As the Wine Trade Changes, Wine Education Has to Change With It

I’ve been talking a lot lately about a simple idea: As the wine trade changes, wine education has to change with it.

For a long time, there has been a gap between the reality of the wine industry and the credentials available to people who want to build a career in it. In much of the world, the choices have largely fallen into two camps: spend four or more years earning a university degree, or complete a professional certificate.

For the past 25 years, I’ve been working toward a middle ground: the trade-school model. It offers a more substantial educational and credentialing structure than a short professional certificate, without requiring the enormous time and financial commitment of a traditional college degree.

That matters because wine is not one profession. It is a trade made up of winemakers, sommeliers, educators, salespeople, buyers, importers, distributors, marketers, compliance professionals, hospitality workers and many others.

It isn’t that we don’t have credentials. We have a lot of them. The problem is that they don’t form a coherent system. Winemakers may have graduate degrees in enology or viticulture. Service people may have WSET, CMS or similar credentials. People in retail, distribution, importing, marketing and many other parts of the business are often largely DIY. You end up with enormous disparities in knowledge and very little clarity about what somebody actually knows when they walk into a job.

And the credentials don’t necessarily map cleanly to careers. People frequently start buying education before they really understand what job they’re training for. There are a lot of stop-starts, wrong turns and very expensive dead ends.

What we need is a true trade-school model: a common foundation of wine knowledge, business knowledge and professional skills that employers can recognize, followed by specialization for production, hospitality, sales, importing, retail, education, marketing and the rest.

At the Wine School of Philadelphia, that foundation is the Core. Level One covers the essentials: what wine is, the major grapes and styles, basic production and how to taste. Level Two covers sensory analysis using varietal fingerprints, blind tasting and the effects of viticulture and winemaking on flavor. Level Three takes that foundation and applies it to the major wine regions: geography, grapes, history, culture and terroir.

Wine isn’t magic, and one of the fundamental skills everyone in the trade should have is the ability to taste and communicate what they are tasting.

After that, people shouldn’t all be taking the same classes, because their careers are going in different directions. Our Advanced students choose the subjects that actually matter to them: winemaking, viticulture, wine science, specific countries and regions, wine business and law, education. Depending on how far someone wants to specialize, that can run from a semester to perhaps two years part time.

The National Wine School is our attempt to take the structure we developed in Philadelphia and turn it into a broader, portable system.

Consumers hear a remarkable amount of contradictory information from people working in wine. If the trade had more shared norms around what is known, how we describe it and what the evidence actually supports, that would increase consumer trust and confidence. I just want to live in a world where sommeliers don’t talk about how rocks make wines taste like minerals.

Wine education needs to stop selling people a fantasy of “working in wine.” We should be showing them what the industry actually looks like, what the jobs actually are, what those jobs require and how to get from where they are now to one of them.

That’s where the trade-school model becomes really valuable.