Help! I Just Got My Wine Exam Results
Passing? Failing? and Other (Sh*tty) Updates from Summer in Paris
Oh Zut, les ami(e)s !
I’m so thankful you’re here, and I have a confession. I’m shaking right now.
I honestly haven’t been this nervous since June of 2017 when I sat for my DALF Niveau C1 exam in the French language in Paris. I wasn’t really nervous at all when I got married in France.
As many of you know, this year I have been studying for the French Wine Scholar certification, a specialization in les vins français. A special merci to everyone who reached out to wish me luck! Well, I’ve been waiting for my results for the past few weeks and they’re finally here. If you want a little bit of background plus the story of what happened when I went to Bordeaux for courses and the big wine exam, keep reading.
If you just want to hear the damn results, no matter what they are, I’m going to read them out loud and put the audio in this post, so scroll on down.
I decided to take a really hard French Wine Exam and yes, it’s my own fault.
Wine—and really everything about l’art de la table (entertaining)—is my passion, so even though I do already have the WSET Level 3 in Wines and Spirits (that’s a global certification), I decided that since I’m working on reinventing myself after moving to France for love, I’d go deeper into the specifics of this very complex world in France. Nobody made me do this. But I really wanted to challenge myself, to confront something that was daunting enough to make me actually pay attention. Do you ever feel that way? Like you just need to do something hard?
Leave a comment and tell us what was—or is—your most recent “hard thing” or challenging objective. We want to know!!
Yes, I may have a chip on my shoulder since I never went to university.
If you’ve read about my adventures in the New York City restaurant world, you’ll know that I come from the Midwest, and that I did not grow up close to nature. If my childhood were a glass of wine I was describing, I’d call it “surprisingly colorful given the aromas of iceberg lettuce and tomato soup. Tertiary notes of Laughing Cow cheese triangles,” which au fait (by the way) are the first “French” thing I ever ate and they’re basically my Proustian madeleines.
So I was never (and am not now) a wine snob. But I love how wine is such an art and a science (and a geography project), how many people and how much care it takes to make good wine, and especially in France, I love the incredible history of wine that dates back to the Romans, and before them the Phoceans.
Was I intimidated in my French wine scholar class?
Mouais (uh, yeah). There were seven students including me, one of whom is le responsable OEnologigue (Oenological Director) for three grand cru vineyards in St. Emilion (Bordeaux). There was an actual wine shop owner, plus a young sommelière who works in un resto étoilé (a Michelin-starred restaurant). And our prof ? Oh, he’s just a candidate for the Master of Wine, the Mt. Everest of Wine Accomplishments that involves blindly identifying wines from all over the world using only your senses and your expertise. Have you ever had that feeling when you don’t want the teacher to call on you for fear of completely imploding? Yep, that was basically the situation.
But in the end, the course was fantastic. I learned so many things I never even thought I was interested in, and I discovered so much about France herself—her regions, her climate and topography, her rivers and estuaries.
I realized during the course of this class that I didn’t know how to tell which side of any river was the “Right Bank” versus the “Left Bank.” If you don’t know either and you want to know, leave me a comment and I’ll tell you!
What’s in the French Wine Scholar Exam?
At the end of two fascinating days of tasting (about 35-40 wines I’d say) at the Wisp Campus in Bordeaux, we put away our glasses, nos crachoirs (our spit buckets—yes, you read that right), and our textbooks and sat down for a timed one-hour test with 100 multiple-choice questions. The level of detail was generally excruciating, with questions on soils, French wine law, winemaking processes (ouillé ou sous voile, anyone?) des çépages anciens (old grape varieties) and des appellations (the controlled place names that are the backbone of French wine quality).
Side note: we had to fill in an answer book with a pencil, just like old times. Only thirty-six seconds per question!
And then we said our goodbyes, most students taking the leftover wines to enjoy now that the big test was finished. I had to hustle over to the train station to get back to Monsieur B, who picked me up in Paris and took me to a delicious dinner on the evening of La Fête de la Musique, an annual all-night French bash that takes place on the 21st of June and features music everywhere—on the streets, in museums and non-traditional venues, in cafés and restaurants. If you’re planning a summer trip to France, it’s a really fun and vibrant event to experience.
So did I pass the damn exam, or what?
In the hours after the wine exam, I felt pretty confident, then fell into despair when I looked up several things I had struggled with and found that I wasn’t sure if I’d answered this or that.
