"satisfied the examiners"

I have been laid up with some horrible death-cold given to me by a pregnant friend who, it seems, was carrying germs for two, and I haven't been drinking much that I have been noting (although I did have a few interesting bottles with friends pre-illness) and not really drinking much at all, but today I got the results back from the WSET exam I took back in July.

I passed. With merit, which isn't as good a ranking as I'd hoped for (I was hoping for the one superior to it: "with distinction", since I am a dork and that is about as well as you can do), but it works well enough for me. I did fine on the written part of the exam but bombed the tasting a little bit, which is part of what did me in. I guess this is where I kick myself for not shelling out a squillion dollars and going to the class proper... I guess the WSET is a lot pickier about their tasting notes than I thought, and I would have known this had I gone to a class.

Because I hate the way you get a grade from the WSET but never know what you got wrong or did wrong, I poked around online and found a guy talking about the exam over at the Ebob boards. He teaches the class somewhere else in the US and said that the exam isn't as easy as it was pre-2003, and that up to 1/4 of his students fail it on their first try. He said that a lot of his in class students did fine on the tasting notes, but that some home study students have had problems with the tasting notes because (like me) they didn't know to memorize all the sub-categories of tasting and mention each one in the tasting note and comment on it. I commented on the applicable ones, but not each one, and that loses you points, so that is where I went wrong. Live and learn, I guess. If I do anything more with the crazy old WSET I will remember that.

Anyway, I just wanted to be a little happy that I now own another silly wine certificate and passed with merit. Hopefully soon I will be ready to drink and write more, and live on the edge by not writing up wines using the Official WSET-Approved Style of tasting notes, which, while they are thorough and good and scholarly, are deathly boring.

And for now I can be amused (because I am twelve) by the fact that my certificate says that I "satisfied the examiners" and am hereby awarded said certificate. Oh, the WSET, so cheeky.