How taking on the MW qualification inspired a memoire
In a podcast with Sonal Holland this month, the Mumbai-based wine consultant told db about the sacrifices she made to gain the Master of Wine title, and how it inspired her to write a book, which has just been published.
As you can listen to in the recording – in which Holland reveals her ‘Desert Island Drinks’ – before she passed all the Master of Wine exams in 2016, Sonal spent six years on the programme, which involved a significant amount of travelling, money, and painful separation from her daughter, who was aged just one when Sonal started her MW studies.
Looking back to her first day on the course, which saw her enrolled on a week-long period of study at The Austrian Wine Academy in Rust, she recorded how shocking she found the introduction to the MW programme, despite having quickly and successfully risen through the qualifications offered by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET).
“After doing the diploma, it [the MW] was such a huge step up, I didn’t even know what I was thinking at the time, because I passed all my WSET courses fairly quickly and with no problems, and so when I entered the MW program, I was feeling confident,” she began.
“But I remember day one in Austria’s Rust, and the first thing they did was put these 12 wines in front of us, all of which looked like the same, and we were asked to answer this paper for the next couple of hours and write like an MW, and there was no coaching, there was no prelude to any of this activity, and I didn’t even know what to write. I was so stumped at the time, and then, as if that wasn’t enough, we were all asked to read out our answers, and I remember making so many massive blunders with the wines in the earlier days, so all of my initial confidence came crashing down.”
That was just day one for Holland, who spent a further six years on the programme, during which, she recalled, “I spent an enormous amount of time away from home, and this was at a time when my daughter was one year old.”
Commenting that achieving the MW title appears “seemingly impossible,” when you start the course, she added that the study programme involved many “personal sacrifices,” from “being away from home, leaving a young toddler,” to “missing out on best friends’ birthdays,” as well as her “daughter’s fourth and fifth birthdays”, because “her birthday is in June, and that’s invariably when our exams would be.”
Not only did this fuel “mother’s guilt” in Holland, but she was also investing a huge amount of time and money in “the self-study that one must embark on, in terms of travel to wine countries around the world, and your own understanding of the craft.”
Consequently, she told db, “My god, those six years were tough, I will say; I will not lie, they were tough.”
Partner Content
Indeed, she said that the study programme unearthed a set of qualities “that I didn’t know existed in me”, including “self-belief, grit, perseverance, adding, “I had to remind myself that I’ve set this upon myself, I want to achieve this, and I can’t give up.”
Now Sonal’s daughter is a teenager, what does she think of her mother today?
Holland recorded, “My daughter was 7 years old when I finally became a Master of Wine – she lived that 6-year-long journey with me, and I promise you, there were times when I used to feel so guilty leaving home, and invariably, all these Indian flights are in the middle of the night – all flights to Europe and US and UK, they all leave in the middle of the night – and so this used to be a depressing time to leave her, because, you know, I’d put her to sleep, knowing that when she woke up tomorrow morning, she wouldn’t see me… I’d be so depressed about this, and I would really think that my daughter would grow up and one day question me, asking, ‘how are you my mum? Or who is my mother?’ Or something like that.
“But you know something, when I became a Master of Wine, my whole family was with me: it was an important festival, and the day the results came out, and I got the call from [executive director of the IMW] Penny Richards to tell me I’d become a Master of Wine, it was the day of Ganesh Chaturthi – it’s a pretty big festival, and I was in the middle of a ritual.
“And the phone rang, and I picked up the call, and I got the news, and I turned around, and I broke the news, and everyone was elated. So my mum, dad, sister, brother-in-law, of course Andrew, my husband, and my daughter, and everyone, and I was crying, laughing; everything at the same time. And Rhianna, my daughter, asked Andrew, ‘Why is mum doing what she’s doing, like, what’s happened?’ And my dad said to her that mummy has just became a Master of Wine – ‘you remember all this time she was traveling, she was away from you, she’s finally achieved what she was wanting, and she’s become the only Master of Wine in India’.
“And my daughter, who was studying Maths in school, walked over to me, and she’s asked me, ‘Mummy, is it true? Are you India’s only Master of Wine? Because that makes you one in a billion.’
“And I embraced her, and I said, ‘Rhianna, not only have you given me the greatest compliment ever, but you’ve just given me the name for my book. I will one day write a book, and I will title it, ‘One in a Billion!’
As Sonal concluded on this topic, “So that’s where this name comes from, and this is actually what the first chapter in the book talks about – the prologue is about the third best day in my life, which was the day I became a Master of Wine.”
Related news
Global spirits groups escalate legal battles in India
