After my finals, I promised never again to put myself through the torture of feeling sick because I'm so ill-prepared for an exam. But on 3 June there I was, outside the exam room, textbook open, trying to memorise the formula for potassium ferrocyanide, an agent used to remove iron and copper from wine, as well as which vine varieties are most susceptible to a group of diseases known as grapevine yellows. Yes, it was a wine exam. The Wine and Spirit Education Trust runs a two-year diploma course, and for the first half I had to sit five hours of written, essay-style questions and one of tasting, all done in proper exam conditions in a big hall with invigilators and row upon row of desks.
Amazingly, I've just discovered that I passed, and this despite muddling up all the glasses in the blind tasting and being so gloomy about how it was all going that I opted to drink the samples (the proper procedure is to spit).
This means that I can now bear to talk about it all again, and I have to say that I can't recommend the course enough. Besides the dweeby pleasure to be had from knowing about viticulture and vinification, learning about wine makes history and geography more interesting than I ever thought possible.
For example, I now know that the great wines of the Medoc in Bordeaux are made where glaciers slithering off the Pyrenees thousands of years ago left the deepest gravel deposits.
That the Alto Adige in northern Italy is largely German-speaking because it was annexed to Italy only after the First World War (indeed, it is often called the Sudtirol) - and that I am very fond of red wine made from a grape called Lagrein that grows in the high, narrow valleys there.
That Margaret River in Western Australia lies on 33.6 south latitude - roughly as far from the equator as Rabat in Morocco. But that, on average, vineyards on the same latitudes in the northern hemisphere tend to be warmer than those in the southern one, partly because of the warming effect of the Gulf Stream in Europe but also because of the greater land mass.
That the prized Hungarian wine Tokaj is made in the volcanic Zemplen Hills, close to the ferociously named River Bodrog, around the village of Mad - and I can pick them out on a map.
That Borrado das Moscas means "fly droppings" in Portuguese, and is also the name of a grape.
And that Henry of Anjou became king of England shortly after marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine. Bordeaux was part of her dowry and stayed under English rule for three centuries.
In short, I'm far better acquainted with the world. The only problem is that swathes of knowledge are lost to me, because if a place doesn't make wine, I'm barely aware it exists.
