Online wine platform launches with 50% discount to BAME students

By Lisa Riley

Published: 10 September, 2020

A global online wine education platform using a new approach to tasting wine, and offering a 50% sponsorship to all BAME students, has been launched by Nick Jackson MW.

The School of Taste’s courses will be based on tasting wine by identifying structure rather than flavours, as defined in Jackson’s first book, Beyond Flavour: The Indispensable Handbook to Blind Wine Tasting, published earlier this year.

The platform will be offering live interactive webinar tasting courses and pre-recorded content to wine professionals and students as well as amateur enthusiasts.

Starting on 14 September, the first courses are available to book now, with the business offering wine education sponsorships to cover 50% of the course costs for all BAME students.

The platform set itself apart from other wine education schools by using Jackson’s “unique new approach to tasting wine”.

“Rather than focusing on the flavours of a wine as the primary means of identifying the origin and grape variety of which the wine is composed, I teach an approach based on assessing a wine’s structure. For white wines, that means acid structure, and for red wines, tannin structure,” said Jackson.

“Each major variety has a slightly different structure, and by assessing that, it is possible to distinguish varieties from one another without recourse to flavours, which can be inconsistent and unreliable markers,” he added.

First introduced to wine at Cambridge University where he helped run the wine society, Jackson then went on to work at Sotheby’s, where, in 2018, he was awarded the best wine list in New York City at the Wine-Searcher retailer awards, shortly afterwards gaining his MW, passing both the theory and tasting exams at the first attempt.

Jackson said while The School of Taste courses could be “easily followed by anyone interested in wine”, they would be particularly beneficial to those studying for WSET, MW and MS qualifications who want to develop their blind tasting skills, by offering them a totally different perspective.

The School of Taste is initially offering two six-week courses, Wine Tasting by Structure and Tasting around the World.

At the beginning of this month, Jancis Robinson OBE MW annouanced she has partnered with Mags Janjo of MJ Wine Cellars to launch a website shining a light on wine talent in the BAME communities.

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