Congratulations to Jesse Filipi, FWS for passing the French Wine Scholar exam with the highest honors with our program provider Texas Wine School.
About Jesse:
''I have long been a wine enthusiast, but without any formal training. With our travels all over France the past three years, my wife and I discovered our inner-Francophile and we focused on learning French wine. Being able to experience the Alsace, Burgundy, Loire, Provence, Languedoc and other wine regions first-hand prompted me to want to learn more than reading on my own. This year I set a goal to advance my wine knowledge and enrolled in the French Wine Scholar program because it seemed like a logical starting point to enter the wine industry.
This is the first wine certification program I have taken so I had no idea what to expect. The Texas Wine School in Houston, TX did a great job of balancing the theory in the coursepack and teaching the mechanics of tasting the wine. When I enrolled, I didn’t realize we’d be tasting wines every week using the professional tasting frameworks and weaving them into the course material. I had such an incredible experience and looked forward to every week.
I plan to enroll in future wine certification programs and am currently deciding in which order to do them because I want to take them all! There are benefits to broadening out and take a WSET level class, but because France is my passion a master-level Wine Scholar Guild program is on the list too.
I think the French Wine Scholar program provides a great anchor point on which to build the future of my wine studies because France is the epicenter of the wine world. To have this core knowledge means it should be easier to compare and contrast other countries moving forward.
My wife and I have a long-term goal to start a business centered around our love for French culture. Because wine is such an integral part to the French culture and the FWS program teaches about the history and personality of each wine region, I believe the FWS and master programs are going to provide a deep level of knowledge and be key differentiators for us going forward. ''
