In New Orleans with the Court of Masters Sommeliers

After 3 days and 2 nights, the Wine Zen is ready to get home. The classes for the Court of Masters Sommeliers Introductory Course were long and there was barely enough time to cover everything we needed to know about wine, let alone spirits, beers and sake. A portion of the class, I was looking forward to learning, cigars, was cancelled flat out.

4 Master Sommeliers Tim Gaiser, Randa Warren, Guy Stout, Brian Koziol, ran the class as well as they could. Tim, Randa and Guy were the veteran MS-es and were able to pull information from their vast stores of travel experience. Brian did not have their vast personal experiences but he made up for it in technical expertise and sheer passion. Everything was there, the professionals and information but the weak link was time. Quite literally it was like taking sips of water from a fire hose.

I pity the folks who came here and thought they were going to be spoon-fed information while having their hands held for this mind job of a class. The frustration started to mount as almost all of the 45+ participants told me that they barely had time to take any notes as frames of PowerPoint slides just zipped by on an average of 20 seconds. I think some were ready to write letters to the CMS through their organizations. In a partial defense to the CMS, people were warned though to do their pre-class readings at least a month ahead of the class date. Of course it would be better if the schedules for 2009 classes came out earlier than the end of December 2008. Still we were warned nevertheless.

With wine retail it isn't as if December was a free time for me, I had managed to skim through most of my reading material and most of the information was already active and used everyday. Still I knew where my weaknesses lay, Burgundy, Italy and Spain. Thankfully, when it came to exam time, these regions were covered pretty generally. I disagreed with some of the information in the course. For example, the classifications for Cognac the CMS listed were very different from the ones actual cognac producers told me. So it boils down to believing the people how learn and teach about cognac or believing the people who actually make and sell the stuff for decades.

The blind tasting portions of the class although not part of the test were a good peek into what was expected of you if you wanted to be a certified sommelier. I must admit, I was not at the top of my game. I had been tasting wine all this time from the stand point of enjoyment and price to quality ratios, not playing guess the wine. So I had to dust off the sections I had long ignored , the visual aspect. To me if a wine tasted good you won't be able to see it go down in your mouth anyway. Furthermore, wine makers everywhere are using a variety of new techniques to make a wine look how they want it to look. One particular white wine I thought was incredibly complex was a Savennieres. It actually threw off blue cheese notes. All the MS-es loved it and it was a fabulous wine but I knew that the majority of the folks would not like this wine. When a vote was taken in the room, 80% did not like the wine. It was the Domaine des Baumard Savennieres 2004. Just goes to show you that it still takes courage to make wine that are really terroir driven. Especially when nobody understands that terroir.

Still the frustration built up so much from striking out so much that there was a time where I questioned my faith in my abilities and my career choice. Then came the last set of wines of 2 whites and 2 reds. I got them all right down to the varietals, region and even vintage, something I have always had a problem doing blind. (Whew! Now I don't have to take a welding course and do construction.)

So yours truly is now one step closer to being a certified sommelier. I think the classes were informative and fun but I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that for almost $500 per person and having to fly to New Orleans and book a room at the hotel, the least the CMS could do was give us a copy of the PowerPoint slides in print. We didn't get to keep that. Still it could be worse, I could have been part of another group there that had a joint function with CMS and had pay close to $900 per person. Yikes!