Last year, I joined the drinks business as a reporter.

Like most people, I more or less fell into the drinks industry. To extend the metaphor, I landed on my feet and hit the ground running by enrolling in the WSET’s Level 2 course, which I passed with flying colours.

The Level 2 is great for anyone who wants to learn more about wine, but recruiters in the alcohol sector often need you to have more knowledge than that. Some employers require at least a Diploma before they even look at the rest of your your CV.

In the interests of a thorough review, feeling confident at tastings, and working towards the shiny WSET L4, I enrolled in the wine-focused Level 3 in February this year.

What followed was six months of existential doubt, and an eye twitch I still need to get checked out. It was also one of the most valuable learning experiences of my career so far.

If you’re about to embark on your own course, take a look at the few things I wish I’d known before I started, and you may well do better than me.

Note: This course was funded in part by the drinks business and by the WSET.

The course in brief

At Level 3, you are expected to develop a strong ability to describe wine accurately, and account in detail for the style, quality and price of wines.

The material covers the following:

• The key factors in the production of wine, including location, grape growing, winemaking, maturation and bottling.
• The key characteristics of the principal still, sparkling, and fortified wines of the world. Chapters include (not in order):
  • All the key areas of France. Bordeaux, Beaujolais, Loire etc all have their own chapters
  • Germany and Austria
  • Hungary
  • Northern, Central and Southern Italy
  • Spain
  • Greece
  • The USA and Canada
  • Australia
  • New Zealand
  • Portugal
• How to make appropriate wine recommendations
• How to make a tasting note to Level 3 standard, including tutored tastings of 82 wines

It’s important to remember your tasting sheet is going to be a lot bigger this time, and you will need to memorise it fairly quickly.

So, here’s what I wish I knew….

You can choose your own pace

There are a lot of ways to study the course. The school I attended allows you to cover the syllabus in a five-day crash-course, but also offers anything up to a six-month curriculum. I have a full-time job, so I signed up for the longest and least-intensive, which took place on the first Sunday of every month from February until July.

I was joined by 13 other would-be wine buffs, just one of whom was in the industry himself; a chef who co-owns a wine-focused restaurant in Stoke Newington. Some worked in finance, some worked in law, all apparently saw the wine trade as a viable escape-route out of office life, hence the education.

While in theory, six months gives you plenty of time to revise, if you have a full time job, you have to be motivated to work under your own steam. Personally, I would’ve gone for a shorter course if I knew just how much I’d have to learn independently.

You really, really need to prepare

Day one was less a relaxed introduction, more a refined interrogation into our current knowledge base. We were told that we should re-familiarise ourselves with the material from Level 2.

You can skip Level 2 if you have equivalent training or already know your stuff — like the chef — but trust me, you need some kind of starting point for this. I took the course late last year, but I was still a bit rusty.

The material you learn at Level 3 will go into more depth than Level 2, so it’s useful to have some kind of structured knowledge to work with before you get to the classroom.

You need to get to know your course-mates

Or better still, sign up with a friend. At Level 2, you more or less turn up once a week and never even have to look your coursemates in the eye if you don’t want to.

However, in addition to your written exam Level 3, you have a blind tasting assessment. Our teacher Melanie at the East London Wine School — which, by the way, will be exhibiting at our Wine & Spirits Show on 12th-13th October — told us to start a Whatsapp group so we could arrange study groups outside of our timetabled lessons.

Every month, about two weeks after each lesson, we’d meet up at a wine bar like Vagabond and practice our tasting notes. Success was mixed, but it really is useful to do this in a group. Once you’ve completed your notes, you can swap them around, correct each other, and realise you’re all in the same boat. The study groups were simultaneously terrifying and reassuring.

You need to start revising from week 1

Think you can just skim-read the book the week before and cruise a Merit? Think again.

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The Level 3 textbook is….big. It’s also extremely in-depth.

Apologies to those who have completed or are still studying their Diploma, who are now scoffing into their Merlot reading this.

Our teacher told us to start revising right after out first session. While I agree that was useful, I found it even more helpful to read up on the subject I knew I’d be tackling in the next session. That way the information stuck firmly once I was learning with the class.

You shouldn’t rely on the textbook alone

Ok, so you will only be examined on what is in the textbook which, by now, you can recite backwards.

BUT, I found the course material difficult to read at times. Maybe it was the depth and breadth of knowledge we were expected to have. Maybe it was some of the awkward wording in chapters, but as a dyslexic it wasn’t exactly a picnic.

You need to stay motivated, and the best way is to make it fun. Watching TV shows, listening to podcasts, attending tastings, and visiting wineries are all great ways to keep your knowledge fresh and your mind open to the subject.

It gets competitive

I knew I’d entered a new world of anxiety in lesson three. At Level 2, classmates would talk in low voices and compare their notes as they went. It was an imperfect system, but it was ours.

But this was different. In one lesson, I was stuck on a tasting note for Riesling, which is my Achilles heel. I went into a mini meltdown and all the tasting notes I’d revised evaporated from my memory. Panicked and desperate, and knowing I’d have to think of something to bring up in the group discussion afterward, I tried to casually glance over my shoulder to my neighbour’s sheet of paper (DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT).

My neighbour put her pencil-case between us and obstructed my view.

Like any errant child who hasn’t done their homework, I was outraged. This wasn’t an exam. This wasn’t even meant to be marked at the end. What was her problem? But then it hit me.

First: I’m 25 and need to grow up.

Second: as I’ve said before, you’re expected to complete a minimum 52 hours of revision in your own time. Let’s say you’re a bartender and you’re earning £7 per hour on a zero-hours contract, and you’re self-funding this course. You’ve already spend upwards of £600 enrolling in the first place, and you’re now going to lose more than half of that in potential wages because you need to study. Your time is precious, and so is your fellow oenophiles’. You may be classmates, but you shouldn’t expect people to let you freeload.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

But remember, you can still be friends. Just don’t act like a kid.

You should buy more stationary

There is only one thing fun about GCSEs, and that is the stationary.

I asked my classmates what they used to revise, and more than one mentioned mind-maps. I personally found drawing on a map of the world with a whiteboard pen useful when I was trying to pinpoint regions. Anything you can do to make your study more interactive will help.

Buy highlighters in every colour. Stick those A2 multicoloured sheets of paper in your basket. Go on, get those scented pens. You deserve it.

You need to relax

I realise I haven’t made that easy, but staying calm is going to be crucial if you want to pass both exams at the end of the course.

Our teachers told us time and time again that you should trust your instincts when tasting a wine. If you can smell something, write it down straight away, and don’t try to second guess yourself.

And as well as this, if you go into every lesson worrying about the amount of information you need to absorb, you won’t absorb it. Remember, this is meant to be rewarding, so don’t punish yourself before you’ve even started by panicking.

You really can go at your own pace

If you’ve read this far, great. This is the most important part. You need to remember that you signed up for this voluntarily. This isn’t about getting into sixth form, or university, or being allowed to handle a car. This is learning more about something you’re truly passionate about, and if you have a problem, your teachers will support you.

If, for whatever reason, you are suddenly unable to take the exam (that is, if you are out of the country, unwell etc), you can defer your paper for a fee.

About one week after I had my first lesson with the WSET, I had to leave London suddenly for about two months. I was unable to attend the next session, or catch up with the course material for a while. I asked to defer the exam, and my teachers were more than accommodating.

Remember: at the end of the day, it’s just wine.