After working for the then-dominant spirits company Seagrams, Ian Harris took over as head of the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) in London in 2012. He is widely credited as having radically modernised and brought relevance to a course whose content was criticised for being far too theoretical. Over the past 12 years, the WSET has adapted to further change as new markets have grown in importance. A WSET exhibition stand, with Harris usually in attendance, is to be found at almost all the major international trade fairs, and the courses are now being followed by far more students outside the UK than inside. Today, the WSET offers eight levels of qualification. Separate basic Level 1 Awards in wines, spirits and wine service; a choice of a Level 2 Award in either spirits or wine & spirits; Level 3 also comes in two forms: wine & spirits and the recently added Sake. Finally Level 4, which is better known as the Diploma, is the testing qualification that is seen as the necessary stepping stone for anyone wanting to attempt the Master of Wine qualification.
MEININGER’S: What’s the elevator pitch for the WSET?
HARRIS:The wine industry, in particular, and the spirits industry are not in great shape. People are making wine to a price rather than to a quality. The only way you can breathe any sort of financial upside into the industry is by persuading the consumer to pay more, which gives potential margin for everybody down the supply chain. One of the key parts of that is education.
MEININGER’S: Who are your competitors?
HARRIS: In the US, there are two sommelier-based offerings, and the Society of Wine Educators. Interestingly enough, a huge amount of people that use sommelier qualifications all over the world do WSET qualifications to get the product knowledge, and then they either add on a sommelier qualification or they come the other way and so we coexist very happily.
MEININGER’S: Who was it originally set up for?
HARRIS: We were set up in 1969 to educate people who were already working in the UK wine and spirits trade and people who were intending to work in it. This generally meant fine wine merchants and retail shops. In the late 60s and early 70s, wine was sold by large specialist retail chains such as Peter Dominic and Victoria Wine which no longer exist, or in pubs. Supermarkets weren’t really serious about wine.
MEININGER’S: How many students were there in those first years?
HARRIS: In the very first year there were 1,376 and just the one school in London. It took until 1990 to get to 8,000, tipped 10,000 in the mid 90s and then it dipped back down again. It started going international in 1990 but at a very, very slow pace. By 2001 to 2002, when we had just short of 10,000 students, 35% were international. Since then, the proportion has just gone on growing and is now up at 76%. In 2013 the number of US students rose by 18%. In China the growth was 13%, while for the UK, it was just 8%. In China, we now have over 13,000 students – not much less than in the UK. The US is our third-biggest market, with 4,500. Our courses are being taken on there by the big distributors, which for us is quite a good endorsement.
MEININGER’S: What is your turnover, and how much of your income is derived from courses and how much is from other sources?
HARRIS: We turn over £8.5m ($13.38m), of which £8.25m comes from the courses, with the remainder coming in sponsorship.
MEININGER’S: It’s a small percentage. Do you really need it?
HARRIS: Twelve years ago when I joined, all the feedback I got when I went to see the key industry players was that the syllabus was not relevant to a great extent and the WSET didn’t have enough money to invest in making the changes. The turnover was £1.7m and we had just £80,000 in the bank. The sponsors provided the seed capital for us to bring the courses up to date.
MEININGER’S: Who writes the syllabus today?
HARRIS: We have an R&D team based in the UK, but the exam panels are international. It’s not just someone sitting at a desk in London going “what do we need?”
MEININGER’S: What is a provider?
HARRIS: We have 602 APPs – Approved Programme Providers – around the world, including 190 in Britain. Last year we had about 30 or 40 new ones. It’s a bit like golf club membership; you might get 50 new ones but 10 drop off.
MEININGER’S: How does someone become an APP?
HARRIS: There’s a very stringent, robust application process. Basically people have to convince us that they have the right premises, facilities, mindset, business plan, skills and capabilities to do the teaching properly.
MEININGER’S: What proportion of the APPs are actually commercial wine distributors?
HARRIS: I’ve never done the analysis, but I would say probably about 10% of the members, with a lower proportion – maybe 4% to 5% – of the students.
MEININGER’S: What defines the subject matter that goes into the course? Why are Switzerland and Uruguay on the syllabus, while Moldova and Virginia not?HARRIS: It’s a question of when something becomes more than just a locally-produced and locally-consumed product. There is a defining moment when suddenly you’ll see it on a shelf in a store in America, in a bar in California. It’s not so much gut feel, it’s more demand, because we get feedback from people saying, “why isn’t such and such included, why isn’t this included, why is such and such included?”. We get grief from people when we drop things from the syllabus.
MEININGER’S: When the WSET started, the UK was the heart of the international trade, but that’s decreasingly the case.
HARRIS: The UK is still a shop window, but we understand the commercial issues, which is why we solicit the opinions of all our stakeholders and all our contacts, all our APPs, all our students every year, and then every three years we revamp every qualification on a rolling cycle. So it’s not just someone sitting in London taking a decision on their own; they’re doing it with a lot of input from a lot of people.
MEININGER’S: But don’t the UK-based retailers and distributors among your sponsors have a disproportionate say in what students are going to study in the US or China?
