My "Journey"

 

I am on a flight to SFO for about the 100th time since I started trying to achieve The Holy Grail of the Master of Wine.  The time has finally come to sit the Master Of Wine exam.  Holy shit.  Within the program, the word “journey” gets used by almost everyone to describe the process of sitting this exam.  It’s really obnoxious but for whatever reason everyone involved in this thing likes to say things like “on my wine journey, blah blah blah”.  I get it.  There is definitely a feeling of having started at one place in your understanding and getting to another, but it’s so ostentatious to use “journey”.  When you get down to it, what you have done is obsessed about wine and then spent the past few years consuming nothing but wine materials and furiously tasting.  You can swap out other things people get obsessive about like “on my yoga journey”, and immediately I’m thinking “go fuck yourself.  You’re just stretching.”  That’s what any normal person thinks when they hear someone talk about “their wine journey”.

I’m not positive, but it appears a decent number of people become totally sick of wine by the time this thing is over.  There are quite a few MWs that have completely disappeared, even since I started in this thing four years ago.  I think they just get sick of “all wine, all the time”.  I read a book about the MC5 a couple weeks ago, and I can’t recall the last time I had read a book that wasn’t on the subject of wine.  It becomes everything you think about as you can’t possibly become an expert in farming, fermentation, industrial processing, logistics, marketing, global trends and tariff policy at once.  That doesn’t mean you don’t try.  Do I know about Canadian monopoly policy?  Yes.  Do I theoretically know about how to treat botrytis impacted grapes upon receipt to the winery?  Again, yes.  Want to talk about viticultural norms in Mendoza?  I can do that.  Am I sick of doing that right now?  Again, yes.

It's impossible to be an expert in all the interlocking aspects of this subject.  Early on when I entered the quest, I received the sage advice that I just needed “Wikipedia depth” knowledge.  That makes it sound easy until you realize how many times you’ve had to click on Wikipedia on your phone when you wondered about something.  I have spent the last three years trying to get up to Wikipedia knowledge in all the science aspects of this subject, and I gotta tell ya, it ain’t easy.  It wasn’t until March of 2025 when I can say with some confidence, I began to see how the puzzle pieces fit together.  I may have been the slowest learning student of basic winemaking this program has ever seen.  I JUST NOW had it click that X impacts Y which means that you can then do Z.  It sort of reminded me of how as a high school student you memorized facts like “Union fights Confederates in 1860s to free slaves in Civil War” but it’s not until you understand how the pieces fit together that you understand that slavery drove the economy of the south, global slavery was ending, if they wanted to keep making money they needed the status quo, global Old World powers had their agendas influencing actions here, the abolitionists had momentum but not total buy-in, the states alliances were fragile, and on and on and on.  The shit is complicated and interlocked.  So is this wine shit.

I was looking at old notes of mine from the first year or two when I jotted down stuff that seemed important.  Sherry producers plant 3600 vines per hA.  They plant on albarizo soil. They refresh soleras 5 times a year in Jerez and 9 times in Sanlucar down the road.  OK, let me memorize all that.  The problem is you are just memorizing baseball player’s batting averages or lines of code doing it that way.  It gets easy when you realize that they only plant 3600 plants per hA because it’s dry as shit there and there isn’t enough water for more.  They use that albarizo soil because that’s spongey and the little rainfall they get gets soaked up in that subsoil and the vine roots get it when they need it.  The soleras get refreshed with wine in Sanlucar more often because the flor crust forms that much faster right on the ocean compared to the more inland Jerez.  The flor keeps the wine protected from oxygen because yeast is eating everything, which is why the wine is so pale.  In Sanlucar it’s happening faster so it needs more food, so you have to get newer wine introduced more quickly.  Ohhh… That makes sense.  It’s all interlocked.

I cannot thank a few of my study partners enough.  I can’t imagine what Yoann was thinking when even 6 months ago I had a tenuous grasp on such basics as pH, SO2, and oxygen impact.  He HAD to have been thinking, “How did this guy even get in this program?”.  My friend Jane has made wine for a bunch of labels you see in every supermarket in North America and patiently explained things to me she must have learned in her freshman year of college.  Still, their knowledge on the ABCs of wine is so far past mine, I’m not even in the same discussion.  I asked all kinds of people all kinds of questions, and to their credit, they helped me out.  At last, I FINALLY had something click where I understand how all this shit fits together, and that’s because of them and the hundreds of hours I spent in the Avon Lake Public Library in Study Room 1 and 2 figuring this shit out from books and websites.  I now know Wikipedia level knowledge on a shitload of topics, but more importantly, I sorta get how it fits together.

I firmly believe I can accomplish anything within reason.  I’m thinking my childhood goal of being a receiver for the Buffalo Bills might be in jeopardy, but almost anything else is in play.  I’m not as smart as plenty of other people and don’t have nearly the natural talents, but I’ve got more drive.  I will outwork you over time.  I can do it on ambition alone.  I would like to point out, that you can too regardless of what your, ahem, “journey” is.  Most people fail at accomplishing things because they don’t try.  Whatever it is you have always wanted to do, just do it.  I just finished watching the remarkable TV series “The Rehearsal- Season 2”.  I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it (and I can’t recommend it more highly), but towards the end of the series I gained a newfound optimism for getting past this exam when something clicked after multiple failures for one of the protagonists.  I don’t know if I will pass when I sit this exam this week.  The stats are wildly not in my favor.  Everyone fails.  I might do so poorly that I get bounced out and have to re-apply in two years.  Hey, it could happen.  But I will continue to persevere regardless of outcome and keep working.

Let’s go sit this exam.

See ya in a week.