I'm taking a wine exam in October and I'm nervous about it

A few of you have asked what I've been up to, so here it is.

I'm sitting my WSET Level 3 wine exam on October 25th in Boston. It's the one where someone hands you a glass and you have to talk your way through what you smell and what you taste, precisely enough to land on the grape and where it came from. I'm genuinely nervous about it. There's a real chance I don't pass, and I'd rather tell you that now than quietly find out in November.

I've been studying since spring. Or I've been intending to study since spring, which turns out to be a completely different activity. The material is a dense e-book that assumes you're going to sit at a desk for two hours. It's already on my phone. It's just in a shape my phone is no use for. And I do not have two hours at a desk. What I have is the car on the way to the gym, the pickup line at school, and the twenty minutes before I fall asleep.

I spent about six weeks deciding I wasn't disciplined enough.

I studied classical piano from the age of eight. Two lessons a week, hours of practice a day, for twenty years. And nobody learns a piece by sitting down and playing it through for two hours. You take four bars and repeat them until your hands stop thinking about them.

So I built something. Every module read aloud in a real voice, cut into pieces about the length of a drive to the gym, so I can study with my hands full. It took a couple of weekends and about eighty-six dollars. I now study more in a week than I did in the six weeks I spent feeling bad about myself.

It's called The Vine and it's at studythevine.com if you want to poke at it. I'll warn you now, it isn't finished. There's no payment, no proper sign-up, and a few things I already know are wrong with it. I'm showing it to you anyway.

I'm not telling you this so you'll go build a wine app. Almost nobody needs a wine app.

I'm telling you because of those six weeks. The material was fine. My brain was fine. The mismatch was the problem, and fixing it took less time than I'd already spent feeling guilty about it.

That's the thing I keep running into now. The spreadsheet somebody sends you every month in a format you rebuild by hand. The recipe box nobody opens. So much of what's hard in a week is just the shape it arrives in. That used to be expensive to fix. It isn't anymore.

One last thing. I was going to host an evening at the end of this month, and I'd rather find out what you actually want than guess and book a venue. Honestly it suits me better anyway. I'm at my best one-to-one, not standing in front of twenty-five people. So I'll do this instead, every couple of weeks.

Which brings me to the only thing I want from you. Hit reply and tell me the one thing eating your week. The recurring annoyance you've stopped noticing because you've been working around it for so long. I read every single one, and some of them are going to end up in here.