London, July 18th 2025

This week I attended a five day, 30 hour summer wine course at Le Cordon Bleu in London. The key elements of the course was to be able to identify common wine categories, styles and methods of wine making, and describe these when tasting.

Our skilled course leader was Matthieu Longuère, one of less than 300 Master Sommeliers in the world.

Typically we had 5 or 6 wines per session, all within a theme.

All in all we tasted around 70 wines throughout the course, and I learned a lot in a very relaxed atmosphere. Matthieu held it unpretentious, and we avoided the more geeky lingo.

But we did learn how to describe the appearance, nose (smell) and palate (taste) of a wine, to conclude on the overall balance, ageing potential, serving technique and food match.

Regarding food pairing, we had an interesting session, where we tried several wines with ingredients representing sweet, bitter, acid, fatty and spicy food.

In addition we went to Cord, a restaurant operated by Le Cordon Bleu, where we had an interesting session about how different glassware affects wine. We also got to see the cooks operate.

In parallel with our course, several other cooking courses took place in the same building. We met the students in the café, plus at a fire drill.

They arrange several other courses related to food and wine, so I might return at a later stage to satisfy my urge to learn more.