After I hung up the phone, my immediate thought was well, I can’t do it. I simply don’t know how to do it. I can’t do it. This was the first time in the 30 months that I have been...

If there’s one thing I love more than a really good pun, it’s a really bad pun. The more groan-some the better. It’s almost compulsive for me, which means I’m devoting far too much time to...

The academic year for my practical-only resit course has now begun. Several MWs have recently said to me that passing both exams first time is ultimately disadvantageous: that by retaking the...

The 13 new Masters of Wine of 2011, nine of them women, were formally welcomed into the Institute at its annual reception and awards ceremony at Vintners' Hall in London last Wednesday, 9...

You know what studying for the MW is like? It’s like a perpetual funfair of JOY and AWESOMENESS where your heart sings for sheer love, everyone shares their packed lunches and Bambi’s mother...

It shouldn’t be called a dissertation. It should be called academic waterboarding. The only thing more torturous than doing an MW dissertation is convincing people how much harder it is...

Well, that’s a load of my mind: yesterday I heard that I have passed the MW theory exam! Or, to put it another way, yesterday I heard that I have failed the MW practical exam. Not by a...

For the first time ever, the number of current Masters of Wine has reached 300. The Institute of Masters of Wine yesterday announced not only the results of this year's exams (in which our very...

It has now been ten weeks since I sat the MW exams. Over the summer, I was quietly resolved to continue studying in order to keep my notes up to date and to preserve all revision in my memory....

Read it and weep, folks [and remember that questions can look deceptively simple; the examiners are looking for extremely detailed answers with lots of examples - JR]. And see yesterday's details...

Tomorrow - t he theory p apers . It's so  much easier when they tell you what the wines are. Reproduced below is the 2011 MW practical examination - that is, all three...

Completing the MW exams wasn’t quite the death of me, but a post-mortem is nonetheless the most apt phrase. The lurid task of picking over the bones of such draining work proves morbidly...

With less than two weeks to go until the exam, I am now studying and revising full time. Well, apart from writing this. And procrastinating on Twitter . In fact, my lack of attention span is a...

INHAFE: I now have acronyms for everything. They have resulted from my attempts to formulate a system for tackling the tasting paper. Until now, I have adopted a scattergun approach to the...

There’s only one thing you can be sure of on the MW course: every student thinks that every other student is doing more work than they are. Myself included. I hear of students writing a...