million facts I never got to use) or the issues around quality New Zealand sparkling wine reaching the market it deserves, but here I was blagging about two letters that sometimes appear on a bottle of Champagne.

My mood wasn't improved by the next question - "Saumur." That fashionable, high-quality, commercially important Loire Valley sparkling appellation. Oh, is that a question about France again? I was ready to answer a question about the Loire, but didn't think they'd ask about a specific appellation because they're not important enough. Wrong.

After the very specific and then the specific, came the massively broad - "Black Grapes," a subject I could have spent the whole exam writing about. I seem to have taken a different approach to answering the question than my fellow students, writing in detail about Pinot Noir and Meunier, the two black Champagne grapes, with a passing reference to Sparkling Shiraz at the end, rather than writing about every black grape used in the production of sparkling wine (and there are a lot). The difficult thing here was knowing what information you were expected to produce in just ten minutes.

I then went on to tasting the three sparkling wines, which presented fewer problems. The first was Prosecco, but from the higher quality Prosecco Superiore DOCG; the second was a fairly standard Cava, from major producer Codorníu, with a hint of toastiness at the end the only indication that it had been aged on its lees; and the third a Californian Blanc de Blancs. We didn't have to specify where the wines were from - instead asked to come to a conclusion about the quality of the wine - but I was quite pleased I had been able to work out that the third wine, by far the best, was New World and not Champagne.

Spirits

I'm not that much of a spirits drinker, though I've become more interested in them over the course of the last month, which is why I've been blogging about them incessantly. I think that's why I found the tasting (the practice) much more difficult than the written questions (the theory).

I again approached the written answers first, covering the spirits with a piece of paper in a vain attempt to mask the aromas emanating from the peaty whisky which I could smell from the other side of the room even before the bottle reached me. Before the exam, which took place a long three hours after the sparkling, a few of us joked about which obscure category would come up. So there were a few wry glances around the room when we all looked at the first question, "Cachaça," a subject we had guessed may appear as it's still not that well known but it is World Cup year. (Another relevant topic we also thought would come up was Jim Beam as it's been taken over by Suntory, a huge event in the world of spirits. It would also have given me a chance to write about Mila Kunis in an exam. Wrong again.) The second question was "conversion," probably the vaguest exam question I've ever faced. Most of my answer was about the conversion of insoluble starch into fermentable sugars in malted barley, which I hope is what the examiners were looking for. The third question was "Districts of Cognac." I read Nicholas Faith's book on Cognac last summer and answering this question was a process of distant recollection. Frustratingly, I could only remember five of the six regions (Bons Bois being the missing part). I then bluffed about soils as best I could.

For the tasting, we had to state where each spirit was from, what it was made of, what spirit it was, and how long it had been aged, all worth five marks out of the possible twenty-five. In short, get it wrong and you're screwed. The first spirit was water white and quite aromatic. At first, I smelt only tropical fruit flavours so concluded it was a white rum. But for the rest of the exam, something kept nagging me and I kept returning to it, desperately smelling it for enlightenment. I concluded it probably wasn't a white rum, but couldn't figure out what else it could be. It wasn't a vodka - too aromatic; it wasn't a tequila - no agave; it wasn't a grappa - not grapey or rancid enough; probably not a pisco - again, not grapey enough; not a Calvados - there was no age to it. There was nothing else it could be, so I reluctantly settled for white rum, knowing if that was wrong, all my tasting notes were wrong. It was pisco. Looking back, I'm not surprised that it was pisco, as it was so aromatic, but that's one tough spirit to spot. It was also one of the spirits we'd speculated, but feared, they'd ask us about.

The second spirit confused me too. It was amber coloured, with oaky aromas and dried fruits. It could either be a brandy or a rum, I thought, and I leant towards brandy because I could smell raisins and sultanas (from the grapes, I thought), because it wasn't dark enough to be a dark rum, and because I'd named the first spirit as a white rum. Answer: it wasn't dark enough to be a dark rum because it was a golden rum. From Jamaica's most famous producer, Appleton Estate, it was pretty good too.

The third spirit I barely needed to taste. Smell peat and write the tasting notes: peat, smoke, earth, smoked fish, seaweed, bonfire. After the problems of the first two spirits, I even felt confident enough to suggest it may come from Islay. The only confusing thing was its pale colour - it smelt rather than looked like a whisky. It was Ardbeg 10YO, which has a noticeably paler appearance than its neighbours Laphroaig and Lagavulin.

That tasting was one tough thirty minutes. I've done all the WSET courses and this is the first one that's focused in any detail on spirits. Not having being taught it thoroughly or consistently, the only way you could spot these three spirits with any confidence is by being a professional alcoholic. If I have to resit, that profession awaits.

Rum

Ah, Ron. Another spirit that once upon a time I wouldn't have gone near but which I'm now extremely intrigued by, especially the dried fruit and sweet spice flavours of oaked dark rum.