I rallied a little when Monsieur B and I went to a blind tasting of Côte d’Or wines (from la Bourgogne) at a really lovely Parisian wine and spirits shop on the Rue du bac, and I surprised everyone (including myself) when I correctly identified the appellation in five out of seven wines. But for the test, I still worried because I’d heard that it’s something like only 65% of candidates who pass the first time.
The waiting was awful. I refreshed my email so often, looking for word of my results, that my finger actually ached. But finally, here they are (!) along with a note from the wine school that first says, “In the case that you failed: DON’T PANIC” and a link to the results letter. Reading that DON’T PANIC is giving me re-trauma from my French driver’s license exam, which—spoiler alert—I failed three times.
OK, OK let’s read it together! Agggghhh!
In case you don’t feel like listening to me read the letter from the Wine Scholar Guild, the news is…FABULOUS!
I passed, with honors! Putain de merde ! (holy shit!)
Yes, there was some goofy jumping up and down immediately following these happy results.
Needless to say Monsieur B was delighted with the news and we opened a number of very good bottles to celebrate with family visiting. Je suis fière de vous dire (I’m proud to tell you) I can now add the initials “FWS” (French Wine Scholar) to my calling card, and my new lapel pin is on the way. 🙏🏼🍷🇫🇷
And what pray tell will I do with this new certification?
I’m cooking—or should I say swirling—up some ideas now! Je vous tiendrai au courant (I’ll keep you posted). In the meantime, if you’d like to join me on a really easy and fun “beginner’s” French wine journey, check out my latest article on the Wines of the Loire Valley for My French Life™ magazine. Or you can listen to me (not a French teacher) pronouncing French wine words and phrases in preparation for your next trip to France or just to sound cooler at your local wine shop!
Thank you for being here and for supporting La Flâneuse with Karen Bussen. Sharing is caring! Mais oui ! If you know someone who might like to join us here, I hope you’ll send this post to them with a little note or restack it here on Substack so others can discover the fun. It’s free but it means so much to me. Merci merci !
And now, as promised, some updates (sh*tty and otherwise) direct from Paris.
L’Histoire des Jeux Olympiques et La Maire de Paris (The Story of the Olympic Games and the Mayor of Paris). In Paris, each arrondissement has its own mayor and its own town hall. But then there’s “The” mayor of Paris, who’s sort of the mayor of the mayors. That’s Anne Hidalgo, and she decided to prove to Parisians that after more than a billion euros of clean-up efforts, the Seine was actually pristine enough for Olympic athletes to swim in it. But what proof, you ask? Well, she promised she would swim in it herself, bien sûr (of course) !
She originally postponed this dip in the river when just last month two things happened:
Tests of the water came back “still too polluted”
In classic French fashion, cynics started a “movement” (pun intended) to faire caca (poop) in the river in advance of her swim to show how they felt about it (and her)
Mais bref (but in short), she did it. Madame la maire got in the water (albeit with just an hour or two’s notice to journalists and the Number Two Ne’er-do-wells), and to my personal horror, she even did the freestyle, complete with open-mouth side breathing.
Chapeau (a tip of the hat) to this painfully funny Instagram post on the subject (Translation in the caption. Note that JO means “Jeux Olympiques” (Olympic Games) and is confusingly pronounced zhee-OH, like “g” not ‘j”):
Finally, because it wouldn’t be La Flâneuse without a little culinary wandering… juste un petit mot (just a quick word)
I’m loving this guy on Instagram who cooks lots of good things, but who excels at “cooking upside-down.” Check him out—he has 40 million views on his first upside-down recipe video and he’s a charmer. I’m totally trying one of his creations this weekend.
On veut des commentaires ! (We want comments!)
OK mes chers/chères, thank you thank you again for being here.
Je vous souhaite un excellent week-end (I wish you an excellent weekend).
Bisous (kisses),
Karen
HOW TO TELL WHICH SIDE OF A RIVER IS THE "RIGHT" OR "LEFT" BANK. Can't believe I didn't know this. You just look at the river, and point yourself in the direction the water/current is flowing. So looking in the direction that the current is flowing, the Right Bank is on your right-hand side. If you're looking at a map it's a bit more tricky, but you just have to look at where the river is flowing (as in--toward which other body of water is it flowing), and that tells you the direction of the current. Then if you orient yourself in the direction the current is flowing, the Right Bank will be on your right-hand side and the Left Bank on your left-hand side. Easy-peasy. Let me know if this is confusing in any way and I'll get Monsieur B to explain haha
Et La Vache qui Rit etait mon premier fromage français, aussi, il y a si longtemps. Je l'aime toujours. :-)