Tom Wark on What a Wine Education Means

In a recent post on Fermentations, Tom Wark asks what it means to earn certification from a school that teaches wine knowledge. If you’re an employer, should you care? If you’re looking to advance your career in wine, should you care what the certification says about you?

Michelle Massie cares, Wark writes. She is the first recipient of the Habibi Sommelier Scholarship Program, supported by the Wine School of Philadelphia and The Hue Society to “expand access to professional wine education and build pathways into the wine industry for people who have historically been underrepresented in the field.” The scholarship will let her take the school’s Core Sommelier Course.

Right before the announcement, Wark and school founder Keith Wallace were trading emails about the meaning and utility of a wine education. Wark has long questioned the need for any formal wine education. Wallace, naturally, sees greater utility in it. But his real concern is that the credentialing system surrounding wine education is incoherent.

“Winemakers may have graduate degrees in enology or viticulture,” Wallace told him. “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.”

“He’s not wrong,” Wark writes. As far as he knows, no wine education programs target wine retail, distributor sales, wine educator, importer or event organizer careers.

Wark asks whether Massie could just buy Karen MacNeil’s “The Wine Bible” and take six months to master it. What she wouldn’t get from the book, he writes, is the benefit of interacting with educators and fellow wine lovers, and of Wallace’s “years of experience and knowledge of how the wine industry works.”

“I probably spend more time with students outside the classroom than I do in it,” Wallace said, “helping them understand how the trade actually works and pointing them toward concrete paths that can lead somewhere.”

Wark calls that “a form of mentorship” and says it will surely be one of the benefits Massie takes from the school.

Wallace believes the traditional trade school model is both possible and needed. “What I think 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,” he said. “That’s part of what we’ve been trying to build with the Wine School of Philadelphia and the National Wine School: not another isolated credential, but a stackable education system that starts with a common foundation and can then lead into increasingly specialized professional training.”

Wark’s verdict: “Michelle Massie is in good hands.” Wallace has a quarter century under his belt educating wine lovers, a great many of whom have gone on to every sector of the wine industry.

As for where wine education is going, Wark writes, “I sense that Wallace and his notion that wine education needs to have more of a trade school-like character is probably the future.”

Read the full post at Fermentations: https://tomwark.substack.com/p/the-future-of-wine-education