Find Your Inner Sommelier

Free Wine Education!

Are you a cork dork who dreams of being a wine geek? Learning about wine comes in many forms, and plenty of free resources exist. There are some excellent free wine education videos online, many great wine blogs, and even free wine tastings to attend. This is one of the significant advantages of living in the 21st century: no matter the discipline; you can educate yourself if you have the drive. Even at the Wine School, we offer free online wine classes to our wine club members and send our free wine newsletter every month.

Wine Books & Tasting

Accurate enough, free only gets you so far. You may eventually tire of being part of the attention economy and the constant sales pitches. It takes a lot of work to sort through the garbage heap of lousy information to find those rare pearls of wisdom.

For many, digging into a trove of wine books and buying some wine is the next step in their wine education. Jumping into a book by a reputable wine expert is much more satisfying and in-depth. You eventually realize that you and all those wine influencers are reading the same books.

But no one in their right mind wants to read; there must be some wine-tasting involved! You are going to need great wines, but you also don’t want to bankrupt yourself. The key is to find a great wine shop and develop a relationship with its wine buyer. For this, we recommend staying away from the big chains if possible. Independent shops have more freedom and typically won’t upsell you, either.

Wine Podcasts

The wine podcast is one of the most important venues for learning about wine. For a list of the best ones available today, we keep an updated list here: The Top Wine Podcasts.

Dreaming of Your Sommelier Pin

There does come a point where swirling wine and flipping pages hits a plateau. After finishing a few books, you wonder where the writers got their information. It wasn’t just from books. You start to realize that many wine writers have distinct cultural biases. Jancis Robinson is a francophile, Kevin Zraly loves Italian wine, and Robert Parker is down with Napa Valley. You may also start noticing that wine books aren’t updated often and may be outdated.

This is the point at which people start thinking about taking sommelier classes. There are plenty of fabulous wine schools across the country; one of the most popular types of wine education involves sommelier certification. It’s a myth that somm certification is only for working in restaurants. Did you know that half of all sommelier graduates and over 85% of all master sommeliers don’t work in restaurants? This has been true for decades.

Sommelier certification has become the standard for wine education. Before 2001, most people who wanted a high-profile wine career would get a viticulture degree from a university. That was always overkill. Wine certification is now organized more like the technology sector: you don’t need a university degree, and the sommelier certification is now the de facto credential.