The Barrel room at City Winery in Chicago

I'm very enthusiastic about bringing the WSET course program to Chicago's City Winery, where we will be conducting classes in the beautiful Barrel Room.

The WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust) is considered one of, if not the, most prestigious routes to wine education available. Lyn will be leading several courses this autumn for Fine Vintage, Ltd, the most comprehensive WSET provider in North America - including this one-day Level One course covering the fundamentals of wine - how it's made, and how to find the wines you love.

The Level One course is a "foundation course" that is ideal for everyone who loves wine and wants to understand it better. This full-day course focuses on learning the art of wine tasting (including demystifying the vocabulary you might have once found daunting), pairing food and wine, and exploring the characteristics of the major grape varieties with intensive exercises. We also delve into grape growing and winemaking, and serving and cellaring wine. 

Who is this Level 1 class for?

This course is the ideal place to discover or to hone your wine sensibility, whether your interest in wine is as an occasional consumer hoping to demystify a wine list when you go out to dinner, or a culinary professional looking to expand your wine knowledge beyond the basics that are part of culinary training. It's a full-day course that includes tasting 18 world-class wines from Vintage Champagne to classic wines from Spain, France, Italy and the United States. 

You can only learn about wine by tasting great wine!

An important benefit of the Level 1 class is the opportunity to have an introduction to WSET's much-admired systematic approach to wine tasting and evaluation. Prepare to be amazed at the skills you will develop through the day's guided tastings of 16 wines. This approach is expanded on in Levels 2 and 3, so this is a fine place to build a framework for tasting and, better still, for sharing your impressions of wine. In this course, you will sample wines made from the same grape but two different regions to compare not only taste but regional style.

The course concludes with an exam that, when passed, provides you with a Level One Certification from the Wine and Spirit Education Trust. Increasingly, restaurants, importers and distributors want their representatives to have a verifiable certification of their interest in and knowledge of wine. There is no more respected, nor globally recognized, certification than that from WSET.

For more information on the Level One Award in Wine course, click here to open a new window on the Fine Vintage, Ltd. website. And to register for the course with Fine Vintage for Level 1 in. Chicago, click here. One caveat is in order: if you want to take this class, you are well-advised to sign up as soon as possible. It's easy to put things off, but registering early gives you time to receive all your materials and to prepare for the class. We will send you a PDF of the text that you can download before class along with more than 100 sample exam questions to give you an idea of the materials we'll cover. When you arrive at City Winery on July 8 we'll have a hard copy of the workbook ready and waiting.