Anshu Grover: 

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Hello, and welcome to The Wineitupanotch Podcast, a podcast where we talk about wine, life, and everything in between. My name is Anshu Grover. I'm a certified wine expert and your host, and I'm so thrilled that you've decided to join me today. Thank you for doing so.

Welcome to episode 57 of the podcast.

Today, I'm going to be doing something a little different with you, which I hope you'll enjoy.

Back in episode 54, I announced that I had a little bit of a life update. If you haven't listened to that episode, you know, you might want to go back and have a listen.

But I can summarize it here by telling you that what I shared in that episode was that I have, or at that time had, been accepted into the Master of Wine study program.

Now, this was back in late September of 2025, and since then, I completed the first year or the first stage of the Master of Wine study program. I wrote the stage one exam in June, and we're now sitting in July of 2026, approximately six weeks after me having written the exam and having officially completed my first year in the program.

Now, I don't know what's going to happen. The results don't become available for some time yet. It's sort of mid-September that we find out if we passed the exams that we wrote and whether we are being invited to return back for stage two, and for some candidates maybe being invited to return back to stage one.

But that's not going to be clear until mid-September, so probably about, I guess it's about eight weeks from now. In the meantime, I have continued on with the business of Wineitupanotch, doing the things that I usually do.

And one of the things that I did do and have been doing through the Master of Wine program is writing about my experience in the program on a platform called Substack.

If you're not that familiar with Substack, it's a writer's platform. It's not really as much of a social media platform, I would say. There is a social media element to it, but it's a lot more for writing long form entries on topics of your choice. And so writers, journalists, people who want to talk in long form or share information in long form tend to gravitate towards this platform.

And it's the platform that I chose to document my journey towards becoming a Master of Wine.

That was really for me, when I started it, an attempt to capture this really interesting part of my life, this chapter that I never really planned for, didn't know that I would see necessarily, and I'm so thrilled to be in, and I want to remember later in life.

 I've done, I think maybe it's about eight or nine at this point, different posts on Substack through this period of stage one, which was not a year. I say it's a year, but it was about eight or nine months from late 2025 into mid 2026.

And just last week, I posted a reflection on all of the travel that I did during stage one of the Master of Wine program, and that is what I'm going to be sharing here today.

So in a moment, I'm going to flip over to the 

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recording that I shared with all of the readers of my Substack publication.

And, you know, this one is an important one for me because I think I didn't honestly realize, if I'm being completely honest, how much I was going to have to travel in the Master of Wine program.

Of course, I'd heard that you need to travel and you need to be prepared to travel. Thinking about that in a conceptual way versus actually having to do it are two totally different things. And so as I reflect back on that stage of my journey, I'm actually very, very proud of the way in which I undertook all of the travel and balanced it with all of my life commitments and made it work and came through it with lots of really great lessons.

I'm not 100% sure if I've shared this here on the podcast before, but certainly I've shared it before on my social media platforms, that I, in the past five years or so, have developed or had developed a bit of anxiety around travel. I used to travel a lot in my work life. in fact, travel was sort of a cornerstone of what I was expected to do in many of my corporate roles.

But then during the time of the pandemic, things changed and shifted for me professionally and also on a personal level. A lot of things came to be, and somehow for me, um, that transpired in a number of different ways, but one of the things that manifested was this deep anxiety around traveling.

Not only traveling on my own, but traveling even with my family. Traveling short distances in a plane or long distances in a plane. I'm talking specifically about plane travel here. it had become very challenging for me. So the fact that I was able to face it and make it work in my Master of Wine journey is something that I'm proud of and I want to remember.

I'm now going to flip over to the recording. That was personal and a little bit vulnerable, but I hope that if there's somebody out there who is thinking about the Master of Wine study program or knows somebody who's thinking about it or is just curious, that you will find this information and this little reflection of mine interesting, informative, and helpful.

And with that, I will flip over. Before I do, I will thank you once again, as always, for tuning into the podcast. It's always a pleasure to have you, and I will talk to you next time. Cheers.

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Anshu Grover: 

So one of the things that I think is worth considering, and probably isn't necessarily talked about enough when it comes to thinking about the Master of Wine study program, is the amount of travel that's required, particularly if you are not in London, where a lot of the major testing happens, course days are delivered, and of course, the Institute of Masters of Wine is actually headquartered in London.

Or if you're not in California, where there's another central area, usually Napa or Sonoma, where a lot of content is delivered and testing is undertaken. And I'd say I think the third place is either Hong Kong, Singapore, or somewhere in Australia.

But if you are not in particular in London or in Napa, Sonoma, which are, you know, relatively close to one another, you do need to do a lot of travel. And I 

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was just driving around today thinking about how much travel I actually did in a very short period of time, and I have to be honest, it's pretty remarkable, costly, and time-consuming.

So I was accepted into the stage one Master of Wine study program in September of 2025, sort of mid-September. In November, I went to New York for a couple of days. In January, I went to Rust, Austria - I've written about both of those trips. In March, I went to Bordeaux on a special student trip that I was lucky enough to be picked to attend.

There are student trips through the year that are sponsored by trade bodies in various regions, and if y- you can put your name in the hat, and if you get picked, you get to go. Then in June, I went to Napa to write my exam.

So that's four trips.

I skipped a trip to New York for an extra set of course days in March because I was doing a personal trip with my family. That happens to be the spring break for my children, and I did not want to miss that spring break with my children. But had I not done that, that would've meant that I went to New York twice, I went to Austria, I went to Napa, and I went to Bordeaux. So five trips from about October until the end of May.

Add onto that any personal travel that you do, and it starts to multiply very quickly. So in that same time period, I went to Chicago for my cousin's 50th birthday, and as I mentioned, I went for spring break with my family. I did not travel during the Christmas break because I didn't want to travel so much.

So I ended up doing six trips - some long haul, some a little shorter - but still six trips in approximately, you know, seven or eight months.

So travel is a very important part of the study program, and it's not something that you can avoid in most cases. And I want to highlight that in my first year of the program, which is what I've just completed, I actually did not travel to wine regions, which is also something that a lot of people do, because it's kind of an expectation of the program that you will travel to wine regions and bolster your knowledge.

I just decided that other than the big Bordeaux trip, I was going to wait, um, and see how I fared, and then save all of that travel to wine regions for stage two.

So if I'm lucky and I make it to stage two, I think it's going to be another year of a lot of travel. If it takes me longer than one year to finish stage two, then it's going to be multiple years of a lot of travel.

But like I said, it is important to note that travel is a very big element of this study program. 

And it's interesting because coming into the year, I wasn't really all that comfortable with traveling, certainly solo travel. But by the end, I felt a lot better about it. So that was a win!