Wine exam week. The long MW one. Close to 22 hours of high-level performance over four days. It’s intense. I sat six weeks’ worth of MW exams. Enough I decided, for my lifetime. No more exams. Ever. I even have a tattoo to remind me of that self-promise.

So I am writing this as I sit invigilating the MW Stage 2 final theory exam on a Friday afternoon in June in Napa. Call it penance, or closure. I choose to call it a tribute to those in front of me right now.

There are two elements I do miss; only two. The first is the suspension of time, the bubble created by the exam room. Within the four bland windowless walls there is a brilliance at work, a silent laying out of the mind-map to plot a path through the maze of questions.  The outside world is muffled, temporarily put on hold, distanced. Time stretches and becomes irrelevant in the flow that settles, while simultaneously ticking down to zero on the exam room clock. It’s a beautiful puzzle.

Watching my son dive over the years, I felt the perfect moment came not as he entered the pool splash-less, but when the arc of his flight seemed momentarily suspended midair. His body stopped time. He flew and just like a bird, he drew breath between the exertion and seemed to hover on a heartbeat. That middle part, the sinew-stretching, slo-mo mode, that’s what had me most engaged. Those were the brief glimpses of forever I loved the most.

I enjoy wine most when it performs that same trick. We know wine has little respect for measured time. An open bottle can stop a clock; a second glass turns a meeting into a date. We hope a wine will show at its best when we choose to draw the cork but must accept that we are never masters of its mercurial nature. It can be tricky. Great wine interprets time uniquely. Even in an exam room. While I do not miss the pressure, I miss the privilege it gave me of precious hours dwelling solely and intently on an object that so fascinates me. I am now more acutely aware and grateful than ever when a wine allows me to forget the time, when it allows me to put away the phone. Two Burgundies gifted me that recently, a Bourgogne and a Chambertin. The one perky, joyous, the other silk-fine and luminous. They stopped me in my tracks and, for a brief moment, were all that mattered.

I also miss the luxury of release. Exam-takers communicate on subjects that have been carefully studied. They get to elaborate on themes that have played in their mind on long loops for years. Years of stored experience bottled up, fit to burst. Those essays were a blessed relief. I always felt the MW Tasting papers were akin to my Language Translation Finals at university. A glass of wine served blind is a story waiting to be told; it’s just in another language. My job in the moment was to attempt to make sense of it; the trick was to learn to speak ‘wine’.

We, the industry, are sometime accused of being poor communicators, at worst elitist, at best irrelevant. I think we do struggle often. Most of us who love wine stumble from time to time in our excitement to convey what speaks to us. Words are poor substitutes for feelings after all. We can mislead at the very moment we seek to give clarity. As of course can wine, under exam conditions. How many times did I confuse a Spanish flight for a French, a New World for an Old, a Puligny for a Chablis, yes even a Sherry for a Madeira? But our stumbles and failures do not mean we shouldn’t try. The worst thing we could do right now to an industry that is fraught and a little fragile, is to turn the volume down on our innate enthusiasm or dumb down on our love. Like any relationship worth preserving, it’s worth talking about, and it’s worth fighting for.

I failed many more wine exams than I passed. My journey was a minefield. But I opened so many extraordinary bottles with extraordinary people along the way, my relationship with wine is a love affair for the ages and continues to offer me my fragments of forever. For that I am grateful and for that I sit silently now, in suspended time, championing my roomful of students.

You can read the questions that the students were asked in this year’s Master of Wine exam here.

Photo by Akshay Chauhan on Unsplash