HARRIS: That could be inferred, but a lot of the companies are involved with us because of the international exposure. Companies like Treasury and Constellation donate the wines that we show in our master classes that we run in places like Hong Kong and Shanghai. Many of our supporters do have a global reach and the thing they like about us is that we help them to get their products into markets where otherwise they might struggle, or we can supplement by giving exposure to their wines at shows and fairs. We cannot guarantee that any sponsor will have their wines shown in a course and certainly not on the exam, because everything that we choose for our courses and our exams is done blind and totally impartially. We’re not in their pocket.
MEININGER’S:A distributor recently made the point that their employees had learned a lot of facts about wine, but very little about how to sell it.
HARRIS: One of the things we did develop back in 2007 was a sales skills course. It wasn’t successful because what we found was every company has its own philosophy. They said: “well that’s fine but actually no, we have a different way of doing it”. There was no one-size-fits-all approach. As you’re aware, we run a very well-respected residential, three-day business and commercial knowledge course once a year in the UK. It’s great value at £1,200.00, but we get 30 people and that’s pretty much it. We’re not turning people away.
MEININGER’S: If companies have their own philosophies and needs, so surely do markets. But your courses do seem to offer a one-size-fits-all model. Law students in China and the UK don’t study precisely the same things. Shouldn’t there be regionally-based qualifications?
HARRIS: We have wrestled with the whole concept of whether we should have a qualification for someone who works in China or should we have a global qualification? And we’ve stuck with the one-size-fits-all because it’s working and it’s what people want. There are certainly pockets of countries, industries, trade sectors who say “this part of the syllabus isn’t relevant for us, that part of the syllabus isn’t relevant for us”, but the fact that we do have a global syllabus is actually one of our major selling points.
MEININGER’S: Why do distributors become APPs?
HARRIS: One reason is that they recognise that they can use education as one of their sales tools. It happens in China with ASC, in America, and the UK. They not only run the courses themselves for their staff, they will go to their customers and say, “we won’t give you listing fees but we’ll give your staff WSET courses”.
MEININGER’S: What proportion of your students are now consumers?
HARRIS: In round numbers, 25%. When I joined 10 years ago, it was between 15% and 18%.
MEININGER’S: Is there an argument that you should have two flavours of this course? One for consumers who would get the same facts but actually packaged in a different way and one for the trade who would get the more commercial side?HARRIS: A lot of consumers who come on our courses, certainly at the Diploma level, are people who have been in very senior positions in other fields like law or finance and not just people who like something to talk about at a dinner party, so they actually like the fact that we cover how the trade works.
MEININGER’S: Doesn’t that leave a gap for more ordinary consumers who want an introduction to the subject?
HARRIS: Because they probably don’t want to sit an exam at the end of it and our core business is qualifications. There is no such thing as a WSET course unless it’s got an exam at the end of it.
MEININGER’S: Language is another issue. You have been accused – by Chinese professionals, among others – of being too focused on English-speakers.
HARRIS: Once you get to Level 3 you can see we’re translating it into what will be nine languages. When you get to the Diploma it is in English. Whenever we translate anything into any language at Level 3 we have to train markers. The growth of students in China has been pretty astronomic. We still have only got seven Diploma graduates from mainland China and they’ve only come through this year. That’s the sort of level of knowledge and capability that we need when we train markers. It’s not just a question of “let’s translate the book, let’s translate the Power Point slides so we can deliver a course”; we have to have the academic rigour in the examination. But will the Diploma be available in Chinese in my lifetime? The answer to that is probably yes.
MEININGER’S: And now you are offering online courses?
HARRIS: We have an online classroom where the student gets everything that they would in a classroom except they have to go and buy their own wines. What works in an online environment is that people want to study at their own pace when they’re available in different time zones. What you don’t have is, “okay, it’s eight o’clock at night, hook into your course now”, because that’s no good if it’s four o’clock in the morning on the east coast of America. Everybody has an online tutor and when you sign up for an online course there is a start date, a finish date, and milestones during which you have to submit work. You are marked to show your progress in the same way that you would when you come into a classroom.
MEININGER’S: The first thing you learn in an Australian wine course is faults. One of the criticisms made of the WSET course is that students can qualify at the highest level without having been intentionally exposed to a wine tainted by TCA or brettanomyces, for example.
HARRIS: That’s a fair criticism and the answer is yes, we do teach it. We will examine it, so we will ask questions on it. It’s on the syllabus. And we do use taster kits to supplement understanding of faults in some markets, but it’s not something where we specify that you have to run a two-hour session, and you have to have these little vials of stuff where it’s got TCA and brett. There’s an argument that perhaps we should.
MEININGER’S: So students who qualify in one market may have followed a different syllabus to ones in another market?
HARRIS: No, it’s the same specification, but everywhere we encourage centres to supplement the teaching with whatever is relevant in their particular markets. We don’t supply fault-education kits in the same way that we don’t supply all the wines to every centre who runs a course; they choose them. To answer your question about if the courses are homogenised, yes, but only in the specification and the fact that what you will be examined on is homogenised. We encourage individual APPs to add on educational pieces which are more relevant to their market, their consumers, and their sales people. Some spirits companies will add on a bit about their specific brands or their competitors. Indeed some of the companies like ASC, who are one of our APPs in China, will deliberately not show their products because they want them to show their staff: “actually there’s a world outside”.
MEININGER’S: Finally, you have 60,000 students now. What will the figure be in five years?
HARRIS: On the basis that I plan to retire, God willing, in six years time we will have 100,000 a year by then.
Interview by Robert Joseph
