When writing yesterday’s FT article about the wine relationship between the British and the French, I wanted to research the original MW syllabus as I’d heard that it concentrated on France, plus the two fortified wines that were very common then, port and sherry, and the German wines that were so much more popular in the 1950s than today. So I asked the Institute of Masters of Wine’s executive director Sarah Harrison for details of the initial syllabus and she responded by sending me the first set of exam papers.
What struck me immediately was that these pre-dated the formation of the Institute of Masters of Wine because the papers were headed ‘The Worshipful Company of Vintners and The Wine and Spirit Association of Great Britain (Incorporated)’, the two UK trade organisations that originally fostered this now world-famous professional qualification. It was restricted to members of the UK wine trade until 1984 (when I was the first person outside the trade to qualify) and four years later was opened out to international candidates, in time for Michael Hill Smith of Australia to become the first non-British MW, each of us having passed exams very different from the original ones.
On the morning of Monday 11 May 1953 the handful of candidates then were asked to sit Paper IA on ‘Cultivation of the vine’ followed by an hour-long practical exam involving six faulty wines and several corks, all of which had to be assessed. In the afternoon came Paper IB entitled ‘Production of Wine’.
Tuesday morning’s paper was the most fascinating to me, Paper II on ‘The technique of handling wines, and general cellar procedure’ reproduced below. This clearly shows that most wine then arrived in the UK in cask, making adulteration and fraud much more likely, or at least possible, than today. The job of a UK wine importer in the 1950s (and 1960s) crucially involved treating bulk wine and bottling it. Even in the 1970s I remember encountering at least five working wine cellars under the streets of central London.
The fact that so much emphasis was put on wine faults in the first practical paper also indicates how common they then were. I can attest to the fact that when I started drinking wine, as a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only one bottle in three on average was free of such flaws as an excess of sulphite additions or oxidation. Whites were particularly prone to faults since temperature control was still relatively rare. Wine drinkers today are so much more fortunate.
The second practical paper at the end of Tuesday morning involved identifying six white wines and matching a range of bottles to types of wine – again indicating how important bottling then was in the UK wine trade. The Tuesday afternoon paper was on ‘The history of wine and the Wine Trade’ (Wine Trade always capitalised!).
The exams finished at 1 pm on Wednesday after a morning paper entitled ‘General regulations affecting the sale of wine and marketing methods’ (hogsheads were mentioned several times even in this paper) and the third and final practical exam involving identifying six reds and a range of wine-related objects, all doubtless related to treating wine that arrived in barrel. See the Oxford Companion entries on château bottling and domaine bottling for a survey of when wines started being bottled at source.
As for the thrust of my initial enquiry, I was completely wrong in my assumption that the original MW syllabus was entirely focused on Europe. South Australia is mentioned twice and the Australian state of Victoria once in this set of 1953 papers.
Best of luck to all those attempting the 2026 versions!
Book now for the Institute of Masters of Wine 2027 International Symposium to be held 15–18 April 2027 in Adelaide, Australia.
