MW Seminar Landau 2025

 

The Master of Wine seminar is a requirement of the academic year.  A week long combination of mock tasting exams and industry presentations, it’s a full bore deep soak in all things MW.  An interesting feature of the program is you can choose which seminar to attend.  The options are Adelaide Australia, Odney England, Napa, and Landau Germany.  I would have loved to have come up with the excuse to go to Australia, but the dates laid across Thanksgiving and I was limping into the end of my work year with four or five days left of PTO.  I’ve spent a great deal of time in Napa, didn’t really want to go to Odney in January and figured I could work in a visit with my German friends at Landau.  Landau it is…

 

I worked it out that I would land in country on Thursday morning attempting to get on the time zone and also visit the Rheingau.  I’d never been, and there are some legendary producers and vineyards there.  Germany is not exactly the most scenic place to visit in January, but the lack of tourists was great for me as I got to spend lengthy time with a few producers and try to figure out what they had cooking.  The German wine scene is interesting.  The don’t produce enough wine to fill domestic demand, so there is a huge import market.  They absolutely love sparkling wine and bring in an ocean of prosecco, cava, crémant and champagne in addition to the sekt across all quality ranges that almost everyone makes.  They don’t make much bold red wine, so cheap big bold fruity reds have a home there too.

 

You might not be shocked to know that their own wine production is very organized and classified.  Yes, Germans being organized and grouping data together is very odd, I know.  Most American consumers think of German wine being exclusively cheap ass sweet whites like Blue Nun and Black Tower.  While I’m sure you can still find that in supermarkets somewhere, most of the German wine that makes it to America is good/very good/excellent quality.  Their most outstanding stuff stays in country for the most part, and the cheap sweet n’ fruity “two euro and change” wines are for their grocery stores and cheap cafes.

 

Most producers of size still produce bottles in the kabinett/spätlese/Auslese ascending sweetness levels.  The big push amongst the VDP producers is the establishment of premium and super premium dry single site “premier cru” (erste lage) and “grand cru” (GG) wines made to be bracingly dry.  It’s a delicate situation they have there.  As more than one winemaker has told me, “People say they want dry wines, but they drink off dry”.  While there are some impressive GG bottlings, rapier sharp acid knives with citrus/mineral palates, I gotta say I prefer the dash of sweetness to help balance giant acidity and low pH.  It sort of reminds me when Champagne was tripping over themselves to get zero dosage bottles on the market, but with notable exceptions, most seem to be better balanced with 6g/L of sugar to take on that acid.  Anyway, you go to a producer’s cellar to taste and they might have four different wines from the same vineyard.  Here’s our GG, here’s our kabinett, here’s our spätlese and here’s our Auslese and they are all from the (insert name of indescribably impossible to remember vineyard name like) “Gutsverwaltung Niederhausen Schlossböckelheim Schloßböckelheimer Kupfergrube”.  Make sure and ask for it by name.

     

I spent a couple days in Stuttgart and made Sister Ant take me out to a couple highly regarded Wurttemberg producers.  Most of these area wineries churned out sweet simple wines to quench the summer thirst of Stuttgart residents, but now there are some really good wines being made.  The wine profiles sort of reminded me of the Finger Lakes with cool climate red fruit and assertive acid Rieslings.  It’s the opposite of a Napa wine “experience” with it being way more chill and conversational.  In two wineries I had tasted Riesling, Spatburgunder, Lemberger, Weissburgunder, Blauburgunder, Sylvaner, dry traditional method sekt, cabernet sauvignon, and a Bordeaux blend.  I really like the spatburgunder at Heid and the racy dry erste lage Riesling at Aldingher.  It’s two train stops out of town with a two block walk, couldn’t be easier to visit.  It sucked that I couldn’t buy a bunch of wine and mule it around Europe for the next two weeks, but what are you going to do.  After a dinner with my Whiskey Daredevils Euro Tour associates, it was off to seminar in Landau.    

 

The way the seminar is set up is you start each day with a 2:15 mock tasting exam of 12 wines.  When you take the exam, you have the option to handwrite or type and I have always handwritten.  I decided to “give typing a go” (as any one of the various Brits there would say) on the first mock exam.  Man, was that a mistake.  My primitive two sausage finger typing skill results in consistent errors and slow pace.  I suppose it’s easier to read, but I went so slowly that I didn’t come close to finishing the mock, an issue I have never encountered previously while writing.  The other big part of the mistake was I had forgotten that was the exam which would be graded by the existing Masters of Wine.  To say a bunch of unanswered questions was going to look really bad is a bit of an understatement. 

 

I had fallen so far behind because I had to keep backtracking and fixing typos that I had to rush tasting.  Then I went back to answer two early wines which had confused me.  I gave these rushed half assed answers, also misidentifying the wines badly.  I can’t remember what they were (and am not allowed to reveal them anyway) but let’s say it was like I had two buttery Cali chardonnays and wrote some sort of flimsy answer for steely acid driven furmint.  It was just a total disaster, but that’s why you practice new things there instead of at the exam itself.  On the one hand, that’s all good as it IS just practice, but what’s not great is having to sit down with whoever graded your paper and sit there as they berate you.  Let’s be frank.  The English dude that graded my paper thought I was a complete jack-off, and based on the evidence at hand, I’d have to agree with him.  He essentially said to me, “How did you get this far?  You don’t know what you’re doing.”. There’s that saying where when coaches stop pushing you and coaching you hard, you’re in trouble?  Yeah, I pretty much ceased to exist to him after that.  From that point on I was essentially invisible to him. 

