sole – Page 5 – food by sole

28th May 202230th May 2022

How to study for the WSET Level 3 Award in wine (part 1: theory exam)

WSET London school class room - tables and chairs looking towards a big screen

(Following from my triumphal I finished the course post…)

I thought it could be interesting to document what I did to study for future reference. If I don’t pass, maybe it’ll help me fix what I did wrong. If I do pass the exam, maybe it helps someone else!

Please be reminded that I am not an official educator and so maybe some of what I suggest might be technically wrong. These are my own thoughts and opinions, take my advice with the appropriate caution, etc.

26th May 2022

I finished the WSET Level 3 Award in Wines!

Six different bottles of red wine, labelled with numbers one to six, for a tasting

If you were wondering where have I been and why have things been so quiet lately: it’s been because I was fully committed to the cause of studying for this course.

There’s no other way around this: either you go full-on or you just can’t retain the information 😬

I actually had the exam last Saturday but I have spent the week decompressing.

I still don’t know if I have passed the exam or not—they take a few weeks to come back with the results. So who knows if I will have to go back and re-study everything! 😆🤪

It’s very liberating to just BE DONE with it, but it is also very strange to not be thinking of what lessons I should be studying at every single moment of the day, including while you’re sleeping—I had not dreamed about wine before, but I have had a lot of weird dreams about wines and grapes and production methods during the last months! It sure shows how intense it is.

In the meantime: was it worth it?

7th April 20228th April 2022

Unconventional wines

Six glasses of different red wines, for a tasting

I had the chance to taste a lot of wines last week. And I mean a lot!

4th April 2022

Casa Julio (Fontanars dels Alforins)

Casa Julio in Fontanars, on a very drab day

This was the second birthday surprise for my mum! Lunch at the famous Casa Julio in Fontanars.

The story goes that it was a traditional restaurant, then got an ambitious chef, they did really well, so well they got a Michelin star at some point, then got really stressed about the implications of having the star, and then gave it up and went back to just serving nice food but without the added stress of being in the Michelin guide.

Star or no star, we did want to go both for the first time and also back again—some of us thought we had been there before in one of the pre-star incarnations. But weren’t really sure, as when restaurants are “traditional” it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between them, specially when that visit was many years ago. Had we been there? Did it really matter? No!

31st March 20221st April 2022

A visit to Bodegas Arráez (La Font de la Figuera, Valencia)

A glass of wine with white wine, and a "Y tú... ¿qué vida llevas?" label

We visited this winery on the same week that we went to Pago de Tharsys.

How often do you pack two winery visits in a week? Very rarely, I’d say! But it was really insightful as we still had the previous experience fresh in our minds, and it was easy to compare styles between the two.

There are plenty of similarities: both are based in the Valencia province. Both are inland, in mountainous areas, way above 500 m over sea level. They’re independent (not owned by a big group), and they offer various types of products, from entry level to premium wines.

Judging by that, you could expect the second visit to be predictable, samey, boring… but it couldn’t have been any more different!