An Honest review
I wish I had known more about this program before signing up, so I have written this review to help others who are considering it.
As a champagne enthusiast with a lot of drinking experience, I really wanted to deepen my knowledge about production – the WSET are the most recognized programs for wine education, but they don’t offer a champagne-focused course so this seemed like the next best option.
I will preface this by saying that I did learn quite a bit, though as a remote experience, it was incredibly disappointing. For $875+ (USD), I expected better.
Who Its For
- People who love self-study and want to go very deep on champagne viticulture, production, and business.
Key Takeaways:
- This is a self-study program that deeply covers the technical aspects of production, regulation, geography, terroir and business. It only lightly touches on tasting.
- There is in-depth material provided by many experts, including Essi Avellan, Peter Liem, Cedric Mousse, Steve Charters, Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, Charles Curtis and historian Yves Tesson.
- The use of technology is disappointing, confusing, frustrating and when it came to taking the exam, invasive. The facilitation was not the level of professionalism I expected, especially for the cost.
Course Overview
Calling it a remote class isn’t accurate – it’s a self-study program. The videos and reading materials are released monthly and you read/watch them at your own pace. My session went from March-October, which is quite a generous period of time. There were 6 Zoom calls spread across 8 months to review the material. The Zoom was usually around 40 minutes, and it was recorded & posted promptly for anyone who couldn’t attend. Interactions were limited to the chat function (cameras off), meaning there was no possibility for discussion.
The program included access to Message Boards. I found participation in the Student Forum limited to a few people. There was also an Instructor Q&A forum where response times varied quite a bit – sometimes there was very helpful follow up to questions quite quickly, and sometimes questions went unanswered entirely. The Tech Support channel, which was used often by many students, was very helpful…
… and this is because the technology was confusing and materials were sloppy. There were many typos, including misspellings of place names and even a village missing from the maps. The portal with all the study materials was very confusing – people often struggled to find things, it doesn’t automatically track progress, and it’s not usable on smaller screens. (When I signed up, it said the class was compatible with an iPad – I am happy to see that language has since been removed from the website, as it does not function on anything but a laptop.) The practice tests were very clunky, including text occasionally covered by graphics, leaving you to guess the rest of the question. Material in the book and in the videos contradicted each other at times. At one point in the class, there was an entirely new message board system with no warning – half the students were not added to the relevant forums and all previously asked questions went unanswered.
They also published new (corrected) and surprisingly different maps in December, which was after the course had concluded but before many students had taken the exam. Those new maps wouldn’t be used in the exam for several weeks, causing a lot of confusion around which maps to study (especially for those of us who had exams scheduled for early January). For the price of this program, this kind of sloppiness is unacceptable.
The videos, which make up the bulk of the class material, were primarily recordings of Zoom calls. It wasn’t unusual for the presenter’s head to be covering some important detail on the accompanying slides. By contrast, the videos for the Champagne Masterclass by Richard Juhlin are incredibly well-produced and only €132 for a year’s access (my review is here). The videos from the Comite Champagne’s e-learning platform cover similar topics to the WSG program, are subtitled into multiple languages, and only €49 (read my review of this here).
The physical book is a required purchase and not available in any downloadable form. (I did ask them directly about this.) This means you either have to be online to read it via the awkward portal, or carry the large, floppy physical one around for offline viewing. As someone who travels a lot, carrying around an odd-sized book was not practical for me. On top of that, the shipping charges for the book were not included in the class fees and were unjustifiably expensive. ($85 was the value listed for the book. I had to pay an additional $66 for shipping from Germany to London, which is ridiculous.)
The final exam can be scheduled at your convenience and I was impressed they let me take it on New Year’s Day. It is monitored by a third-party proctoring agency and felt overly complicated to schedule (though I expected nothing less at this stage). There were many steps just to make the appointment, including emailing humans at WSG to activate the link to the third-party proctor to set up a new account at the proctor’s website to access the scheduling tool. Once scheduled, there was an additional piece of software to install and several computer settings to reconfigure. Everything had to be done on Mac or Windows computer using the Chrome browser.
The exam itself was 2 hours for 10 mapping questions, 50 multiple choice questions, and 4 essay questions. While there were a number of practice tests available for the multiple choice portion, it was tricky to know if I was adequately prepared for the essay portion since the class contained no opportunity for discussion or equivalent practice. I do think the instructor did a good job at prepping us for the kinds of topics which might be asked for the essay portion of the exam. The multiple choice portion did contain some surprising questions – small details/vocabulary which weren’t touched on in any of the review Zooms or practice tests. And of course, I was surprised by some of the mapping questions, given I had studied the new maps and the old versions were the ones on my exam (and were surprisingly very different).
My biggest issue with the exam was the amount of invasive technology required for the third-party proctor. Despite going through all the technical checks in advance, there was additional software required to install & run at the time of the exam which gives this third-party full access to your computer, including screen-recording, camera, microphone and mouse control. I was using my work computer and my work security setup understandably prevented me from running this software. While the tech support team from the proctoring company was very patient, the only way I could take the exam was to use another computer – as someone who works in tech, I happen to have access to multiple computers but I suspect this is a luxury few people have. After completing the exam, there was no information provided on how to disable/remove this software and all the settings that the remote agent configured – I shudder to think how many people have taken this course and still have their computers completely vulnerable to remote access!
It took a full 3 weeks to get the results from the exam. No detail was provided – just whether it was “pass” or “fail”. Should you fail, they would be happy to let you re-sit the exam, for a fee (naturally).
Summary
At the end of this program, I certainly deepened my knowledge about the CIVC, viticulture, the production process, geology and geography. Having been to the Champagne region many times, this was a good academic compliment to my experience meeting producers and tasting with them. That said, I’ve participated in many remote educational programs and the execution of this one really fell short – between the inept use of technology and the missed opportunity to create community, I don’t think its worth the cost. Given how much money they are making, it is a shame they haven’t invested into making the experience better.
If you’re looking for a self-study program to deepen your knowledge, I recommend starting with the Comité Champagne’s e-learning program – it has great videos, detailed information, a website that automatically tracks your progress and several quizzes to test your knowledge. While the Champagne Specialist in-person course doesn’t cover quite as much technical detail, its probably more than sufficient for most people, and excellent value at one-third of the price.
RACH DRINKS CHAMPAGNE 
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