National Wine School Announces A Historic First

PHILADELPHIA - Dec. 6, 2020 - PRLog -- The National Wine School (NWS) is announcing a historic first in the field of wine education: a fully virtual sommelier certification program. The program is based in America but is available worldwide.

"There is a reason this hasn't been attempted before," says Alana Zerbe, the Director of Wine Education. "Training people to be able to blind taste remotely was universally thought to be impossible. It was only after a breakthrough early in 2020 did we crack the code."

The online wine program includes sixteen classes, at-home guided wine tastings. online textbooks, and a series of four sommelier exams. The classes are streamed live from a wine school in Philadelphia with Alana Zerbe as the featured instructor.

Using their propriety process, NWS can test and certify sommelier candidates remotely. Development of the process took years. The breakthrough only came during the pandemic, when the school was forced to innovate due to the shutdowns.

Success was followed by six months of bench trials with actual sommelier candidates. The results were stunning: the online sommelier programs were as effective in training and certifying wine professionals as in-person training.

A fantastic byproduct of this innovation is lower pricing. The school is offering its online programs at half of what the in-person programs cost. The Online Core Sommelier Certification program is priced at $550, down from the $1,100 price tag of its in-person program.

The first semester will be exclusively offered to the public via the Wine School of Philadelphia.

https://www.vinology.com/class/online-core-sommelier-course/2021-01-31/

About the National Wine School

The National Wine School distributes sommelier training and testing platforms for schools and Universities.  Founded in 2011, NWS is ranked as one of the top sommelier accreditation programs in the United States.