 

Here's the thing though…. It doesn’t matter.  I’m not competing for his praise.  I’m trying to pass the exam.  If he bails out on wanting to help me, it’s on me to find someone else or loop him back in if I can show him evidence that I’m not a total dipshit.  Whatever.  Fuck that guy.  I will fully admit that day 1 mock exam was a complete klusterfuck for me.  He was just responding to what was in front of him.  When I hit day 2, I went back to the handwriting.  This proved to be a very, very good idea.  First off, I finished the exam.  Secondly, I did reasonably well identifying everything early, correctly identifying countries and regions.  There was then a question of “Here’s some stand alone wines all made from different grapes in different places”  where I got beat up pretty good.  Got a couple right.  Badly missed a couple.  One just sorta off.  Then, on the last question, I jumbled the last three wines places of origin.  No doubt about it.  I improved but that’s still an “F”.  Fuck.

 

At this point, I’m beginning to think “What am I doing here?”.  I am six months out from this exam, and I’m not sitting in a place of “just a couple small tweaks, and I can do it”.  I’m at the point of questioning why I can’t seem to differentiate between high and medium acidity or pick up oak.  The thought flashes through my head into slinking off to the train station in the dead of night and fly home like a whipped dog.  Well, I’m here so I might as well take the red wine exam tomorrow morning.  I wake up feeling sorta shitty from too many beers at a terrifying nearby bar that Yoann and I found that we must have discovered via time machine.  There were four banged up people chain smoking playing some weird German slot lottery machine thing.  It was like I smoked a pack of Winstons just walking in the joint.  It was bleak in there. 

 

I wake up feeling “ughhhh” and go set up my glasses.  Fuck it.  Let’s do it.  And wouldn’t you know it, I did OK.  The first two wines are a gift and I’m writing confidently.  Wine 3-5?  I know what these are and start writing.  Wine 6-9 are clearly made of different thin skinned grapes and I try to place them.  I pound some square pegs into round holes here, I go 2-4 here.  One was a real bastard that almost no one gets and the other I missed makes me feel like an idiot.  The last three are thin skinned light bodied wines, and I’ve got to place them around the globe.  With climate change, these are really challenging.  Let’s just say they are pinot noir.  How thin are the margins between Central Otago, Baden, Bio Bio, Sonoma Coast, Adelaide, Willamette, Marlborough, Alsace, Pfalz, Leyda, and Yarra these days?  Some Otago producer tosses in stems and that green element that you think is the tell has you furiously writing “Leyda”.  Is that wine really light, clean and finesse driven because it’s early picked out in Santa Rita Hills or is it because it was hard to get ripe in Marlborough?  It’s a game of fucking inches.  In the end, I’m still not good enough.

 

I’m in a real mixed mindset on Friday morning.  I’m tired and feeling sorta dodgy.  I chalk it up to lack of sleep in this weird German hotel room that provided two (2) duvets that are five feet long.  Germans are sorta tall, so what’s with the “boy’s large” duvet size?  I have to adopt this “cross duvet” system to keep myself warm at night as my room has two temperatures; unbearably hot and unbearably cold.  I shower off with a “fuck it” mindset and take Exam3.  I’ve improved for the fourth day in a row.  I’m getting used to the timing now and I finish with a few minutes to spare.  I’m confident in my answers getting 9 of 12 wines identified correctly, the only mistake is going the wrong way on a 50-50 coin flip on a pair of dessert wines that I miss EVERY time and not identifying some fucked up natty rose that was kind of gross.  After a full week, I definitely passed a mock exam.  My answers are forming to expectation, sounding more robotic (or “expert” depending on where you sit) but demonstrating confidence.  It was like I was wrapping up a terrible round of golf but went two under par on the last three holes giving me an infusion of shaky optimism. 

 

That night a fever rolled in.  I felt sick as shit.  I got up and dumped a bunch of meds into me, guzzled a terrible coffee, and took the 730am shuttle bus to Frankfurt.  I wouldn’t say I left with a sense of confidence but I did identify some gaping holes in my knowledge.  I have a massive drive to succeed, and this program is not great for people that expect success to come easily.  Last year about 150 people sat the tasting exam and something like 12 passed.  To pass, you will need to walk into that room for three days in a row not only tasting well, but confident.  If you’re trying to not make mistakes, you’re fucked.  I’m going to prep the best I can and remember, “no matter how many Brits cruelly admonish you, wine is fun”.  Just to be in a position to take the Stage 2 master of wine exam is absurd.  This is a room filled with winemakers and people that have devoted their lives to the trade.  Me?  I’m just some fucking guy.  I’ll tell you what though.  I’ve got as good a chance as most of ‘em.  Nose to the grindstone baby!