Perceptions of rum are dominated by Bacardi, one of the biggest international spirits brands in the world (globally, it sells nearly 20m cases a year, second only to Smirnoff). I remember the ads from the '90s: a trendy, cool drink which meant guaranteed success with Latina women; such an ad inevitably led to ordering one in a bar, and, equally inevitably, vowing never to drink the stuff again. For an older crowd, though, rum means Navy Rum: bottles with drunken sailors on the front and only ever ordered by an old ruddy-cheeked, frantically stubbled man. Both these styles are image conscious, Bacardi the party spirit for good times (and, of course, to be drunk with coke), Navy or dark rum the drink of history and tradition. Neither image does much for rum, though.

this looked really cool in the 1990s

 

an ad for Lamb's Navy rum about the "True British Character" - featuring a Creative Branding Guru...

what's it made from?

It was probably Marco Polo who brought back sugar cane from Asia and it made its way to the Caribbean through the Spanish (by way of Christopher Columbus). By the seventeenth century, sugar cane was an even more valuable commodity than gold, so much so that it led to the development of the slave trade. Extracting sugar from the plant creates a residue of sticky sweet molasses, which planters distilled into spirit so as not to waste any material. By the eighteenth century, this spirit had become extremely fashionable in Britain - yet another spirit with a heavily colonial history.

Most rum is made from molasses, though it can also be made from sugar cane juice (particularly in the French islands Martinique and Guadaloupe, when it's called rhum agricole).

different styles

white rum - clear and colourless; if they receive any oak ageing, the colour is filtered out (which is how Bacardi has traditionally been made); flavours aren't particularly intense, though this depends on the desired style.
golden rum - the colour comes from time in oak (as well as some caramel for consistency), and the ageing results in a greater complexity.
dark rum - the different methods of distillation for rum lead to spirits of lighter and heavier intensity - a dark rum will be made from the most intensely flavoured spirits, while the dark colour comes from lots of time in oak. This prolonged maturation also allows the unripe, green cane flavours of the base spirit to develop into rich tropical fruits. The heat of the Caribbean plays an important part in maturation; a "tropical year" is eight months long, so a twelve-year-old rum is almost the equivalent of a twenty-year-old spirit from a cooler climate. This is the kind of stuff sailors used to drink in great quantities, and there's another style of dark rum - Navy Rum, which is even more aromatic and has caramel added to it to give it a burnt-treacle flavour.

where it's made

Most countries in the Caribbean produce rum, and often the base materials are shipped from one country to another - as long as the drink is made in a country capable of growing sugar cane it can be called rum. The major countries include Guyana, which uses Demerara sugar and produces a broad range of styles of rum due to the unusual wood pot stills used for distillation, Jamaica, where the variety of styles comes from the length of ferment, and Cuba, where the style of white rum originates.

Diploma tasting

Bacardi - my notes say vegetable and grassy, with green bananas and bubblegum. I'm not sure it even tasted of that much, but we have to write something for the tasting exam. We also need clues to help us spot which spirit is which when we do the exam, especially when they're this bland, so for a white rum we should be looking for tropical fruits such as underripe banana. These clues didn't help me for the mock blind tasting at the end of the day, as I thought this was a vodka (we were warned that it's easy to confuse white rum with tequila; I wish I'd made a mistake that obvious).

La Mauny Rhum Agricole - a much, much more interesting white rum. The clue is again green banana and grass (flavours you don't find in vodka), but there's also cinnamon, white pepper, melon, and smoke.

Appleton Estate 12YO - no confusing this with vodka, as it was mahogany coloured. The tropical fruits were much less ripe, with cedar and sherry aromas from the oak, and treacle, toffee, and fruitcake from the molasses. 

El Dorado 15YO  - another mahogany coloured rum, with lots of complex aromas. I've already talked about this, and Pusser's Navy Rum, in my initial blog about the Diploma spirits classes. These two rums were fantastic.

Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum - I coped pretty well with tasting nearly forty spirits one after the other, by taking small sips that I thoroughly spat out. This, though, was 63% and the alcohol was immediately apparent before even pouring it from the bottle. On tasting, the aggressive alcohol did fade to reveal tropical fruit aromas, but the level of alcohol meant that there's no way this could ever be considered a complex drink. Quite amazing, though, to produce a drink of this quality with such high alcohol.

cachaça

We weren't given any cachaça to taste, but we were told that it may appear in the exam. Thanks for that. Cachaça is the second most drunk spirit in the world, after Shochu (an Asian spirit) - so there's more of it produced than vodka. Most of the production and consumption, though, is in Brazil, meaning that its importance is local (to a country of 200m people) - that's definitely changing and the international importance of cachaça is growing. It's made from sugar cane juice rather than molasses; this means it's technically no different from rum (particularly rhum agricole), but the Brazilian authorities have been campaigning to get international recognition of cachaça as a distinct product and last year, the US finally agreed to recognise cachaça as a separate category. Cachaça's the base ingredient in a caipirinha, which is how recognition of the spirit has been growing in the UK and elsewhere. I do have memories of drinking cachaça in Lisbon, but those memories are dim...