On The Road To Becoming A Master Of Wine: First Speed Bump, Certified Specialist Of Wine, Part 8

It is All Hallows' Eve, and I have been working all day stocking, pricing and selling wine. I haven't had any good wine all day, and I am tired. The lights in and out of the house are off to ward away trick-or-treaters, and I sit in front of the computer screen trying to conjure up some inspiration to write my next blog, and in the process get some studying in. I did manage to study the Society of Wine Educators (SWE) written guide during lunch for about 20 minutes while eating a sandwich. I think the appropriate subject or module tonight should be Fine Wine Sales and Service. While I have much experience in fine wine sales, I have very little experience in service, not counting entertaining at home. If you are just joining me on this little journey, click here for the first part of the series.

I am figuring to get a 70% or better on this section, and the majority of the wrong answers to be on service. Let's see... Ha! I scored exactly 70% and got a total of 6 questions wrong out of 20. What isn't quite plain to me is what category those six questions fall under.

Fine Wine Sales and Service

I must say that this section was almost unbearably annoying to me. Almost all the questions had little bearing on what, I believe, would make someone a good wine educator. Maybe I am just tired, but I really doubt that is the real reason I found this section a bit ambiguous and annoying. Let's take a look at the questions I got wrong.

According to a 2005 Gallup poll the preferred alcoholic beverage of choice for Americans is not beer, as I supposed, but  wine. 2005 marks the first time wine was preferred by Americans, over beer and spirits.

When assisting a customer purchasing wine, what is the most difficult scenario? Casual dinner, special occasion or gift. I chose special occasion because I want everything, especially the wine to be memorable. The answer the SWE was looking for was "gift giving", the area I have the least difficulty with. You ask a few questions such as; do you know what they like? what is the occasion? should they be able to drink the wine now or would you like them to age it? in what range should the cost of the gift be? Bam! Easy!

Food and wine pairing is based on understanding right and wrong rules of food and wine pairing. True or False? I said True. As I stated in my last post there are better pairings than others. This could be loosely translate as "rules", and I believe that wine and  food pairings are "based", but not necessarily decided, on these "rules". Rules, however, are made to be broken. The problem I had with this question is a matter of  semantics.

This next question definitely falls under the category of service. Which restaurant wine service protocol is INCORRECT? I chose "Servers should pour from the right." I racked my brain trying to remember how waitstaff have poured my wine and I came up empty. I just guessed.The answer they were looking for was, "Wine glasses are always set to the left of the waterglass, above the fork on the left side of the place setting." Maybe if I wasn't tired I could have pictured my table setting and gotten that one correct. I always put the wine glasses on the right.

Chilling the bottle reduces the pressure inside a bottle of sparkling wine and allows for more control of the cork when opening. I guessed false. I am generally not very interested in the technical aspects of things. Start talking numbers or what things are made of chemically, and my eyes glaze over. That said, sparking wine should be chilled to 40-45 degrees, not only for proper serving temperature, but because those suckers (the corks) can reach 65 miles per hour when released.

There are 6 atmospheres of pressure trapped in a bottle of sparkling wine. At this point I had reached 100 atmospheres of pressure in the space between my ears and just hoped that this interesting but useless information is not on the final exam. I mean seriously, can you imagine helping a customer either in a retail store or as a server in a restaurant and saying, "Now be careful with that bottle, remember it has 6 atmospheres of pressure trapped in there."  Customer's response, "Really, is one of them Uranus?"

Picture from http://www.astro.virginia.edu/

I took the post-test and scored a 100%.  Happy Halloween and cheers! Five days to go until the exam.