2026 MW Exam Rearview

 

Well, I did it.  I sat the 2026 Master of Wine exam.  I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you.  It was a real slog.  The fucking thing just keeps going.   It’s just day after day after day.  It’s exhausting concentrating so hard for four straight days under the pressure of a clock.  It was different this time.  At the end of day one last year, I felt good about the blind exam, but knew my viticulture paper was not great.  That exam last year had me reflecting back to when I wrote this horrible essay when I was doing WSET Diploma.  There was a question about Port shippers which I answered something along the lines of “Port shippers ship port in ships as part of the business of sipping port via ships.”  I only wrote one essay in that style this year, though unintentionally.  In a way, last year it was liberating to fuck up the chance to pass so early on.  I knew I could not pass the entire exam, so I was loose and relaxed the rest of the week.  This year, I knew what I was talking about on the subject matter.   It’s just a question of how well I wrote it.  At the end of the day in the freezing conference room, I was just thinking “Do I have time to grab something to eat before going over my notes for winemaking in my bleak hotel room?  I’m still alive in this thing.”.  

I stayed in a Best Western, not my usual hotel choice in Napa.  I wanted to be “all business”.  It was better than most crappy Best Westerns as they need to compete in the luxury experience capital of America, Napa California.  My initial assigned room was on the ground floor with a window that everyone who walked past stared into and thus at me.  Within 10 minutes of being in the space I said, “No fucking way.”  A guy at the front desk that looked like Kip in “Napolean Dynamite” gave me a room on the second floor with the warning of “it’s an extra $20 a night”.  Considering an order of tacos from a “locals only” Mexican joint in Napa costs $20, this was the best money I spent all week.  The room was bland, spartan, clean, and had a large enough sink for me to wash my wineglasses each night when I got back after the exam day.  It was a totally forgettable space.  Perfect.  It was me and an entire hotel filled with guys in the trades installing industrial HVAC systems, probably in the enormous downtown hotel being built to further rob Napa of any Old School charm it was clinging to with its fingernails.  I’ve already forgotten the experience of being there it was so bland.   

I will write up my blind wine exams on the blog like I did last year but I think I am supposed to wait until they announce the wines.  If we want to talk big picture, I felt like I did reasonably well on the whites, pretty well on the dreaded mixed bag Paper 3, and (as usual) got lit up on the red wines.  The wines poured didn’t go to my wheelhouse as there were like 8 full bodied tannic wines.  I am certain that I misjudged some tannins as my palate became fatigued in the second half.  I need to figure out a way to get used to tannin carry over from wine-to-wine and judge it effectively.  I’ve been obsessing over a really stupid mistake I made at the end of that red wine paper.  I was running behind and only had 8 minutes to taste and write three pages on wines 11/12.  I made such a stupid decision on my call on those I will think about it all summer.  I need to remember my mantra.  “It’s just wine.  Don’t worry about it.”  I won’t and I will probably worry about it.

I am on the flight back now.  I’m really fried out.  I’m also a little hungover after tying one on in the inevitable post exam drinkfest with a bunch of the other students.  I hadn’t had any alcohol for 9 days, which might be the longest I’ve gone without wine since I started this insane quest.  I was ready to get to work in that pub yesterday.  Some gracious people had pulled out bottles and magnums of upper scale stuff like premier cru Burgundy, grower champagnes, and quirky off the beaten path wines to share.  Whenever it seemed like they had all been sampled, another one appeared.  I had to leave the joint after a while to get some food or I was going to be unconscious.  I went to this Italian joint that serves a reasonably good plate and sat at the bar next to an 84 year old man named “Butch”.  Butch moved back to Napa to live with his son after all his friends in Montana died off and he was alone.  He carries candy around and hands it out as an icebreaker.  I got a Werther’s.  We shot the shit while we ate our meals.  Butch is a backslapping friendly guy that has an easy laugh, like a movie character.  I liked him.  All the employees in the place knew him, and swung by for a candy and a clap on the back.  To that point, I hadn’t realized that all I had eaten that day was an apple.  It was a good decision to eat. Especially as I arrived for Round 2 of Drinkfest 2026.

By the time I got to Compline a huge circle of 15-18 chairs had been formed.  Wines kept getting passed around, really good shit.  I have no idea who was ordering them or what protocol was on this thing.  I didn’t even know everyone in the circle.  I kept getting sample pours of grower champagnes, then an Emilio Pepe Trebbiano, then a couple high quality pinot noir where I never even saw the label.  I wish I knew what I was drinking.  It just kept coming.  There was an absolute fortune of wine being poured.  Where was it coming from?  Who was in charge?  I felt like I was slipping beyond the point of reasonable inebriation and I certainly wasn’t alone.  I talked to a guy for a bit that I had never seen before that I thought was someone’s “special needs” friend.  It dawned on me much later than you would think that not only wasn’t he special needs, but that I might be the problem here as my perception was getting so out of whack.  Or maybe he was drunk as fuck.  I don’t know.  Then out of the blue some other guy tells me, “when things get out of control like this, sometimes you just have to let it happen.  It’s like when I was in Egypt and some guy gave me a rim job and jacked me off.  I was like “Hey, it makes him happy and I don’t mind.”  

This is when I thought the wheels were coming off the evening and I pulled the rip cord.  In a full “French Goodbye”, I got up, took a leak, and walked out the door.  I have no clue what happened with that bill, no idea of who the people were that kept pouring the wines, and no idea about who to even ask about kicking in my share of money.  I just left. I regret doing that now but have no idea on who I could even reach out to via email to venmo some cash.  It’s not like I can do a fruitful Google search for “mischievous husky guy that was drinking in Napa yesterday” or “sex deviant wine expert”.  That will only take me to some old Master Somm article.  Hey-o!  Oh well, I’ll probably see somebody that was there at some point when I undoubtedly have to take this test again and I can hand them a stack of money. 

Full report on the blind exams shortly.