Here’s how to save on wine education: cancel that WSET diploma course or your participation in the Master Sommelier programme, and go work a harvest instead. You’ll learn more in a week than in a life-time’s classroom study.
This is the sharp end of wine, when the reckoning for a whole year’s work is compressed into a rollercoaster of split-second decisions. Everything happens on the fly, and solving logistical challenges suddenly becomes way more important than soil-types or radical philosophies on sulphur.
Merlot’s law states that every wine cellar is too small during harvest. Suddenly, room has to be made for the destemmer, the crusher, the sorting table and the futuristic new concrete eggs the owner decided to buy. Chaos reigns, the flow of full crates is unending and someone has a find a place to keep those grapes cool, to stop them fermenting, to start them fermenting, to get them out the way for the next batch. It’s literally a case of rinse and repeat for a frantic few weeks. Then everyone takes a deep breath and looks forward to a few months without sleep deprivation.
Nine months or more later, the results will be bottled. Then someone has to come up with the details for the tech-sheet – the fiche-technique to make it sound fancy and French. Here’s where the fun starts.
Tech-sheets are there to keep importers, distributors, sommeliers, journalists and other assorted wine geeks happy. They’re a legal necessity in some markets. Most of the time, they’re a convenient way
This Article was originally published on The Morning Claret
