More ideas and resources to study for the WSET Level 3 Award in wines exam

If you haven’t yet, make sure to read part 1 (how to study the theory) and part 2 (how to prepare for the practice exam).

This is the final set of advice and tips I can share and which didn’t quite fit the previous installments 🙂

I’ve broken it down in various sections so it is a bit more palatable.

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My favourites from the Bancroft Wines 2022 portfolio tasting

Bancroft Wines 2022 portfolio tasting event main hall at RIBA

I was invited to attend this event last June (many thanks to Kat!).

It was quite a huge event with LOTS of producers showcasing a veritable variety of wines, and I quickly realised I could not even remotely try as many as I wanted, so I took a quick executive decision to just focus on the producers from the areas that have been intriguing me the most lately: Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, and neighbouring and “up and coming” trend-wise areas from France such as Alsace and Loire Valley.

Unfortunately left untasted were wines from Friulia in the north of Italy, Abruzzo, many from New Zealand and Australia (I was really looking forward to trying out more of their Pinot Noir and Rieslings), etc, etc.

Here are the ones I tasted and liked the best:

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How to prepare (and study!) for the WSET Level 3 Award in wines practice exam

Six glasses of different red wines, for a tasting

If you somehow landed here and missed part 1, here’s the link so you know how I would approach studying for the theory exam.

My one-sentence advice would be: maximise your chances… and now I’ll explain why.

The practice exam consists in blind tasting two wines, and describing them using the WSET’s SAT method.

At this level, you are NOT meant to identify which wine is it or which grapes was it made with. You’re just meant to describe it in terms of flavours, aromas and other variables such as levels of sweetness or acidity.

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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.

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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! 😆đŸ€Ș

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?

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