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General WSET Exam Information

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WSET Advanced Certificate Exam

The exam for the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Advanced Certificate consists of two parts (described in greater detail below):

The tasting exam and written exam are marked and passed or failed separately. The passing percentage for each is 55%. If you pass one part, you keep that pass indefinitely, and can re-take the failed part at any time in the future.

 

Pass, Merit, and Distinction

The Advanced Certificates themselves will be annotated either "Pass" (55% to 64.9%), "Pass With Merit" (65%-79.9%), or "Pass With Distinction" (80% or higher). Someone who initially fails one of the parts of the exam can earn no higher than "Pass With Merit," no matter how high a score (s)he achieves in eventually passing the previously failed part.

 

Blind Tasting Paper: Expectations and Evaluation

From a neutral bottle you will be given one wine, red or white, and asked to write a description, following the WSET Systematic Approach, which you should know thoroughly if you have been attending classes. Under appearance, for example, you would need to describe the wine's clarity, intensity, color and any other observations, such as rim vs. core. Continuing with the nose and palate, you would need to accurately describe all four of the aroma description categories and all eight of the palate description categories to get the maximum number of marks for each. Additional points are available for identifying what the wine is and its approximate retail value.

Who will decide whether a description is right or wrong? No more than two hours before the exam is scheduled to begin, one or more "Internal Assessors" (there are six of them locally) will taste the same wine from the same bottle(s) and create a marking key, which they will use to grade student papers. Then the marking key and student papers will be sent to the WSET whose examiners will verify a portion of all graded tasting papers to make sure that they are "valid, authentic, consistent and sufficient," verifying that the marks given to a candidate's paper reflect its congruence with or deviation from the marking key. The wine for each exam will be from a list supplied by the WSET, so they will have prior familiarity with the wine and how it should have been described.

Does this seem intimidating? If you have been using the WSET Systematic approach during class or while you study independently, you should be able to get a passing score. Remember, you only need 14 marks out of a possible 25. You can get up to 21 of the possible 25 marks just by describing the wine in your glass. And the other four marks? You can get two marks for correctly identifying the type of wine and two marks for identifying its price category. You need not pluck the wine type and price range out of thin air. A sample exam question that the WSET issues gave you a multiple choice of Bordeaux, Barolo, Beaujolais and Australian Shiraz, four wines that are different enough that most people should get the type of wine correct. And the price bands were wide: "low-priced" (under $10); "mid-priced" ($10-$20); "high-priced" ($20-$30); and "premium" (over $30).

 

Theory Paper: Multiple Choice Questions

The following multiple-choice questions are typical of those that often appear in the Advanced Certificate Exam theory paper.

  1. What is the principal grape variety in Rose d'Anjou?
    a) Gamay
    b) Grolleau
    c) Malbec
    d) Cab. Franc
  2. Which one of the following is an example of a low- trained, cane-pruned system of vine cultivation?
    a) Guyot
    b) Gobelet
    c) Lenz Moser
    d) Cruzeta
  3. Which of these villages is in the Grand Champagne  district?
    a) Bouzy
    b) Cramant
    c) Segonzac
    d) Aÿ
  4. Where is the Aconcagua Valley?
    a) Brazil
    b) Chile
    c) Argentina
    d) Uruguay

Answers for the above questions are [ b, a, c, b]. Highlight inside the brackets to see the answers.

 

Theory Paper: Short Answer Questions

The WSET has released two sample questions representative of the types of questions included in the hour-long short answer questions.

The first question shows a replica of the label of a 1989 Rheingau Rüdesheimer Berg Roseneck Riesling Spätlese Halbtrocken. Here is what you are asked to provide, followed by (in parentheses) the maximum number of points available (total of 25 points).

An answer which would garner all available marks (25), following the category sequences listed above, would be:

To get a passing grade for that particular question, you would need 55% of the available 25 marks, or 13.75 marks. But, please don't feel intimidated. You would get 3 marks just for copying the grape variety, region and QmP level from the label; and, assuming you have tasted a mature German Riesling (usually poured during the German class) you should get close to the available total of 10 marks for the "tasting note."

And, of course, this is just one of four questions within this segment, so you could get, say, only 10 points and earn the other points you need to reach the 55 point passing score on the other three questions.

Here is the second sample question:

A customer who regularly purchases classic French wines requests New World alternatives. Recommend a suitable New World wine as a substitute for the following wines, stating reasons for the selections.

The five French wines are Pouilly-Fume, Côte Rôtie, Saint Emilion, Margaux, and Chablis. For each, you could get up to 2 marks for identifying a correct New World wine type and up to 3 points for your rationale, for a possible total of 25 points.

As with the first question, here are suggested answers that would earn the maximum available (25) marks.

You would need enough marks from this question so that, when they are added to your totals for the other three short answer questions, they total 55. If you did well on this question getting, say, 20 marks, then you would only need a total of 35 marks from the other three questions, less than 12 marks each.

Once again, this segment containing four short-answer question is graded separately from the short answer part of the exam. You could get a total of 100 marks from the four short answer questions but you would still need to get at least 55% from the multiple-choice part to pass the "Theory Paper" (the non-tasting part of the exam).

 

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