Has anyone here taken one of the completely online WSET Level 2 or Level 3 courses? How do tastings work? How do you calibrate your palette to what WSET expects? (Thinking of levels of acidity, sweetness, etc.)
If you took an online course, would you choose it again? Or do you wish you did an in-person course?
Not quite on point, but took the level 3 in person. 100-120 wines were sampled over 4 day but these samples rather accompany the course materials (most of the time). These are used to illustrate the textbook learning. You may be able to grasp their illustrations of differences of varietal, method, terroir, etc through your samples.
If such is the case that makes things much easier. Then you just need to have the exact samples needed to study for the level 3 exam tasting portion. That might be 4 whites and 4 reds and shouldn’t be too difficult to manage.
The larger and more engaged the group, whether online or in person, the better as it helps supplement rather dry textbook learning.
If you can focus, have some wines that illustrate the textbook to help with learning and have a decent peer group, see no reason why it wouldn’t work online vs in person.
Unless they have recently changed it, you won’t be doing tasting at 2.
That said, I would recommend doing it in person if that is possible. More than anything, you’ll get a wider range of palates across all levels and that is important.
Either way, I will do nothing but encourage you to dip your toes into WSET. IMO, you will gain a greater understanding of wine in general and get a wider view of styles across the entire world.
I took Level 3 online in 2014. Tons and tons of writing exercises, which were a benefit on the test. Tasting is totally on your own. I was tasting a lot and writing a lot of notes at the time independently of the course, so I leaned on that, just making sure I adopted their nomenclature and tasting methodology. There were only 2 wines blind in the test, and your evaluation was scored as highly as guessing the correct wine.
I agree with Keith above. Level 3 was very instructive and I definitely gained a higher understanding to the factual information I’d learned previous to taking it.
I’m hoping to skip WSET 1 and WSET 2 and take the WSET 3 course online and do the exam in Minnesota or Denver next spring (I’m in Nebraska.) I sat in on the wines course at Nebraska-Lincoln this last semester where we tasted over 150 wines. (Paul Read, the professor who has taught the course for the last 20 years, retired at the end of the current school year.)
I’ve recently been invited by the owner of the shop where they meet to join a group of industry pros who get together for tastings once a month to practice for the CMS-A level. (I showed up at a tasting she hosted last week with the WSET 3 notes worksheet and we got to talking about that.)
What can people tell me about the blind tasting part of WSET 3? (I thought the notes didn’t need to include a guess as to the wine.)
I did a WSET 3 course fully online through Napa Valley Wine Academy back in 2020-21. They had partnered with a company that sent out sets of unlabeled mini-bottles correlated to WSET notes so that you could calibrate your palate at home for the blind tasting portion. I was studying with a friend, and we tasted through a bunch more wines than those, but those were helpful.
When I took the exam, we were given blind pours of one red and one white, and we had to write down the (memorized) rubric for evaluation and then, for each characteristic in the list, decide which level was correct for each wine. For aromas and flavors, we were encouraged to stick to the terms within the lists they provide, but you could go off-script if you wanted (although it may or may not gain you any additional points). You didn’t have to guess what the wine was - you just had to assess it in each of the dimensions listed.
(Forgot to mention: I also skipped WSET 1 and 2…if you have some baseline knowledge about wines of the world, viticulture, and how wine is made, it’s pretty doable if you put your mind to it.)
I skipped wset1 and did wset2 online in december 2024. Each week you taste and discuss 2 (or 3) wines. You can either buy the tasting samples from them or they give you wine list ahead of time for you to source yourself.
Did you have to take the exam at Napa Valley’s Wine Academy’s testing center? I’ve been looking at what the Denver school offers, haven’t looked at Minnesota yet. (Denver, Minnesota and Chicago would all be similar distances to travel for the exam.)
The owner of the wine shop I was talking to about WSET 3 has passed WSET 2 and is planning to take the two week intensive course at Napa Valley a year from September (the class was full for 2025.)
Testing is required in person. Don’t have to guess on the wine… just need to follow their tasting template to earn as many marks as possible on the color/aroma/taste/inferences parts.
The hardest part is the short answer. If you study for those the tasting notes will come.
If you have a decent baseline don’t need level 2. Started there and it was a waste of time and jumped right into 3. Will sit for diploma sections 1 and 2 next week so looking forward to study with tasting, instead of just textbook study.
You have to go to an approved WSET testing location, but they provide a variety of options. I ended going to a site two hours away on a Saturday morning…down and back and no big deal.