Who It's For: WSET and CMS candidates working on structured tasting and anyone who wants to stop nodding along when someone says a wine is "reductive" or "oxidative."
Grapes are only half the story. The other half is a long list of decisions the winemaker makes once the fruit is in the door. Some of those decisions leave clear signatures in the glass, and once you learn what to look for, you start noticing them everywhere.
This intermediate class focuses on four of the most influential techniques in modern winemaking: lees aging, malolactic conversion, oak aging, and carbonic maceration. We taste examples side by side so you can feel what each one actually does to a wine, cover why a winemaker would choose each approach, and work on the vocabulary to describe what you are picking up. By the end, you should be able to taste blind and make a real guess about what happened in the winery.