Wine knowledge is not wine skill.

Eight Sundays to close the gap.

Foundation + Intermediate · Professional Level III Certification

You already know more about wine than almost anyone you drink with. You know the regions. You have opinions about producers. You’ve read the books.

And you can still be handed an unmarked glass and have nothing systematic to say about it.

That is not a knowledge problem, and more facts will not fix it. Nearly every wine course sells knowledge — regions, grapes, maps, flashcards — and quietly trusts that tasting ability will show up on its own. It does not. Tasting is a separate skill, with its own method, and it has to be taught on purpose.

Core teaches both halves, side by side, for eight Sundays.

Sundays, January 24–March 21, 2027 · 1:30–6 p.m. · No class February 14 · 109 S. 22nd St., Philadelphia

Teaching in Philadelphia since 2001 · Level III certification · 16 sessions

The Wine School of Philadelphia, ranked as one of the best sommelier training programs in America by students and professionals. — WineMaker Magazine, August–September 2024

Two courses, one semester

Every Sunday runs two sections back to back.

Foundation is the tasting half. It builds the sensory method — the mechanics of perception, the structural components of wine, the varietal fingerprints — and ends in blind identification.

Intermediate is the regional half. Grape varieties and the places that grow them: what each region makes, why it makes it that way, and how that arrives in the glass.

Foundation and Intermediate can be taken separately, one after the other. In Core they run side by side, so the regional material reinforces the sensory work while both are still fresh.

The Foundation half: how we teach you to taste

Some people seem to be born with it — the ones who name four things in a glass while you’re still deciding whether it’s red fruit or black. It looks like talent.

Much of it is training. What you’re seeing is sensory memory, built deliberately, plus the vocabulary to retrieve it. That can be taught, and this is the part of the course that teaches it.

Week one is the machinery. What you call taste is three systems working at once: the olfactory bulb, the tongue, and the trigeminal nerve. You’ll learn the difference between smelling a wine and tasting it.

Then come the components. Acidity and the noble whites; tannin and the noble reds. Each class is based on science, but the approach is dynamic. Each step is backed up with wine tastings and even a few unorthodox experiments (you will never view jelly beans the same way).

What you’re building is a fingerprint for each grape. A fingerprint is our shorthand: the markers that most reliably separate a variety from everything else in a blind lineup. Pinot Noir: barnyard and roses. Sangiovese: red cherry and leather. Syrah: game. Grenache: wild herbs and lavender, what the French call garrigue. Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon share green pepper and graphite.

The Varietal Lab, where those fingerprints get assembled into something usable under pressure. A distinction runs through this whole part of the course: you can detect an aroma without knowing what it is, recognize it without being able to name it, and only identify it when you can connect it to a specific reference and say the word. Blind tasting lives entirely in that third category. The lab is where you get there.

By week seven you’re tasting blind. Not guessing — matching what’s in the glass against patterns you’ve spent six weeks installing. Week eight, you’re examined on it.

The Intermediate half: grapes and the places that grow them

The other section each Sunday covers the wine world itself — the regions behind most of what’s on any serious list, and the grape varieties that define them.

France. North America. Australia. Italy. Spain and Portugal. South America. Seven weeks, one region at a time, working through what each place grows, why it grows there, and what that produces in the bottle.

This is where the sensory work acquires context. Knowing that Cabernet Sauvignon runs on green pepper and graphite is useful. Knowing why Left Bank Bordeaux and Napa Valley take the same grape to different places — climate, site, ripeness, winemaking intent — is what lets you work backward from a glass to a region rather than only to a variety.

The two halves meet formally in week four, on Old World against New World: not a debate about which is better, but a working framework for the stylistic differences you can actually taste — where the fruit sits, how the acid reads, what the tannin feels like — and where those differences come from.

What you’ll be able to do

• Approach an unfamiliar wine systematically instead of hoping something comes to mind.
• Recognize the varietal fingerprints of the noble grapes and name them out loud, in language another professional will understand.
• Identify major grape varieties blind — no label, no hints, no one naming the grape first.
• Read structure: place a wine’s acidity and tannin, and know what that tells you before you get to the fruit.
• Know how your own palate is calibrated, and correct for it.
• Speak with authority about the major wine regions and the grapes they’re built on.
• Explain why a Rioja and a Napa Cabernet taste the way they do, in terms of climate, site and winemaking rather than adjectives.
• Walk out with a method you’ll keep using for the rest of your life.

Who this is for

You do not need to work in wine to belong here.

The room holds line cooks and beverage directors, importers and distributor reps, winery staff, and people with no professional stake at all — who simply got tired of deferring to whoever ordered the bottle and decided to do something about it properly.

They sit the same exams and earn the same pin. They have almost nothing in common except a preference for being right over being impressive.

What the course is actually like

The teaching is old-school and deliberately demanding: lecture, guided tasting, discussion, instructor feedback, written exams. The work is a notebook, a spit cup, and an instructor telling you that what you just said about the glass was wrong.

Most students discover in the first two weeks that they knew less than they thought. That is the design, not an accident of it. Come with a notebook.

And it will cost you your Sundays — eight of them, most of the afternoon. We’d rather say that plainly than have you find out in week three. A course that asks for that much is a course that intends to change something.

Sundays, January 24–March 21, 2027 · 1:30–6 p.m. · No class February 14

About the Wine School of Philadelphia

Founded in 2001 by winemaker and author Keith Wallace, the Wine School of Philadelphia offers public tasting classes and professional wine education in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse neighborhood. The school has earned two Best of Philly awards, including recognition for adult education, and a 2026 Philadelphia Inquirer Philly Favorites Silver award in the Trade School category. Classes take place at 109 S. 22nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103.