WSET Level 3 Award

About Erica Dent – Wine Educator

It’s quite unusual to have the words “enjoy” and “exam” quite so close together, so how do we make this happen for you?

The simple answer is Erica – her passion and enjoyment for wine and wanting to share that with other people is one aspect, the engaging teaching style that she brings to the culture of Enjoy Discovering Wine and her belief that a good understanding of wine and food pairing is the key to the social and service aspects that make wine such an experience.

The beginning of my wine training

During a sabbatical from an early career in banking, I travelled to New Zealand where I worked in wineries and tasting rooms, then ended up spending a year on the Tairawhiti wine course pruning, building trellising, learning to drive forklifts and tractors, cleaning tanks and barrels, lab analysis of my grape juice, tasting faulty wines, to name just a small part of the course.

By the end of that wine course I had made ‘wine’ but more than that I had started my journey of wanting to learn more and more and knew that what needed to happen next was to expand my global wine knowledge.

I also wanted to have fun and was looking for a good excuse to share and absorb wine with a good friend; the WSET Level 2 evening course at the head-office in London fitted the plan perfectly.

Hooked on learning

Studying WSET Level 2 with a friend who, to this day I will not forget, decided that she quite liked German wine after all. To me that was one defining moment of what learning about wine is about, challenging prejudices and discovering ‘new’ wines. For us that wine course was about a social ‘excuse’ but one that we learnt an awful lot on.

Having successfully completed WSET Level 2 (WSET Level 1 was another ten years off being created) I craved more knowledge, also at this time I was pondering owning a very small vineyard (it is healthy to have dreams, no?), so the natural path was to sign up for WSET Level 3.

With a full-time job to hold down, plus I was already studying Italian (that was part of the dream back then), I decided to study WSET Level 3 as a distance-learner student.

It met my needs, I spent many hours with my thick (relative to the previous course material) ‘Exploring Wines and Spirits’ WSET book, while studying the wine tasting aspect with friends, and successfully passed the examination a few weeks later. The WSET Diploma followed on a few years after that.

Why I created Enjoy Discovering Wine

Having gained so much in life from learning and starting to teach, I decided that I wanted to do more of it, and also to create a business that brings wine to life for more people.

One of my great pleasures is seeing the educators I have carefully chosen grow and develop; some of these started their education with me and are now among more than 2,000* students that EDW has guided through their WSET studies.